Physics Books
drorzel | November 24, 2009The official release date for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is exactly four weeks from today. So here's a dramatic reading of Chapter 3 to mark the occasion:
I've put this up before, but I edited it to remove the URL, which was apparently a deal-breaker for booksellers. And yes, I will post about something other than the book, Real Soon Now...
drorzel | November 23, 2009The pictures I posted last night aren't really the greatest for seeing the cover of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, so here's a shot of the book jacket spread out on my desk:
This isn't the greatest, either, but it does give you a sense of the key features of the jacket design, which I like a lot:
First of all, there's the quizzical looking black dog on the cover. I've known about this image for a while, but I really like the dog's expression. I wish I could reliably get Emmy to do that and get a picture of it.
The second element, and the first new to me, is the yellow spine with the…
drorzel | November 22, 2009Look! How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is a real book:
Emmy says, very seriously, "You will buy a copy, won't you?"
Of course, like everything else in this house, SteelyKid had to grab a copy:
She whipped through to the last page pretty fast:
Emmy says "What'd you think, human puppy?"
SteelyKid says "If I knew how to read, Daddy's book would be my favorite book ever. People who can read should definitely buy it."
You heard the kid and the dog...
drorzel | November 19, 2009It's not often that I regret having a cell phone that is just a phone, but this is one of those occasions-- I stopped by my publisher today to talk about marketing and publicity, and record a video for the web, and got a stack of finished copies of the book, hot off the presses. If I had a cell phone camera, I'd post a picture, but I don't, so you'll have to settle for a plain-text "Woo-hoo!"
On an only vaguely related note, our cultural activities in NYC will include some college hoops, as there's a preseason "tournament" taking place at Madison Square garden tonight. Syracuse vs. Cal, and…
drorzel | October 6, 2009We're six days into the DonorsChoose challenge, and at the time of this writing, ten people have contributed just over $1,700 to the Uncertain Principles challenge entry. That's an impressive average, and I thank you all for your generosity.
I also offered a number of incentives, and Lauren Uroff is claiming one:
I'd like to take you up on your offer to answer questions. The first question I'd like help with is telling me how to tell my teenager about wave-particle duality, the classic experiments that show light is both a particle and a wave, and why he should care.
As It happens, I have…
drorzel | October 5, 2009In this week's issue of Publishers Weekly there's a short review (scroll down) of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog (which will be released December 22):
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Chad Orzel. Scribner, $24 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4165-7228-2
What do dog treats and chasing squirrels have to do with quantum mechanics? Much more than you might imagine, as Orzel explains in this fun introduction to modern physics based on a "series of conversations" with his dog Emmy. Dogs make the perfect sounding board for physics talk, because they "approach the world with fewer preconceptions than humans, and…
drorzel | September 27, 2009There has been a fair amount of discussion of Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom-- Peter Woit reviewed it on his blog, the New York Times reviewed it a couple of Sundays ago, Barnes and Noble's online review did a piece on it, etc.. Nearly all of the press has been positive, and while it's taken me a while to work my way through the book, that's entirely a function of having a day job and a baby. The book itself is excellent, and kept me reading alter than I should've several times, which is not something I can say about a lot of biographies…
drorzel | September 24, 2009One of the photo caption contest winners, Nick O'Neill, has finished his galley proof, and posted an early review of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
Casual physics intro books are quite possibly the hardest subgenre of physics books to write. Textbooks and further upper-level reading have expectations both of what you already know and how quickly you should pick up new material. Generally, those who pour through these types of books will read and reread until they've figured things out, regardless of how well the text actually explains things. Casual intro books, on the other hand, exist…
drorzel | August 14, 2009A cosmologist, a science writer, three best-selling science fiction authors, a best-selling mystery novelist, and a Nobel laureate walk into a bar--
Oh, wait, that's not the opening to a joke. That's the list of people who have provided blurbs for my book... Kind of an eclectic bunch, but I'm pretty psyched. I'm not quite sure why the final list of blurbs gets locked in this early-- we don't even have the cover copy written yet-- but it's set now, and they look pretty good:
"Chad Orzel teases out the mysterious and seemingly incomprehensible side of advanced physics and makes it…
drorzel | June 22, 2009
There once was a dog from Niskayuna...
The previous post announced a photo caption contest for a chance to win an advance proof copy of my book, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, six(-ish) months before it's available for purchase. I thought I should include something for the less visually inclined, though, and I do have two extra galley proofs, so...
Announcing the Official How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Poetry contest. The idea is simple: write a short poem involving both dogs and physics in one of the usual short verse forms (haiku, limerick, double dactyl, whatever, as long as it has…
drorzel | June 22, 2009
Today is six months to the day from the official release date of my book, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. It feels like I ought to do something promotion-like to mark this date, and I have a couple of extra bound galley proofs (seen above with Emmy), sooo.....
I hereby announce the first of two contests giving you, the blog reader, a chance to win an uncorrected galley proof copy of the book six months (ish) before you can buy it. The idea is simple: below the fold are two pictures that just cry out for amusing captions of some sort. The person who comes up with the best caption will get…
drorzel | June 19, 2009Tom Levenson's series about the writing of his Newton and the Counterfeiter continues with a piece on the getting of blurbs for the cover:
Newton and the Counterfeiter (Amazon, Powells, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound) is by far my best-blurbed book, boasting enthusiastic and generous praise from a very diverse crew of luminaries — (David Bodanis, Junot DÃaz, Timothy Ferris, Brian Greene, Walter Isaacson, Sylvia Nasar, and Neal Stephenson).
This follows, as I wrote last time, a much sparser field of those who promoted my three previous books. How — and why — did I go for this level of long-…
drorzel | June 17, 2009Over at Tor.com, they've unveiled the new Tor.com store, enabling you to buy your books via your favorite SF publisher. It's pretty bare-bones at the moment, so the most worthwhile feature is probably the special picks feature, where they collect together lists of books recommended by their most popular bloggers. Such as, for example, Kate's Lord of the Rings related recommendation list.
In a similar vein, something I only noticed today (via an ad on my own blog) that may have been around for a while is the Seed store, collecting all the books reviewed by the Corporate Masters over the past…
drorzel | June 12, 2009Tom Levenson has another post up in his ongoing series about the writing and publishing process of his new book, this one about generating publicity. At this point, he's gone past what I've experienced so far, but this is fortuitously timed, as I got a note from my editor yesterday saying that the bound galleys are in. Woo-hoo!
There will be pictures and so on when I get my copies (probably next week). This seems kind of early-- the book itself won't be out for another six months-- but I assume that the folks at Scribner know what they're doing. Anyway, I eagerly await Tom's next installment…
drorzel | June 10, 2009OK, it's not really a full post-mortem, because I haven't graded the final exams yet, but I wouldn't tell you about those, anyway. Still, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past term, which was my first teaching introductory mechanics on the Matter & Interactions curriculum.
On the whole, I continue to like the approach. I like the way that the book focuses on the major physical principles-- the Momentum Principle, the Energy Principle, the Angular Momentum Principle-- because those are the real take-away message from introductory physics. I also thing it's good that the class…
drorzel | June 4, 2009When this first came out, I didn't pick it up, despite a glowing recommendation from Jennifer Ouellette, because NASCAR is one of the few things on ESPN that interests me less than baseball. I didn't really think I'd be interested in reading a whole book on the subject.
I saw Jennifer and Diandra on Bloggingheads a little while back, and she made it sound pretty interesting. And then I saw that she was giving a public lecture at DAMOP, and figured it would be good for airplane reading on the way down and back.
The Preface gives a nice description of how she came to write the book:…
drorzel | May 21, 2009Thursday at DAMOP was a little more broken up than usual for me at one of these meetings, because the nagging cold I have was bugging me more, and also because I needed to check my email a few times. There was still some neat stuff, though.
The early-morning session was the toughest call of the meeting: there was the undergraduate research session, a session on ultracold Rydberg atoms, and a session on complicated states in BEC, in widely spaced locations. I ended up skipping the undergraduate session in favor of hearing Chris Foot talk about a rotating optical lattice (which simulates some…
drorzel | May 8, 2009It's a nice demonstration of the oddity of the blogosphere that a libertarian political blog has become my go-to-source for thoughtful blogging about physics education. Thoreau had two good posts yesterday at Unqualified Offerings, one on the problems created by breaking down incorrect intuition, and another on the lack of calculus in calculus-based physics texts:
The ostensibly calculus-based introductory physics book by Knight is not really a calculus-based book. Sure, integrals and derivatives pop up here and there, but the vast majority of the problems can be solved without them, and…
drorzel | April 23, 2009I'm speaking, of course, about this past weekend's Bloggingheads conversation between Jennifer Ouellette and Diandra Leslie-Pelecky. They both blog at Cocktail Party Physics, and Diandra has written The Physics of NASCAR.
It's a good Bloggingheads, covering a wide range of topics related to physics, sports, and entertainment. Jennifer talks about the work of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, Diandra talks about how NASCAR people know more about physics than you might think, and they both have worthwhile comments about the diificult job of explaining complicated technical subjects in…
drorzel | April 2, 2009Physics World this month has a nice article by Robert Crease on the strategies used in popular physics books, drawing on a study of popular books by Elizabeth Leane (Reading Popular Physics, much of which is available via Google Books). He talks about three different strategies that she identifies, and how they're employed in different fields. I was particularly amused by this:
Explaining quantum theory, for instance, seems both to require and to shipwreck metaphors — for what is “down there” just does not behave like what is “up here”. A common tool is to anthropomorphize, personifying…