Nexus - 1604 - New Times Magazine-pages

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REVIEWS REVIEWS @ ambitious promises and where the future of "free public reading" may be as unattainable as "the quest for a universal library". He examines the pros and cons of recent innovations such as Wikipedia, Google Scholar ("Schoogle") and Amazon.com, and asks whether information really is knowledge. A seriously thought- provoking treatise. THE GREAT DIGITIZATION AND THE QUEST TO KNOW EVERYTHING by Lucien X. Polastron Inner Traditions, Vermont, 2009 (first published as La Grande Numérisation by Editions Denoél, France, 2006) ISBN 978-1-59477-243-6 (I82pp tpb) Available: www.InnerTraditions.com aris-based historian Lucien Polastron wrote about the past destruction of libraries in his seminal study Books on Fire. Here, he lends his scholarly weight to considering the future of libraries and how these archives are being affected by the emergence of virtual libraries and books that are changing the way we access and interact with information. While Polastron has an emphasis on he French scene, he covers the global phenomenon that is redefining how information is handled and even how our bodies of thought are being restructured. He laments how ibraries are being "upgraded" in such a way that their incredibly expensive architecture doesn't even have room or all their books, which has led to several national libraries having to destroy or offload hundreds of housands of precious texts. Polastron explores the implications of digitising book collections, where he reality is falling far behind the UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE by Al McDowell Author House, Bloomington, IN, 2009 ISBN 978-I-4389-1284-4 (385pp tpb) Available: www.spheritons.com; www.authorhouse.co.uk Ti foundations of mainstream science and history are scrutinised by retired electrical engineer and doctor of business economics Al McDowell in his stimulating book. In this synthesis of the findings of key modern-day alternative thinkers, McDowell adds his own take to overturn inaccuracies of consensus knowledge and reformulate "a theory of nearly everything". He challenges myriad accepted "dogmas"—on the Big Bang, Einsteinian relativity, gravity and electromagnetism, the evolution of life on Earth and the dating of the Egyptian pyramids— which in his view are unsupportable when subjected to rigorous analysis. 72 ¢ NEXUS McDowell proposes an elegant "spheriton theory" to explain the universe, its forces and "the mind of God and man", with only four sizes of very tiny spherical elastic shells involving Newtonian interactions, three of which travel faster than light to provide our fields of force. He suggests that the fossil record tells us that life did not evolve on Earth but arrived at particular times, seeded by the influence of our "mother planet" Nibiru (as popularised by Zecharia Sitchin), originally from the Sirius star system. Acknowledging that he doesn't have all the answers, McDowell puts forward some unique ideas abou matter and mind that blow away consensus reality and promulgate the existence of a cosmic intelligence. UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE JUNE — JULY 2009 www.nexusmagazine.com