Treefall

Treefall is an amazing book. In it, the everyday world takes on a strange new character. Motion, the familiar change in location of an object from one point to another, is considered in a way that represents a paradigm-shift in our perception of how the universe works. We grow up in a world in which we push an object and it moves. It moves because we push it. It translocates. But, we never stop to consider what that translocation means in terms of the actual matter being moved. Does the pencil falling off the table actually fly through the air and bounce off the carpet? Or is the pencil, falling to the floor, undergoing myriad transitions in which the trailing edge of the pencil becomes air and the trailing edge of the air becomes pencil. Is the pencil moving through space, or is space accommodating the translocation of the pencil in a way similar to how an image of a pencil moves across a computer screen, a pixel at a time? Hansen, who holds the title of Professor of Chemistry at one of the major east coast land-grant universities, explores this and many other related questions and arrives at some thoroughly amazing conclusions. Treefall is an immensely interesting excursion into the world of infinitesimal spaces. Most of us never gave them a second thought.