Physics Books
drorzel | January 31, 2010The Firedoglake Book Salon with Sean Carroll last night was a lot of fun. I was generally impressed with the level of the questions, and the tone of the discussion. We went through all of the questions I had typed out in advance (I type fairly slowly, and revise obsessively, so it's hard for me to do this stuff in real time), and got a decent range of questions from the audience.
The introductory post I wrote for the salon is more or less what I would put in a review post here:
ean Carroll's From Eternity to Here sets out to explain the nature of time, particularly what's known as the "arrow…
drorzel | January 30, 2010A few bits and pieces of news regarding How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
We got and accepted an offer for the audio book rights from one of the biggest audio book publishers. Actually, I think there were two offers for the audio rights, which is amazing. I have no idea when it would be produced or who would read it, but the contract does say they'll consult with me about the reader, so I'll know at some point before it comes out...
Speaking of other editions, I'm getting emails from my publisher about the paperback edition already, which just seems weird. The hardcover's only been out for a…
drorzel | January 29, 2010Hard to believe it's been a couple of days since I posted anything with this title... Anyway, there are a couple of small updates:
The vanity search turned up this mention on ScienceBase, in with a bunch of other recent science books that sound pretty good.
The Union student paper, the Concordiensis, has a story about the book. I exchanged emails with the author, so it has a couple of new quotes that haven't been in other papers.
Once again, if you're in New York's capital district tomorrow, I'm doing a signing at the Book House at 2pm. If you're not in the Albany area, I'll be the host for…
drorzel | January 28, 2010Last week's Seven Essential Elements of Quantum Physics post sparked a fair bit of discussion, though most of it was at the expert level, well above the level of the intended audience. such is life in the physics blogosphere.
I think it's worth a little time to unpack some of the disagreement, though, as it sheds a little light on the process of writing this sort of thing for a general audience, and the eternal conflict between broad explanation and "dumbing down." And, if nothing else, it lets me put off grading the exams from last night for a little while longer.
So, what's the issue? The…
drorzel | January 28, 2010I've toyed around in the past with ways to use the Amazon sales rank tracker to estimate the sales numbers for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. It's geeky fun, but not especially quantitative.
Yesterday, though, I found a reason to re-visit the topic: calibration data!
OK, "calibration data" is probably too strong a description. "Calibration anecdote" is more accurate.
Yesterday when I went into work a little after 10, a comment somebody made sent me to the actual Amazon page for the book, where I saw a little note next to the price information saying "Only 5 left (more are coming)-- order…
drorzel | January 27, 2010Two upcoming events related to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
This Saturday, January 30, I will be doing a signing at 2pm at the book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, on Western Ave. in Albany. I may or may not read something-- I'm not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do as part of this, never having done a book signing before.
Next Thursday, February 4th, I'll be giving a talk sponsored by the Maryland Chapter of SPIE at 3:30 pm in the Lecture Hall (room 1110) in the Kim Engineering Building. The title of the talk is "Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science…
drorzel | January 27, 2010Via SFSignal's daily links dump, Lilith Saintcrow has a terrific post about the relationship between authors and editors:
YOUR EDITOR IS NOT THE ENEMY.
I don't lose sight of the fact that I am the content creator. For the characters, I know what's best. It's my job to tell the damn story and produce enough raw material that we can trim it into reasonable shape. (Which means I am responsible for my deadlines, but we knew that.) I'm also way too close to the work to be able to see it objectively. So, 99% of the time, the editor is right.
Read it. It's good, and very true.
"Yeah, but that's…
drorzel | January 26, 2010A few days back, Matthew Beckler added the Kindle edition to his sales rank tracker for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Given my well-known love for playing with graphs of data, it was inevitable that I would plot both of these in a variety of ways.
So, what do we learn from this? Well, we learn that people in the Albany. NY area don't own Kindles:
OK, maybe that's not obvious to everybody...
When you look at that graph, the blue line is the Amazon sales rank of the physical book edition, while the red line is the Amazon sales rank of the Kindle edition. The two track each other pretty…
drorzel | January 25, 2010The great thing about using Google to vanity search for articles about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, or at least one of the great things about it, is that it's world-wide. Thus, this Dutch roundup of new books, which includes mine. This is what they have to say:
Een erg geestig boek is 'How to Teach Physics to Your Dog'. Chad Orzel gebruikt scenarios uit de echte wereld om kwantummechanica uit te leggen. Dit doet hij dankzij conversaties met zijn hond Emmy. De leuke gesprekken zorgen er voor dat veel vragen worden opgelost over kwantummechanica. Het boek is niet voor de absolute beginner…
drorzel | January 25, 2010As mentioned previously, I've been reading Sean Carroll's Wheel arrow of time book, which necessarily includes a good bit of discussion of "Maxwell's Demon," a thought experiment famously proposed by James Clerk Maxwell as something that would allow you to cool a gas without obviously increasing entropy. The "demon" mans a trapdoor between a sample of gas and an initially empty space, and allows only slow-moving gas atoms to pass through. After some time, the empty volume is filled with a gas at lower temperature than the initial sample, while the gas in the original volume is hotter than…
drorzel | January 24, 2010A few weeks back, I spoke on the phone with a freelance writer who was doing a piece for the Albany Times Union. She was putting together a joint article on How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and the Atomville book put together by Jill Linz and Cindy Schwarz (at Skidmore and Vassar, respectively). The piece was published today: "Physics without limits: Area writers explain quantum mechanics to adults, kids."
Unfortunately, the Times Union has a policy of reserving some stories for the print edition, and so there's no way to link to it. So, unless you have a way to get your hands on a paper…
drorzel | January 24, 2010I'm currently a bit less than halfway through Sean Carroll's From Eternity to Here, which has leaped to the top of the literary inbox because I'll be hosting a Book Salon at firedoglake next Saturday evening. If you want to see how my limited typing skills work in a live chat setting, be sure to stop by. (I plan to type out a bunch of questions in advance, and then cut-and-paste them as needed.)
A little while back, somebody on Twitter referred to this as "Sean's arrow of time fetish book," which is a little unkind, but also funny and memorable. Sort of. My subconscious, trained by spending…
drorzel | January 23, 2010Having seen other authors led into destruction by responding to customer reviews on Amazon, I tend to approach the customer reviews of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog with some trepidation.
It turns out, though, that they're really good. And I don't mean that in a Harriet Kalunser kind of way-- the positive reviews are thoughtful and positive, and the negative comments that have been made are for the most part legitimate criticisms of the book. And then there's this one:
My 11 year old son is nuts about physics, so I got this book to see how it would go over with him. It did, perfectly. The…
drorzel | January 22, 2010We're once again in the "things are in the pipeline, but nothing has been posted recently" mode, which is a good excuse for some Amazon neepery.
Since the AP review came out, and was printed in 20-odd papers, the sales rank has climbed back into the four digits, and has spent the last few days hovering around 2,000. This is pretty respectable, and Amazon proudly touts it as being "#1 in Books > Science > Physics > Quantum Theory," which sounds nice.
Of course, what does that really mean?
If you click through to the "Quantum Theory" subcategory, you'll see that it's a weird…
drorzel | January 20, 2010The college bookstore has set up a display table right at the front of the store with a bunch of copies of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, which is kind of a kick. Some of my students asked me about it in lab yesterday.
The big news, though, is that the Associated Press review ran Monday. I've known they were working on one for a while, now, but didn't see it before it went live. It's not a great review-- it ends "For people who are smarter than the average mixed-breed dog, this might be a good way to learn about the nature of microscopic particles. But I'm waiting for Orzel to write…
drorzel | January 17, 2010Of special interest to Ohio-type readers: I'm scheduled to do an interview tomorrow, Monday the 18th with Jim Scott of WLW AM in Cincinnati. I'm scheduled to call in at 9:50 am, which looks like it's after the regular show hours, and thus probably a taped interview. It says LIVE in the schedule I was sent by my publicist, though, so I'm not quite sure.
Anyway, if you're in the right area to pick this up, you might want to tune in to hear what I sound like on the radio. It looks like they have interviews archived on the web site, so I'll be spending a little time tonight listening to a few,…
drorzel | January 17, 2010The Barnes and Noble store finder finally indicated the presence of copies in the local stores yesterday, so we made a trip down to the Colonie Center, where they had a half-dozen face out in the Physics section, and probably 15-20 on the new releases table. Woo-hoo!
(Now I can shift to fretting that they've got too many in the local stores, and will end up returning most of them...)
Anyway, if you're in the Albany area, and want a copy, they have them in Barnes and Noble now.
Miscellaneous other items:
A nice plug from Derek Lowe
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog catches the eye of another…
drorzel | January 17, 2010A couple of nifty bits of news from the British Commonwealth:
The BBC's Magazine Monitor blog noted my Seed article.
Better yet, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog makes Smriti Daniel's list of "the best books to emerge in 2009" in the Sunday Times of Sri Lanka. The other books on the list: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple, Drood by Dan Simmons, and Unseen Academicals by some guy named Pratchett. That's pretty awesome company to be in...
So…
drorzel | January 14, 2010Even when I'm on the road, I continue to be obsessed...
A nice review at Lean Left that really gets Emmy's role in the book:
The dog asks clear questions and Orzel uses those interjections well. They very often serve as a way to clarify, or to bring up questions that the readers probably has, or to deal with obvious tangents. It is a very effective tactic and it serves to lighten the prose at strategic times in the discussion. The dog' voice is skeptical, wise, incredulous and smug (and bloodthirsty. Much of the time, the dog is attempting to use physics to hunt down and, one presumes,…
drorzel | January 13, 2010Miscellaneous book-related items for you to read while I spend most of the day in transit to Austin:
While I have yet to see a copy in a Barnes and Noble store locally, it's selling well enough in the national chain for them to have ordered more copies. Yay!
Relatedly, the publisher has just ordered a second printing, woo-hoo! I'm not sure what the total number of copies on paper is, but if they've asked for more, that's definitely a good sign.
I have a couple of radio interviews scheduled for next week, which ought to be an adventure. I'm taping an interview with Jim Scott of WLW in…