biography
drorzel | May 10, 2011When I was looking over the Great Discoveries series titles for writing yesterday's Quantum Man review, I was struck again by how the Rutherford biography by Richard Reeves is an oddity. Not only is Rutherford a relatively happy fellow-- the book is really lacking in the salacious gossip that is usually a staple of biography, probably because Rutherford was happily married for umpteen years-- but he's an experimentalist, and you don't see that many high-profile biographies of experimental physicists.
When you run down the list of famous and relatively modern scientists who have books written…
drorzel | May 9, 2011While I've got a few more review copies backlogged around here, the next book review post is one that I actually paid for myself, Lawrence Krauss's Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science, part of Norton's Great Discoveries series of scientific biographies. I'm a fan of the series-- past entries reviewed here include Richard Reeves's biography of Rutherford, Rebecca Goldstein's biography of Goedel, and David Foster Wallace on Cantor's work on infinity (which is less of a biography than the others). I'm not a huge reader of biographies, but I've liked all the books from this series that…
drorzel | April 8, 2010Via Twitter, Michael Barton is looking for some good books about physics. I was Twitter-less for a few days around the period of his request, and this is a more-than-140-characters topic if ever there was one, so I'm turning it into a blog post.
The reason for the request is that he's going to be working as an intern at the Einstein exhibit when it visits Portland, which makes this a little tricky, as relativity is not an area I've read a lot of popular books in (yet-- that's changing). That will make this a little more sparse than it might be in some other fields.
There's also an essential…
grrlscientist | September 11, 2009I just read Eugenie Scott's review of the movie, Creation, a drama about the life of Charles Darwin that was recently screened at the Toronto Film Festival. This film, which -- astonishingly -- does not have a distributor in the USA, humanizes Darwin by showing us key events from his life after he returned from his famous five-year voyage aboard the HMS Beagle. But Eugenie Scott is not the only one who likes this film; it has received positive reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, Ray Bennett of THReviews, the IMDB and Roger Ebert. Besides being touted as an excellent film, Creation has the coolest…
sciencewoman | February 19, 2009Dr. Ashanti Pyrtle is an assistant professor in the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida. She's a chemical oceanographer who studies the fate, transport and retention of radionuclides in aquatic ecosystems. Her PhD work investigated the marine distribution of radioisotopes from the Chernobyl accident, and she's currently doing work in Puerto Rico, off the Florida coast, and in the Savannah River. She's one of the first female African-American chemical oceanographers, and the first African-American to earn an oceanography Ph.D. from Texas A&M University.
Dr. Pyrtle…
grrlscientist | September 18, 2007tags: book review, history, biography, James Smithson, Jacques Louis Macie, Smithsonian Institution, Heather Ewing
As a nearly life-long resident of the West Coast, I have visited the Smithsonian Institution exactly once in my entire life, and to be honest, I didn't notice the bust of its founder, James Smithson. I suppose I should feel guilty about that but, according to what I have read, his bust is located across the street from the Smithsonian Castle on the National Mall. At that time, this area was not included in my Smithsonian-seeking trajectory. However, after visiting the Smithsonian…