Physics Books
drorzel | December 30, 2011I will eventually do a "Year in Blog" post with a bunch of links to top posts and so on, but not until the year is actually over. At the moment, I'm too busy prepping next term's class to do all the link chasing.
That doesn't mean I can't engage in a little self-promotion, though. After all, my second book, How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog will be out at the end of February. And the first pre-publication review is in, from Publishers Weekly:
Physics professor Orzel follows his How to Teach Physics to Your Dog with a compact and instructive walk through Einstein's theory of relativity,…
drorzel | December 9, 2011Three quick items relating to science in book form:
1) It's that time of year again when every media outlet of any consequence puts out a "Year's Best {Noun}" list, and John Dupuis is checking the lists for science books so you don't have to. It looks like a pretty reasonable year for science in the best non-fiction-book-list world, but you can see for yourself.
2) In the "good books about science coming next year" category, the line-up for The Open Laboratory anthology of outstanding science blogging has been announced. I'm very pleased to report that my write-up of the OPERA preprint was…
drorzel | December 8, 2011One of the things that is sometimes very frustrating (to me, at least) about popular physics books is that they rush very quickly through the physics that we already know, in order to spend time talking about wildly speculative ideas. This not only gives some of these books a very short shelf life, as their wilder speculations get ruled out, but it does a dis-service to science. Because as cool as some of the things that might be true are, the stuff that we already know is pretty awesome in its own right, and even more amazing for being true.
Happily, Frank Close's new book, The Infinity…
drorzel | December 6, 2011It's hard to go more than a couple of days without seeing another "imminent death of publishing" article somewhere, predicting the ultimate triumph of ebooks, There's one category of books that I expect to remain safe for the foreseeable future, though, namely books that are specifically constructed to be aesthetically pleasing. In other words, coffee-table books.
Clifford Pickover's new Physics Book is one of these. It's a very attractive and well-made book, pairing some 250 full-page images representing milestones in physics, paired with one-page descriptions of the underlying scientific…
drorzel | September 20, 2011I'm looking at an email from my editor when Emmy wanders by the computer, sniffing around just in case a crumb of food has fallen on the floor in the last five minutes. "Hey," I say, "Come here and look at this."
"Look at what?"
"This:"
"It's the cover for my new book."
"A-hem."
"OK, fine, it's the cover for our new book. Anyway, what do you think?"
"Hey, that's not bad. I'm way better than that dog, though."
"Yeah, well, they didn't want to make the owners of inferior dogs jealous."
"Oooh. Good point. See, this is why I could never make it in marketing."
"It's Madison Avenue's loss, I'm…
drorzel | July 11, 2011(Note: This was not prompted by any particular comment. Just a slow accumulation of stuff, that turned into a blog post on this morning's dog walk.)
It's been a couple of years now that I've been working on writing and promoting How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, so I've had a lot of conversations where the subject of writing a popular audience book on quantum physics comes up. I've had enough of these now that I can recognize a few different categories of responses, one of which drives me up the wall. I suspect that the same is true for most pop-science authors, so as a public service, let me…
drorzel | June 24, 2011I kicked off the week with a grumpy post about the Guardian's flawed list of great non-fiction, so let's end the week with a slightly more upbeat take on the same basic idea. The New York Times did a slightly lighter list, asking their staff to pick favorite nonfiction. The lack of consensus is pretty impressive, but the list is still heavy with books that are famous-- even if you haven't read them (I mostly haven't), you'll recognize the titles.
So, famous works of non-fiction are pretty well covered. Which leaves non-famous non-fiction as a decent bloggy topic. So:
What are some of your…
drorzel | June 13, 2011Right around the time I sent in the manuscript for my own book explaining relativity to Emmy, I got an email offering me a review copy of The Manga Guide to Relativity, part of a series of English translations of Japanese comic books explaining complicated concepts in a friendly way. That was clearly too good a wind-down read to pass up.
Like other books in the series, this sets up a manga-type plot that just happens to require introducing relativity. In this case, on the last day of school at Taigai Academy, headmaster Rase Iyaga makes a surprise announcement: that he will throw a dart at…
drorzel | June 9, 2011While it is not yet officially summer, according to astronomers and horologists, it was approximately the temperature of the Sun here in Niskayuna yesterday, so de facto summer has begun. Accordingly, we have acquired a pool:
Of course, one of the main things you do with a pool is to sit next to it and read in the sun (note the conveniently positioned chair). Of course, then the question becomes "What do you read?
While the obvious answer is How to Teach Physics to Your Dog (now in paperback!), we got a good thread out of non-obvious suggestions for science-related "beach reading" last year…
drorzel | May 31, 2011I heard David Kaiser talk about the history of quantum foundations work back in 2008 at the Perimeter Institute, and while I didn't agree with everything he said, I found it fascinating. So when I heard that he had a book coming out about this stuff, How the Hippies Saved Physics, I jumped at the chance to get a review copy.
This is, in essence, a book-length argument that I owe Frijtof "Tao of Physics" Capra, Gary "Dancing Wu Li Masters" Zukav, and even J*ck S*rf*tt* a beer.
The book expands on things that Kaiser said in that PI talk (which was really good-- you could do worse than to spend…
drorzel | May 11, 2011While Kenneth Ford's 101 Quantum Questions was generally good, there was one really regrettable bit, in Question 23: What is a "state of motion?" When giving examples of states, Ford defines the ground state as the lowest-energy state of a nucleus, then notes that its energy is not zero. He then writes:
An object brought to an absolute zero of temperature would have zero-point energy and nothing else. Because of zero-point energy, there is indeed such a thing as perpetual motion.
This is really the only objectionable content in the book, but he certainly made up in quality what it lacks in…
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 | May 8, 2011The folks at Harvard University Press were nice enough to send me an advance copy of Ken Ford's new book, 101 Quantum Questions: What You Need to Know About the World You Can't See a few months ago. I've been too busy working on my own book to read any other physics books, though, so the actual book made it into print before my review. Better late than never, though.
As the title promises, this is a book about modern physics written in Q&A format. It's presented as a list of questions about physics, such as "1: What is a quantum, anyway?" and "6: Why is solid matter solid if it is mostly…
drorzel | May 6, 2011In comments to yesterday's post about precision measurements, Bjoern objected to the use of "quantum mechanics" as a term encompassing QED:
IMO, one should say "quantum theory" here instead of "quantum mechanics". After all, what is usually known as quantum mechanics (the stuff one learns in basic courses) is essentially the quantization of classical mechanics, whereas QED is the quantization of classical electrodynamics, and quantum field theories in general are quantizations of classical field theories. I think saying "quantum mechanics" when one talks about something which essentially has…
drorzel | April 22, 2011A few months ago-- just before the paperback release of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog-- Amazon started providing not only their Sales Rank data, but also sales data from Nielsen BookScan. Of course, the BookScan data is very limited, giving you only four weeks, and the Sales Rank data, while available over the full published life of any given book, are presented as a graph only with no way to extract them as a data table. You'd have to be some sort of obsessive nerd to make a quantitative comparison between them.
So, anyway, here's the data I got for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
This…
drorzel | April 15, 2011Regular blogging has been interrupted this week not only because I jetted off to southern MD but because this week was the due date for the manuscript of the book-in-progress. It's now been sent off to my editor, and thus begins my favorite part of the process, the waiting-to-see-what-other-people-think part.
I'm pretty happy with it, though it's a bit longer than it was originally supposed to be. This is no doubt partly due to the fact that I'm too close to the thing at the moment, and can't see the obvious places where I could cut material, but that's why professional editors get the big…
drorzel | April 12, 2011I'm in last-minute-revision mode here, made mroe frantic by the fact that SteelyKid developed a fever yesterday, and had to be kept home from day care. I did want to pop in to note that I will be giving the Natural Science and Mathematics Colloquium at St. Mary's College in Maryland tomorrow, Wednesday the 13th. This will be the "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk, described for the colloquium announcement as:
Quantum physics, the science of extremely small things like atoms and subatomic particles, is one of the best tested theories in the history of science, and also one…
drorzel | April 7, 2011A few weeks ago, I gave a talk based on How to Teach Physics to Your Dog for the University of Toledo's Saturday Morning Science program. At that time, their local PBS affiliate recorded the talk, for use on their very nice streaming video site, Knowledgestream.org. My talk is now up, and the video is hopefully embedded below:
I haven't listened to the entire thing, but I watched the first 10-15 minutes, and it's pretty good. the sound is coming from a microphone on my shirt, so you can't really hear any of the audience reaction (I got some good laughs in appropriate places), and in places…
drorzel | March 18, 2011Just a quick reminder that I'll be giving my "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk (same basic one from Tuesday night) as part of the Saturday Morning Science program (pdf) at the University of Toledo tomorrow, Saturday the 19th. The talk will be at 9:30, with breakfast beforehand. If you're in the vicinity, stop by and hear about some cool physics. My cold is starting to improve slightly, so I should be audible, and I've added at least one Ohio-related joke to the talk, so you don't want to miss that.
In only vaguely related news-- indeed, it's probably only of active…