Physics Books
drorzel | March 20, 2012So, this is the new book from the authors of Why Does E=mc2?, covering quantum mechanics in a roughly similar manner. This book, or, rather, Brian Cox talking about some material from this book, created a bit of controversy recently, as previously discussed. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
The big hook here is that they set out to discuss quantum mechanics for a popular audience using a Feynman-type picture from the very beginning. This is an intriguing idea, and sort of appealing in the same basic way that Sakurai's famous graduate text in quantum mechanics and…
drorzel | March 20, 2012A couple of cool items in the promotion of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog:
-- A little while back, I spoke to Alan Boyle, who writes the Cosmic Log blog for MSNBC, who posted a very nice story about the book last night. Mainstream media, baby!
It also uses this very cool picture of Emmy and me in my lab:
(Many thanks to Matt Milless for taking that and a bunch of others.)
-- This weekend (either Saturday or Sunday, depending on where you are), I'll be on the Science Fantastic radio show, talking about relativity with Michio Kaku. There's a lsit of stations that carry it linked from that…
drorzel | March 19, 2012I'm trying not to obsessively check and re-check the Dog Physics Sales Rank Tracker, with limited success. One thing that jumped out at me from the recent data, though, is the big gap between the book and Kindle rankings over the weekend. The book sales rank dropped (indicating increased sales, probably a result of the podcast interview), while the Kindle rank went up dramatically. This suggests that people who listen to that particular podcast are less likely to buy new books on the Kindle than new books on paper.
This got me wondering, though, whether this was an anomaly, or a general truth…
drorzel | March 17, 2012I've done a bunch of publicity stuff for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, some of which frustratingly continue to not appear yet, but one thing from this week has gone live: a podcast interview on the Matt Lewis Show, where I talk about why and how I explain physics to the dog, and a little bit about why relativity is cool.
I continue to struggle a bit with the fact that relativity is a very visual subject-- most of the best explanations involve pictures, which aren't much help in an audio-only medium. I had trouble with this at Boskone, too-- when I was doing a reading, it was hard to…
drorzel | March 13, 2012I finally got a copy of Cox and Forshaw's The Quantum Universe, and a little time to read it, in hopes that it would shed some light on the great electron state controversy. I haven't finished the book, but I got through the relevant chapter and, well, it doesn't, really. That is, the discussion in the book doesn't go into all that much more detail than the discussion on-line, and still requires a fair bit of work to extract a coherent scientific claim.
The argument basically boils down to the idea that the proper mathematical description of a universe containing more than one fermion is a…
drorzel | March 6, 2012The new book is out, which means it's time for lots of promotional efforts and links to radio shows and news articles and that sort of thing. Such as this one: I'll be talking about relativity and dog physics tomorrow night, Wednesday the 7th, on the Big Science radio program(me) at 9pm London time (in the frame of reference in which London is at rest, anyway). This'll be the first radio show for the new book, though I've done a few phone interviews for print publications (links as they become available...).
If you're in London, and have nothing better to do, tune in. (We are, after all, more…
drorzel | February 29, 2012The Subject: header pretty much says it all: How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is reviewed in Nature Physics. I am inordinately pleased with the existence of this-- not because I expect it to sell a significant number of books, but because a serious technical publication recognized it as worth writing up, despite the silly title.
Of course, Nature being Nature, it's paywalled, so you can only read the full thing via the above link if you have institutional access, or know a nice person who will email you a copy when you ask for it on Twitter. The review itself is about what I would expect…
drorzel | February 29, 2012One of the big stories in genre Internet news was Seanan McGuire's post last week, about reactions to the early release of some copies of her book, and the hateful garbage thrown her way by people outraged that the ebook didn't slip out early as well. And let me state right up front that the people who wrote her those things are lower than the slime that pond scum scrapes off its shoes. That's absolutely unconscionable behavior, and has no place in civilized society.
That said, Andrew Wheeler picked up on something that also struck me as odd, namely the way McGuire was so upset about paper…
drorzel | February 28, 2012I'm home with The Pip today, so no extended typing for me, but I pre[ared for this by typing something up ahead of time, and getting John Scalzi to post it for me, as part of his Big Idea series:
In a way, a book about Einstein's theory of relativity is uniquely suited to a series about Big Ideas. Relativity, at its heart, is a theory built on a single Big Idea:
The laws of physics do not depend on how you're moving.
For all its fearsome reputation, everything stems from that single,simple idea. Whether you're moving or standing still, floating in space or on the surface of a planet, you…
drorzel | February 28, 2012The Pip says, "Hi, folks. My daddy's book is released today, and he's shameless enough to use me to promote it:"
"I can't read it yet, because I'm just a baby, but I can report that it was very satisfying to drool on. So you should definitely buy a copy, maybe two."
"Also, dig the awesome stuffed alligator toy I got from my Aunt Erin and Aunt 'Stasia. It crackles, and it has a mirror! It's so cool!"
drorzel | February 27, 2012If you're allergic to hype, you might want to tune this blog out for the next couple of days, because How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is officially released tomorrow, so it's all I'm going to talk about for a little while. Because, well, I'm pretty excited.
And tonight's exciting finding is that it's mentioned in the Washington Post:
If "Physics for Dummies" left you baffled, maybe it's time to go a step further: Why not physics for pets? In "How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog," physics professor Chad Orzel attempts to explain Einstein's theory of relativity via a dialogue with his dog,…
drorzel | February 26, 2012Hey, you might not know this, but I wrote a book...
The official release date for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog isn't until Tuesday, but a friend reported buying a copy in Missouri, so when I was headed out to do some work this afternoon, I went to the cafe at the local Barnes&Noble so I could check for myself, and there it was:
That's How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog spotted in the wild. I'm not going to say "in its natural habitat," because it's really a domestic animal, which belongs in a loving home, with people to care for it. Copies in the bookstore are feral editions,…
drorzel | February 23, 2012I'm grading exam papers at the dining room table when Emmy trots in. "Hey, dude," she says. "Where do we keep the superconducting wire?"
I'm not really paying attention, so I start to answer before I understand the question. "Hmm? Wire is in the basement, next to the--wait, what?"
"The superconducting wire. Where do we keep it?"
"We don't have any superconducting wire. And you're a dog. What do you need superconducting wire for, anyway?"
"I'm building a particle collider! I need superconducting wire for the beam-steering magnets."
How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog goes on sale next Tuesday…
drorzel | February 22, 2012A correspondent from the UK sends along this picture from the Waterstones outlet in Heathrow airport:
As you can see, How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog is #55 on their bestseller rack, just ahead of Confessions of a London Call Girl. I'm not sure what this says about London call girls, but I'm pretty psyched that it's still selling well over there.
On this side of the Atlantic, I got a note from my editor at Scribner the other day that they've just printed another batch of the US paperback of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, which is also good news. There's probably a blog post in…
drorzel | February 13, 2012So, the big How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Photoshop contest concluded on Friday. We got five really good entries, and the judges (me and Kate) had a hard time reaching a decision. After long deliberation, though, we've come up with a solution.
But first, the entries:
Jane Di Giuseppe has Emmy as the dog pulling Einstein's strings:
John Pearce has Emmy playing with Einstein as well:
And Joseph Roith tells Maxwell's Demon to respect Emmy's authoritah!:
But in the end, it came down to two pictures: Tristan Croll's take on the famous chalkboard photo:
It's a little-known fact that not…
drorzel | February 13, 2012I've been falling down a little in the area of shameless self-promotion, but I will be at Boskone this coming weekend, where I'll be doing three program items:
Reading: Chad Orzel (Reading), Fri 19:30 - 20:00
This will be a section from the forthcoming book, probably involving Emmy and particle physics. Or possibly William Butler Yeats.
How to Wreck Your Career with Social Media (Special Interest Group)
(M), Sat 16:00 - 17:00
What are the new opportunities for public humiliation opened by the
Internet? Join this entertaining discussion about authors getting
into nasty public spats with…
drorzel | February 8, 2012I have a Google alert set up to let me know whenever my name or the title of one of my books turns up in one of the sources they index. This is highly imperfect, sometimes missing interesting articles, and often blorting out 57 different pages on which my name appears in a sidebar link. It comes in handy from time to time, though, such as this morning, when it coughed up a whole bunch of pages linking to the Polish edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
Finally, dogs in the ancestral homeland of my father's family can learn all about quantum physics. I'm a little surprised to learn…
drorzel | February 7, 2012A quick reminder: How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog (cover in the left sidebar) will be released at the end of the month. If you'd like to win a signed copy early, though, you can enter our Photoshop contest. Just edit a picture of Emmy into another picture having something to do with physics. Like this:
(See the transcript here for the source of this comment.)
The deadline for entering is this Friday. We've already got some quality entries, but the more the merrier.
drorzel | February 2, 2012It's now officially February, and the release date for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is only a few weeks off-- the official release date is Feb. 28. Of course, I've got a copy already:
If you would like a copy of your very own, you can either wait until the release, or take part in this shameless publicity stunt: The second-ever Dog Physics Photo Contest!
Last time around, we did a LOLEmmy contest for a bound galley proof of the first book. This time, I'm giving away a signed copy of the finished book, so we'll go for something a little trickier: I've picked three pictures from my…
drorzel | January 27, 2012I was going to write something about the politics of scientific publishing, but instead, I want to focus on what's really important in modern publishing:
That's right, I got a couple of early copies of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog in the mail this morning. It's a real book, with pages and everything... You can see it above, next to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, and various clutter on my desk, for scale.
There's not much else to say, other than "Woo-hoo!" They're printing lots more, of course, and it will be available wherever books are sold starting Feb. 28th.