I like the scenes showing the protagonist as a math professor. The lectures he gives are interesting and creative, though not always 100% accurate. (For instance, his discussion of "minimizing error" gives the impression that the expected value is the one which occurs most often. In fact, the expected value may not be a possible outcome at all. Rather, it is the number for which the differences between it and the outcomes is minimized. It fits in well with what he was trying to say...he just didn't say it right.)

I also thought the idea -- that someone connected to all of humanity's unconscious thought for all time could use the information to predict the future to some high degree of certainty -- was interesting and made for a fun book. However, I'm not sure it makes sense if you think about it. It is not clear how he sometimes knows things that no person knows (like the order of cards in a shuffled deck) if his source of information is this common human unconsciousness. Moreover, Fawer ends up with some rather strange blend of the determinism of Laplace and the popular notion of "free will". I mean, the whole point of Laplace is that if things are deterministic then all that you need is enough information and processing power to predict the future. But, once we're supposed to believe that human decision is somehow non-deterministic, I would think the whole thing would fall apart and the ability to do anything like that would be lost.

I've already complained about Fawer's physics. Everything from his quantum mechanics (in which he uses the popular but inaccurate statement that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is the statement that things change when you observe them) to his special relativity (no, E=MC^2 does not explain why you get thrown back in your seat when your car accelerates -- it pretty much avoids dealing with acceleration at all) is off. But his biology is perhaps even worse. Both of his claims regarding evolution (that it is necessarily non-deterministic and that it cannot explain instinctive behavior) are ridiculous.

Fortunately, these little annoyances to not spoil the book. It is an engrossing thriller with some clever ideas and quite a bit of nice mathematics thrown in as well. The book's official website also has a Flash game that you can play which quizes you on and teaches you some basic probability!