Science Books
Category archives for Science Books
For Extra Credit, Estimate Your Chances of Winning: Ballparking Giveaway
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 7, 2012 Some time back, I reviewed a cool book about Fermi problems by Aaron Santos, then a post-doc at Michigan. In the interim, he’s taken a faculty job at Oberlin, written a second book on sports-related Fermi problems, and started a blog, none of which I had noticed until he emailed me. Shame on me. Anyway,…
Dog Physics: Obsessive Update
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 3, 2012 A few more links that have turned up of people talking about either How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog: Andrew Johnston has a review of the UK edition, praising it because “it’s bang up to date, and goes beyond the basic quantum concepts into more complex…
Trickle Down Science
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 2, 2012 A week or so ago, lots of people were linking to this New York Review of Books article by Steven Weinberg on “The Crisis of Big Science,” looking back over the last few decades of, well, big science. It’s somewhat dejected survey of whopping huge experiments, and the increasing difficulty of getting them funded, including…
Book Roundup: People Talking About Dog Physics
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 26, 2012 I’ve been falling down on the shameless self-promotion front, lately, but that doesn’t mean I’m not tracking How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog obsessively, just that I’m too busy to talk about it. Happily, other people have been nice enough to talk about it for me, in a variety of places: The most significant,…
My New Favorite Review of How to Teach [Quantum] Physics to Your Dog
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 16, 2012 My Google vanity search for my name and the book titles is really frustratingly spotty, often missing things in major news outlets that I later find by other means. For example, I didn’t get a notification about this awesome review in the Guardian, from their children’s book section: I am a ten year old who…
Why So Many Books About Quanta?
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 12, 2012 I’m re-instituting the quota system for the moment– no blogging until I make some substantive progress on the current work-in-progress– but I’ll throw out a quick post here to note a media appearance: Physics World has a podcast about books on quantum physics up today: Since its inception in the early part of the 20th…
The Electric Life of Michael Faraday by Alan Hirshfeld
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 11, 2012 A passing mention in last week’s post about impostors and underdogs got me thinking about Michael Faraday again, and I went looking for a good biography of him. The last time looked, I didn’t find any in electronic form, probably because the Sony Reader store has a lousy selection. I got a Nook for Christmas,…
A Question for the Biologists: Origin of The Origin?
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 11, 2012 I’ve had limited success with this query on Twitter, probably because not that many people were reading late last night when I posted this, but I can give a little more context here, so it’s worth repeating: As part of something I’m working on but won’t talk about yet, I’m interested in learning something about…
How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog: A Review Is In
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 9, 2012 I’m trying not to be Neurotic Author Guy and obsessively check online reviews of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog every fifteen minutes. I’ve actually been pretty successful at it, so successful that I didn’t notice the first posted review at Amazon until my parents mentioned it to me. It’s a really good one,…
Impostors, Underdogs, and the Status of Science
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 5, 2012 Over in Scientopia, SciCurious has a nice post about suffering from Impostor Syndrome, the feeling that everyone else is smarter than you are, and you will soon be exposed as a total fraud. Which is nonsense, of course, but something that almost every scientist suffers at some point. The post ends on a more upbeat…
