Quantum Ontology: "What is Real - The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics" by Adam Becker

The Universal-Wave-Function vs. The Pilot-Schrödinger-Wave-Function vs. the Collapsing-Schrödinger-Wave-function as a Stab at Explaining Reality.

The diversity of possible comments on this book reflects ironically the Everett paradigm of quantum ontology. There are as many views of reality as there are observers. Thankfully in all instances, given the depth of some of the possible interpretations, the interaction of the observer state wave and that of the rest of the universe is extremely asymmetrical - the universe has a great effect on the observer but the latter's effect on the universe is mercifully, infinitesimally small. There is no doubt that the philosophical implications of the developments in modern scientific thinking are in lagging mode. This is because of the extreme complexities of the formalisms created to describe the reality as seen by human observers with a certain evolved sense of perception. The modern philosopher has to tread wearily through the theory before emerging tired and almost at wit's end to be in a position to even expound a valid opinion, least of all an emerging new philosophy, on the ontological basis of the quantum world. This is the first time I’ve read a book on Quantum Mechanics wherein three of the major outlier physicists appear: David Bohm, Hugh Everett III, and John Stewart Bell. 

I'm always so frustrated by people who are absolutely sure of themselves, although I wouldn't doubt that I do the same kind of thing more often than I'd like. My suspicion is that people can't help but make probability judgments based only on the information available to them at a given time. Many, especially those in the scientific community, are quick to dismiss certain possible viewpoints because they consider them to have an extraordinarily low probability, therefore requiring "extraordinary" evidence to be explored at all. Even though I consider myself a "skeptic" in many ways, I've always doubted this kind of thinking, which I hear all the time from other skeptics. I'm not sure how to put it into words, but maybe it's the word "extraordinary" that I object to in the first place. Wouldn't many modern scientific "facts" and technologies, for example, be considered "extraordinary" by those in the past, even the recent past in some cases? This exclusionary model of (scientific?) thinking seems fundamentally flawed to me, yet on the other hand, I feel I completely understand why it happens. I believe it's simply a practical matter of human limitations on focus and scope. Ought we to not focus on those that have a higher "probability" of being provable and workable? We seemed to have arrived at some sort of logical paradox here. This seemed the attitude that Bohr and his accolades had when confronted with ideas (by Bohm, Everett and Bell) non-aligned with their vision of what was/is real.

Bottom-line: the Alain Aspect experiment leaves us with ONLY a dual choice in terms of interpreting reality: either (1) a hidden variable interpretation of quantum mechanics (as opposed to a wave-function collapse approach, or whatever) is looking less and less plausible, unless we are really happy to reject special relativity of course, or, (2) reality is non-local in the sense that instantaneous action at a distance is possible. 

I'm not sure I agree with either; unfortunately both the theory and the experiments force me to choose one or the other. I don't think Kant, or anyone else, anticipated this. Bloody hell! In quantum mechanics, the results of experiments are probabilistic. But no one really knows how or why. By that I mean, are their properties as we measure them "real" or are we really measuring some abstraction of an underlying reality? It would take far too long to go into that here, but there are proponents on either side of the debate - and even within those sides, there's very different approaches. One'd probably find most people would say (for various reasons) that reality is fundamentally probabilistic (there is no underlying reality - no hidden variables), but it's not actually as pinned down as its proponents claim. Currently the most common idea is that the world is fundamentally probabilistic, but one obviously wouldn't' agree with that as a hard determinist. I think an idea I keep banging on about - not because I think it is necessarily right, but because I can't argue its ability to circumvent Bell's Theorem - is super-determinism. So, I don't think complexity can turn a hard deterministic universe into one that appears probabilistic, at least not at the fundamental level. But give me a few days and I'll probably change my mind on that. The thing with hard determinism and free will is that I don't think the two are compatible. I'm going to do what I'm going to do, irrelevant of any independent influence from "me". It's a nonsensical statement, even. That doesn't mean I don't make rational decisions, but what I'm going to do is already decided. On the other hand, if there is a "me" that can have some arbitrary influence on my decision making - how is that any more a case of free will? What instigates that spark of independence, other than some random action I have no control over? Even with an understanding of complexity, I still think it all boils down to those arguments of principles. I think. Basically, the question of free will does both my balls in…

A ham sandwich is better than understanding what is reality! How do we know that?

1. NOTHING is better than understanding what is reality -- AND

2. A ham sandwich is BETTER than NOTHING!

Ipso facto; QED!

NB: Becker’s attempt at explaining Bell’s inequality theorem by using the casino analogy is nothing short of masterful. Well done Sir!

Joys of Re-Reading: "A Certain Justice" by P. D. James

I too read Asterix comic books that I've read before. The memories of reading them as a child, the familiarity of the characters and the incidents, the dialogue even. Of course, there are lots of reasons why we might want to return to a book. Reading a book again is not just reading it for a second time, it involves a reflexivity: reading your earlier reading of the book (assuming you remember reading it before or if you’ve got a review of that previous reading).

It’s by re-reading certain authors with greater clarity than I have apparently mustered, the very self-conscious act that lies behind the public use of the verb 'to re-read'. Is it related to the fact that to describe someone as well read is a bigger compliment than remarking on how someone has been to a lot of opera or surfed a lot of the internet? Do we measure intellectual merit by number of books read? Is that a good thing? (I imagine for the readers of a books blog, the answer is “Yes”). I don't know. Some people see re-reading as a light-hearted irritating tendency though not life-threatening social trope, sometimes seasoned with a few sharp comments (in some reviews) on how to deflate the braying, boastful re-reader like myself. Of course there are more specific and sophisticated ways of doing that.

The same happens when it comes to P. D. James. When you strip the storyline back to its bare bones, it's as a shock to understand how little there is to it (minimalist comes to mind), but then it's the James storytelling in some of her novels, her ability to make physical descriptions of her characters, and her profound psychological insight into her characters that are important and putting it all together allows James to weave an intricate web narrative-wise. By binging once again on P.D. James I can see right away what separates the truly gifted writer from the merely entertaining one (like Agatha Christie). James (almost) always manages to give me entertainment value while also offering me attention-getting prose that makes me really think about how the characters feel and how events in the plot might actually affect the lives of real people. That’s what distinguishes P. D. James from her Crime Fiction counterparts. Take this as an example:  Octavia, one of those adult children who insist on being treated as an adult, but moves in with Mummy and tries to rule her house instead of finding her own, 'You see, the only person who’s in a state about her daughter coming home is you'. Insolent and narcissistic. Some children are difficult to love and even more difficult to like. Detestable. Will Mummy turn out to be the Mummy from hell?

Bottom-line: A gripping book from start to finish. Well, almost. I hated the ending… as far as I can recall, it was the first time Dalgliesh does not close a case successfully.

Triteness and Boringness: "Cover Her Face” by P. D. James

“The cultured cop! I thought they were peculiar to detective novels.”

In “Cover Her Face” by P. D. James

Sometimes people just like to talk about the books they're reading. Not boast. Just talk. I realise such plebeian behaviour may not be acceptable in the rarefied circles some people move in, but for the rest of us mere mortals it happens quite a lot. Given that reading is becoming less and less common, one would think you'd be happy people are reading at all, without feeling the need to bitch about the fact that they happened to have enjoyed something so much they might want to read it again. Unless you think reading should just be restricted to the real intelligentsia, among whom some people obviously count themselves. So, unless those people have evidence that re-reading causes cancer or blows up the WC, why not back off and let the rest of us do what we like. Or better, why not direct that scathing anger at something that really matters? "Oh, I'm re-reading ‘Cover Her Face’.” Yes, there are people who like to brag about re-reading the Shakespeare plays, but most of us are just trying to be accurate. If you say, "I'm reading such-and-such," people assume you mean "reading for the first time." I'm not sure why this applies to books and not movies, but it doesn't seem like that hard a thing to accept. As for our being too stupid to understand books the first time around -- sure! Fine! I admit it! I didn't even begin to understand “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” when I read it at fifteen or sixteen. But strangely enough, I wasn't too ashamed of my terminal idiocy to read it again in college and loving it. Plenty of books need a second or third reading, not because we're stupid, but because they're complex. But as almost everyone has said, this is all so painfully obvious that I can't believe I'm actually bothering to point it out.  “Cover Her Face” was one of the first books I discovered at the British Council’s library. Fond memories. Some of them I’m not allowed to state here…But I loved re-reading it although it’s not that good. It's so trite and boring how family and witnesses ALWAYS complain when asked questions... And always having the same depressed, desperate, selfish and despondent characters and family members ... And every character always deciding not to tell what they know...like life really.  And then getting killed just when they decide to tell (this part I’m not particularly fond of.) I, for one, think Katherine is pitiful; the character is so clingy to that man-child doctor it’s a cause for the vomit police. And Doctor Stephen needs a kick up the arse as well! It did surprise me upon this re-reading what a nasty piece of work Dalgliesh can be denying lawyers and bullying witnesses. I always knew Dalgliesh had a mean streak...

Bottom-line: It’s all about Memories after all.

My Y2K with SAP R/3: "A Life in Code - A Personal History of Technology" By Ellen Ullman

If you want to get a glimpse of what was the Y2K Bug craze in 1999 Ullman’s chapter on it is a must.

Millenniums may ask: “What was the Y2K bug?” Well, as one who was actively working in IT at the time, it basically was the number of seriously heavyweight IT-reliant- and IT-provider-based organizations running crapped out, moth-eaten, disaster-ready systems for critical public service and infrastructure functions, systems that were originally developed for Noah's GPSing around Ararat, beggars belief. The problem with the earlier Y2K and other system's potential 1970s-based clock issue and its siblings was and is their potential for cascading. The Y2K bug did, indeed, bite a lot of systems, but it did not go critical and ignite a runaway reaction. However, before the event absolutely no-one on the planet knew for sure whether it would or not.

The real problem was in the corporate/government sphere where old systems running in-house code needed to be fixed and/or replaced, although those systems could be running on quite small hardware platforms, and the risks were real that something serious might happen, and people needed to be informed so that they could carry out the necessary checks (even if that meant doing nothing). It's very true that the vast majority of consumer (and small business) hardware/software applications were sorted by the natural replacement cycle and by the fact that widespread adoption of computers at that scale was comparatively recent (by which I mean the late eighties and nineties). The challenge, as anyone who has done any serious integration testing on enterprise scale applications knows, is testing all the different scenarios; the risk of a cascading failure is ever present.

Simulating 'what-if' scenarios against a future time was particularly hard, since we had to advance the system clocks of many applications simultaneously (or simulate the impact of that). Where finance postings were involved (as is typically the case with billing and logistics systems) that becomes exceptionally difficult to plan and organise. In nearly 20 years of working in one the largest organisations in Portugal, I had never seen such testing done on such a wide scale. At the time, I certainly didn't condone 'mass scaremongering' and I was not gleeful that the world mostly acted professionally to fix the Y2K problem. I'm happy that the risks were assessed and a conservative precautionary principle was followed. If we couldn't realistically have tested all the possible failure modes of a future time flipping things into an unstable state it was safer to find and fix as many of the bugs as possible well in advance. I think it's sad that unscrupulous businesses used it as an opportunity to pressurise people to upgrade and replace things that might safely have been left alone, rather than educating them to do more research and maybe decide for themselves that they were, in fact, ok. The sad fact is that for many people IT fulfills Arthur C. Clarke's maxim: "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguisable from magic", and they will always be prone to being conned.

Will we have another Y2K-craze in 2038? I doubt I will last until 2038 (or the advent of its analogous problem in other systems, probably around the same time) but, if I do, I really hope this time sees a cascading reaction; it will indeed be a pleasure to go out, to adapt Bob Monkhouse's anecdote, listening peacefully to the screams of a multitude of hitherto complacent and ill-informed dweebs as their teetering systems crash and burn around them. I'll rouse myself briefly and LOL: "Ha ha," I'll go. "Ha ha ha." I'll probably be dead when all the planes fall out of the sky this time, so no worries…

How can we motivate corporate businesses to address the 2038 issue? Simple. With threats. Ultimately it is all fixable; I wouldn't panic right now, though it is time to start worrying about it. And anyone coding time into 32 bit numbers right now deserves to be forced to use Windows 3.1 for a month until they promise never to do it again…

NB: A personal note. The Germans calmly assessed the situation and ported non Y2K compliant IBM COBOL code into Y2K compliant SAP ABAP code, and launched one of the largest software companies on Earth. Implementing SAP R/3 to replace old IBM ERP solutions was one of the main ways that companies world-wide avoided the Y2K problem. I was head of an IT SAP Systems Administration team at the time, and the only think I had to worry about was to make sure all the programs developed by humans were Y2K-Compliant, and that was still a big worry I can tell you. My team spent New Year’s Eve at the office to make sure everything went according to plan while other teams were in the trenches... I remember my team drinking and eating on New Year's Eve...Wondrous times that won't come back.

Sortes Vergilianae: "The Inferno of Dante" by Dante Alighieri, Robert Pinsky (trans.)

What I love about Dante is how he doesn't invoke the Muses, unlike Homer, or Virgil, and that he goes straight to the heart of the matter, and straight in to the poem, i.e. "In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray, gone from the path direct". In the middle of his life Dante is lost in a dark wood, the man he most admires, a fellow poet, takes him by the hand and leads him through hell and purgatory, but when they reach the entry for Paradise, Virgil must give way to Beatrice, love is greater than wisdom, Dante's love for Beatrice, his desire for wisdom, what follows is exquisite poetry, and both Botticelli and Dali make an effort to capture the genius that resides there, as words, Virgil's trade, and Dante's, cede to inner knowing, as they ascend, then transcend, life, and reach beyond star and sun into the vast blue. TS Eliot wrote that Dante and Shakespeare "divide the world between them-there is no third." But is it exquisite poetry in English translation? I very much doubt it. The 1970s Penguin verse translation I read by Mark Susa was rubbish. Now I listened to an Audiobook with a translation by Robert Pinsky. Think I'll take T.S. Eliot's advice: use a prose translation if you must but learn Italian if you're serious about getting anything out of Dante's poetry (Portuguese and Italian both came from the same mold, Latin, but they're two very different languages).

Dante is unafraid to sing the praises of the great Virgil "That well-spring from which such copious floods of eloquence have issued", nor the other greats of Latin verse, such as Ovid and Lucan. Likewise, Milton's description of "Death grinn'd horrible, a ghastly smile" in "Paradise Lost" is borrowed from Dante's description of Minos in Canto V of Inferno "There Minos stands, grinning with ghastly features". Virgil had been acceptable throughout the Middle Ages although his works were usually glossed with the alibi that they prefigured Christianity in variously dubious ways.....

Virgil did write a Messianic Eclogue ("Now, a great new age is coming", etc.), but that could be about Augustus. It was hijacked by the Christians, but then, too, was something known as the Sortes Vergilianae, which was the deployment of Virgil in the same way as the Bible. The pagan bits were, however, glossed over, or excised.

I have often wondered why the great writers such as Joyce, Beckett, Eliot, etc. were so enthralled with Dante. I recall in "Damned to Fame" Beckett's biography the author James Knowlson mentioning Sam read "The Divine Comedy" in its original language and this volume was one of his most treasured possessions. I have read The Comedy many years ago (not really rolling in the aisles). Dante while including some Popes in the circles (but not all) must have been popular with some of the religious firebrands who feel his description (XI in particular) of the circles as "damned"...including those who were fraudsters, flatters, "...set their honest as pawn, ...such vile scum as these!" I recall thinking if these are all in Hell then Heaven must be a pretty sparsely populated spot! Is Dante's poetry that good to attract all the admiration... it certainly can't be the moral of his tale? But I guess the same could be said of some of Milton's works, another firebrand if one was to judge form his content.

I'm not the most theologically accurate of persons. I'm still learning a lot from my Friend João Cláudio. As far as I'm aware, it is not the greatness of the act it is the attitude which one has towards it which matters. The most terrible of sins can be forgiven, through the merits of Jesus Christ, if repented. Heaven may have greater sinners in it than hell does but only hell has unrepentant sinners.

Bottom-Line: Anyone who thinks that Dante didn't believe in forgiveness or grace hasn't understood the first thing about the Comedy, or about medieval catholic theology in general (I'm catholic; so I'm probably biased). The narrator's vision is the result of pure, undeserved grace which brings him through hell and purgatory to the vision of God, causing him to be reconcilled to God - and to the memory of Beatrice. The point about the people in Hell is that they refused forgiveness and grace. Unlike later thinkers (such as Calvin) Dante held that God always responded to people who wanted forgiveness, and "Purgatory" and "Paradise" are full of people who did dreadful things, some of them only repenting at the moment of death. It's essentially a long narrative about love, not about torture and damnation.

NB: Apparently, hell has three rooms: one is full of fire, the other full of ice and the other full of shit. Of course, most people choose the room of shit because you at least get to stand there with a warm cup of coffee under your nose. That is until coffee break is over and it is back on your heads.

Hippocrates 2.0 or On How to Put People into Boxes:"The Right—and Wrong—Stuff - How Brilliant Careers Are Made and Unmade" by Caster Cast

http://cartercast.com/book/

Presumably there are four types of persons in the world. To wit:

Those who believe there are four types;

Those who believe there are fewer than four types;

Those who believe there are more than four types;

Those who think the whole idea is cobblers;

Those who don't care (like me).

* Note for pedants.

The list has five elements. This is known as a "joke". I have left you some grammar errors as well to give you something useless to do.

** Note for mathematicians.

We could usefully consider the fifth element as a description of the null set in this context. Feel free to discuss whether the presence of a null set invalidates the claim that dividing a set into four subsets covers all parts of the original set.

Seriously. Really. Strikes me as unlikely that we fit into five professional "categories": Captain Fantastic, the Solo Flyer, Version 1.0, the One-Trick Pony, and the Whirling Dervish (I like the names though). Is there here something really new? Nah, Cast nicked the idea off Hippocrates. This has been around since ancient times when the four types were choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic and sanguine. Truly there is nothing new under the sun. Speaking for myself I was never one to believe we could be pigeonholed. Aye right, “there is no one-size-fits-all solution" - but four (or five according to Cast) sizes? Yep, that just about covers the entire human population.

I was tempted to buy the book, but the "Solo-Flyer' part of my personality convinced me that I already knew what Cast was trying to tell me. In addition, the "Captain Fantastic' part of my personality made me ask why someone would be an authority on fitting people into categories? The 'Whirling Dervish' part of my personality doesn't understand how a book could make my life any happier anyway, while the 'One-Trick-Pony' part of me says that the cash would be better spent on alcohol. I finally decided to to compromise and read the Audio version of the book instead...

Until we can study the physical science of the brain more effectively, making 'laws' of this kind of thing is really just guesswork and not even guesswork in the sense that philosophical principles are developed by logic but just literally guessing. It has been my observation from having worked in at least 10 different places (Consultant, Project Manager, 2nd line Manager, IT Ops Officer, Operational Manager, and Service Manager) that the most compliant workers are usually the most miserable.

You see, there are two things that tend to screw the compliant:

A) There are assholes everywhere (not that many, but usually one or two), and it's usually the compliant that they prey upon;

B) Plenty of people in this world make assertive and assured statements on things they know little (sometimes nothing) about and the compliant types will follow their advice just as readily as anybody else's, often with horrible results.

I say this because I've seen more than once the more compliant people be repeatedly bullied by assholes and/or sent down the wrong path by those whose low self-confidence doesn't allow them to publicly admit that they do not know something well. Sadly I lack the personal equilibrium to endure incompetence, especially from top management.

Whatever happened to "Be yourself" or "Create your own principles"?

It is possible that we adopt different tendencies in different contexts and the truly worked out person knows which tendency to use in any one context. Ever since the Greeks recommended 'Know yourself' that has been an important aspect of well- being but to be told in advance that you must be one tendency or another is very limiting. This seems a personal approach not based on any scientific analysis of personalities. Remember the days when we were either extrovert or introvert and no other options seem relevant. This seems the same. Personality is too rich and individual to fit into categories.

Were I to interview a number of 'gurus' who had written books on how to take stress out of your life and I'd probably found them all incredibly stressed in their actual lives!

This is the reason I never cared much for self-help books. Should we all aspire to be compliant workers and bright-eyed leaders? Nope. I've been on both sides of the barricade (consultant and later on as a 2nd line manager of a SAP Business Unit). If only Van Gogh had been a bit more upbeat he might have been a better team member and wouldn't have wasted his time on all those depressing paintings. Why do publishers peddle this vapid tripe aimed at refashioning a more productive liberal-democratic-professional 'you'?

My own contribution for a future managerial self-help book entitled "The Five Tendencies". What sort of people would buy "The Five Tendencies" you ask? My suggestion:

- those who will purchase the printed version of The Five Tendencies;

- those who will purchase the digital version of The Five Tendencies;

- those who will purchase the digital audio version of The Five Tendencies;

- those who will read The Five Tendencies without purchasing it,

- those who don't give a flying fart about The Five Tendencies.

The author will surely perceive the first three only as the happy ones.

All the self-help books I have read are full of unattributed anecdotes, followed by pseudo psychological nonsense. Any real advice would usually fill a few paragraphs, and is often the same thing dressed up in different ways. Get more exercise, challenge yourself, declutter your life, put yourself first!" There!

NB: 3 stars for the funny category names and professional reminiscences. I liked them. Colourful, aren't they?

Workmanlike Prose: "Rendezvous with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke

Ah, yes. Rama. I actually read this with a torch under the blankets in an intense all-nighter back in the day. What I like about this book in retrospect is its complete lack of compromise as a work of SF. Characters? Who the frack needs 'em. Themes? Bah, pointless! All SF needs to be is an unbroken, brilliantly done description of an alien environment. I'm glad things have moved on since, but I'd still happily sit and read a book so single-mindedly in its purpose like this one.

In any genre of literature, you definitely have some people whose names tower above everyone else, and their influence could not be denied. However, people who like literature don't just read the so-called greats. Clarke certainly wrote some seminal works of SF, but he probably read many obscure works too, some of which may have influenced him. Readers don't just read the big name writers, but have a much bigger interest in the genre. A writer’s work only makes sense within a tradition and how it is situated along other people's work. It is all interlinked and some of the smaller voices may be bigger than critics acknowledge. For instance Clarke's influences aren't as well-known but what he learned from them is part of his work, so the voices remain powerful, and readers equally value preceding works. That doesn't mean that the big name writers don't deserve their place in history, but as fan of literature, I think sometimes, the bigger contributions are made by lesser known writers. I disagree with the assessment that Clarke left questions unanswered; world-building can get boring at the micro, non-plot-related level. This book was "sensawunda" in triplicate -- for the Ramans always did everything in threes. How about those tripodal cleansing things that whirled about? I'm not disappointed that Clarke had no sequel; when you look at 2001 on the screen, then read Clarke's rejected worlds, you realise that Kubrick was right to end with the “Star Child”. There must be mystery and open-endedness along with “sensawunda” to develop and explore. One writer cannot be credited with the continuity of ideas within a literary genre. I also enjoy reading it for the lack of artificial tension - there isn't a saboteur on board, the characters all seem decent and likeable (and sensible - no one behaves like an idiot for the sake of the plot), and only the fiery Martians stir things up a little. All the tension emerges naturally from their being on an alien artefact. It's as enjoyable and fascinating as watching the Edwardian Farm in space... And it's almost impossible to imagine a modern dramatisation without someone ruining it with loads of artificial, clichéd conflict. (Christ, even the remake of Hawaii 5-O has to start off with them all resenting each other and grudgingly gaining each other's respect. Yawn.)

I find Arthur C. Clarke to be a writer whose prose is pretty workmanlike, but where Clarke excels when he's at his best (he often wasn't) is in dramatic structure and for a novel which is all about a good idea it's that knowledge of how to explain an idea which holds it together. Enough is explained for it to make sense, but not enough as to require any utterly pointless sequels. A writer without the knack of explaining a grand idea without deep characterization would have fluffed it.

Not sure which SF I'd recommend to non-SF fans, because as well as the formula issue there's also the fact that the books tend not to take place in the world we see around us which raises a barrier of understanding for the casual reader. Anything by Lem might fit the bill though and of course some Phil Dick. "The Big Sleep” helped created the hardboiled genre. It did not adhere to a formula. When we get down to brass-tacks, I'd recommend it not just to any crime genre fan but to those who aren't fans of the genre as well. And for me “Rendezvous with Rama” is an example of still readable SF, being also an example that remains within the formula and so is one I'd recommend to any genre fan but not to anyone not into the genre.

In the Big Dumb Object competition I'll still take “Ringworld” by Niven, but there was some serious skull sweat involved with “Rendezvous with Rama”. It shows and it deserves respect for it. I also prefer Clarke's “Fountains of Paradise”. The story is a bit better and the engineering involved is somewhat mind blowing. There have been attempts to make it as a film, but they keep running into funding problems. It would be a huge undertaking, and really needs something with a breadth of imagination to create real, or virtual, sets which would need to rival the LOTR films in order to be convincing. Many of the ideas have been used elsewhere, though; for example, in Blake's 7, the concept of Xen insisting that the crew find out things for themselves has some echoes of “Rendezvous with Rama”.

NB1: What about the bicycle? The junior crewmember could've said something earlier, but he had smuggled the device on board and wasn't supposed to have it. Yes, even then the explanation is a bit weak, but the human spaceship isn't supposed to have any devices on it that can manoeuvre in an atmosphere because it doesn't have a mission that would require it (the ship is pressed into service when Rama is detected). But yes, I did wonder where their "Scotty" was, the bluff Scotsman who would rig together something--Clarke missed a chance to have a bit of fun with that. One thing that marked both Clarke and Asimov was their earnestness, and that serious tone of Awe at Marvels sometimes took away a bit of the fun. But I suppose they wanted SF taken seriously, after so many years of being relegated to laughable "monsters from outer space" clichés.

NB2: This novel always reminds me of J. G. Ballard's "Report on an Unidentified Space Station." Not sure why. Any ideas?

SF = Speculative Fiction.