Once Lou finds out about the potential treatment he takes it upon himself to learn as much about the brain as he can. He's surprised to find that he can understand it quite well: It's interesting to me that we spend the early part of our lives rebelling against normality (Why be normal, right?) only to want so desperately to be normal when our normality is not in our hands. Lou is born autistic, and even with the advantages of a future where more is known about the illness, there is still an enormous amount of prejudice towards people with autism. In fact, a multinational corporation in the IT sector has hired Lou Arendale and a team of his equally gifted but socially challenged peers in its most advanced laboratory, where they develop together cutting-edge software routines. Darkness, once again, has no source, so the amount of time it takes for day to turn into night also depends on the light source itself. Therefore, we once again arrive at the conclusion that darkness possesses no speed of its own. Since darkness is defined as the absence of light, its speed is the same as that of light. Therefore, the speed of darkness is also 300,000 kilometers per second. Having an interesting job, a work environment customized to his special needs, a hobby [fencing] and a social group of his co-workers to spend his leisure time with should help Lou Arendale blend-in, but all his pillars of support are about to crumble when a new manager tries to assert his dominance by cutting privileges for his autistic software team and by pressuring them to undergo a controversial new brain intervention that would ‘normalize’ their behaviour.

Make sure you clean all mirrors and windows (inside and out) using the right products. That way, you’ll remove dirt, frost and snow without leaving smears on the glass that might cause lights to dazzle you behind the wheel. It is hard to drive safely in the hot afternoon, with the wrong music in my head. Light flashed off windshields, bumpers, trim; there are too many flashing lights. By the time I get home, my head hurts and I’m shaking. I take the pillows off my couch into the bedroom, closing all the shades tightly and then the door. I lie down, piling the pillow on top of me, then turn off the light. The answer to our question is simple and perhaps a bit boring: If you have a lit area and you remove all the light, darkness will propagate (or rather: be revealed) at the speed of light. I got a library copy that had tons of notes and also underlining/circling of the text and it took quite a bit of effort for the “autistic” part of me to ignore it and focus on just the text of the book, but for the most part I managed to do that.Take caution when driving in the dark by driving slower, paying attention to the surface of the road and looking out for pedestrians and animals Normality is a fictional notion, a social convention. Witness the extreme pressures exercised by some vocal minorities, both on the right and on the left of the political spectrum, to redefine normality in light of their own peculiar dogmas. Everybody who disagrees with them is their mortal enemy: Nazi sympathizers on the right lay claim to national identity – they are the only template for what it means to be a true [insert nationality here]; Every Christian splinter cult throughout history claims they hold the ultimate answer to God, and that everyone else is a heretic who should be burned at the stake; crusaders for a new sexual revolution on the left rush to cancel anyone who dares to question the validity of their claims and of their priorities. All my advisers and counselors told me to go into applied mathematics, so I did. They told me what I was capable of, and I believed them. They did not think I had the kind of brain that could do real scientific work." It would take MANY years, but the speed at which darkness will dominate our solar system is entirely determined by how fast photons travel away from us, i.e. the speed of light.

The protagonist, Lou, is described very well by the blurb and it was a genuine delight to follow his thought processes. This review is chokkas full of quotes from the book because you don't need to be autistic to relate to many of the introspective observations:L. Necib/Caltech Figure 1: (Left) Distribution of all stars in the simulation of a Milky-Way-like galaxy used by Herzog-Arbeitman and colleagues [ 4]. The center of the galaxy is in the center of the image. The color scheme indicates the density of stars, from densest (yellow) to least dense (blue). (Middle, Right) The distribution of the oldest stars (middle) and the dark matter (right) in the same simulated galaxy and in the same coordinate system. As in the left image, the density of old stars is largest in the center of the galaxy. The dark matter distribution is more spherical and extended than the all-stars distribution. ×

of the universe that humans have observed is darkness. It is either nothing, or it is full of objects so far away from Earth that their light hasn’t reached our field of vision yet. Y.-Y. Mao, L. E. Strigari, and R. H. Wechsler, “Connecting Direct Dark Matter Detection Experiments to Cosmologically Motivated Halo Models,” Phys. Rev. D 89, 063513 (2014). This book reminded me to never judge or underestimate anyone based on their disability or appearance, and it did make me think what exactly makes someone who they are and what makes a human being valuable. It also said a lot about change and about risk.So it makes absolutely zero sense that without that learning style, without those pattern recognition skills that enabled him to learn about organic chemistry and neuroscience in a couple of weeks, he's still able to become an astronaut and fulfill his dream and live happily ever after. Internal logic would dictate that in the process of becoming non-autistic, he would find that the one dream that he had as an autistic person would be forever beyond his reach, because that dream was a product of his autistic mind. But the book is so much more. This isn’t an action or adventure novel, and the treatments and potential cure for autism is pretty much the only real SF element in the story. If you expand the concept of dark, however, it may appear that the dark has a speed all its own. Consider a dark spot in a beam of light, which might be created by placing a piece of cloth or other object over part of the light source. While this dark spot might not meet strict criteria for total darkness, it travels at the same speed as the rest of the non-obstructed light [source: University of Illinois]. This same speed of darkness holds true if you equate darkness to how long it takes for the light to go away when the power is switched off -- again, the speed of dark in this case is equal to the speed of light.