Science Books
drorzel | November 11, 2008Sometime commenter "Dr. Pain" asked, on a mailing list, for book recommendations for his son, who "wants to read up about physics, especially weird modern physics." He adds some qualifications:
Kid's books on physics are way too elementary for him, but the typical "naive adult" book is over his head. Does anyone have any good recommendations for something that would be an interesting introduction to physics at a young teen level?
I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I don't know anything to recommend for this. Partly because it's been so long since I was in middle school, and partly…
drorzel | October 22, 2008Another question from a generous donor, in this case Natalie, who asks:
As for my question, how about "who is your favorite author, and why?" or, if you'd rather, "what's your favorite book, and why?"
This is a difficult question, because it's subject to a sort of quantum projection noise. That is, my "favorite book" and "favorite author" exist in a sort of quantum superposition of all the various possibilities. When someone asks, I can give an answer and either the wavefunction collapses to that value at that instant, or the universe splits into many parallel universes, each with its own…
drorzel | October 21, 2008Chris Mooney will be visiting Union tomorrow (I'm picking him up at the airport in a couple of hours). He'll be speaking to a couple of classes and then giving a presentation about science and politics in the evening.
If you have any questions that you've been dying to ask Chris, and haven't been able to get him to address on his blog, leave them in the comments. If they're reasonable, I'll see if I can get answers during one or another of tomorrow's events.
drorzel | October 5, 2008The best way-- really, the only way-- to sum up David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Brief History of ∞ is by quoting a bit from it. This comes from the middle part of the book, after a discussion of Fourier series, in one of the "If You're Interested" digressions from the main discussion:
(IYI There was a similar problem involving Fourier Integrals about which all we have to know is that they're special kinds of 'closed-form' solutions to partial differential equations which, again, Fourier claims work for any arbitrary functions and which do indeed seem to-- work, that is-- being…
drorzel | October 5, 2008Jennifer Ouellette's pop-science book project post and the discussionaround it reminded me that I'm really shockingly ill-read in this area. If I'm going to be writing pop-science books, I ought to have read more of them, so I've been trying to correct that.
Hence, Longitude, which I actually read a few weeks ago at the Science21 meeting, but am just getting around to blogging. Longitude is Dava Sobel's bestselling book about English clockmaker John Harrison and his forty-year sturggle to win 20,000 pounds for making a clock capable of keeping time at sea well enough to allow navigation.
This…
drorzel | September 8, 2008I gave my talk this morning at the Science in the 21st Century conference. Video will eventually be available at the Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive site, but if you'd like to get a sense of the talk, a few people were live-blogging it in the FriendFeed room for the meeting. You get a pretty accurate impression of the talk from the comments there.
I think it went well. People laughed in the right places, and there was some really good discussion in the question period. I look forward to seeing what it looks like on video. They have a really nice AV set-up here, with two cameras…
drorzel | August 27, 2008Jennifer Ouellette was inspired by the recent book "meme," and is putting together a similar list of pop-science books.
It might surprise some people, but I haven't been a big reader of pop-science books over the years. In fact, I've read few enough of the books on her list that I'm only going to copy over the ones that I have (partially) read. Bold means I finished it, italics are books I've started or skimmed, and books I intend to read someday are marked with an asterisk.
4. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman
11. *The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene
14. *Where Does the…
drorzel | August 22, 2008Every time I mention the idea of teaching physics to a wider audience than just physics majors, somebody brings up Richard Muller's course, "Physics for Future Presidents," at Berkeley. So, I was pleased to find out that he has turned the course into a book, also titled Physics for Future Presidents, with the subtitle "The Science Behind the Headlines." I was going to try to cadge a free copy from his publisher, but our default local Borders is closing, and they were offering deep discounts on all their stock, so I just bought a copy.
The book is framed as a sort of memo to somebody who will…
drorzel | July 27, 2008Richard Reeves is probably best known for writing biographies of American Presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan), so it's a little strange to see him turn his hand to scientific biography. This is part of Norton's "Great Discoveries" series (which inexplicably lacks a web page-- get with the 21st century, already), though, so incongruous author-subject pairing is part of the point.
Some time back, there was a "meme" that went through the science side of blogdom asking people to post about their favorite historical scientist. I didn't contribute, mostly because I didn't really have a favorite…
drorzel | July 27, 2008Having admitted that I know noting about fine art, here's an opportunity to prove it...
A week or so ago, I was in the Schenectady library looking for something else, and noticed a book called Categories: On the Beauty of Physics, which is packaged in such a way as to make it difficult to attribute, but appears to be the work of Emiliano Sefusatti, John Morse, and Hilary Thayer Hamann, a science writer, artist, and art expert, respectively. It's subtitled "Essential Physics Concepts and their Companions in Art & Literature," which sounded very Clifford Johnson, so I figured I'd give it a…
drorzel | July 7, 2008John Allen Paulos's Innumeracy is one of those classics of the field that I've never gotten around to reading. I've been thinking more about these sorts of issues recently, though, so when the copy I bought a few years ago turned up in our recent book-shuffling, I decided to give it a read.
Unfortunately, I probably would've been a lot more impressed had I read it when it first came out in 1988. Most of the examples used to illustrate his point that people are generally very bad with numbers are exceedingly familiar. They appear in How to Lie With Statistics, and the recent The Drunkard's…
drorzel | June 27, 2008Over at Science After Sunclipse, Blake has a very long post about the limitations of science blogs. Brian at Laelaps responds, and Tom at Swans On Tea agrees.
You might be wondering whether I have an opinion on this. Since I'm going to be talking about it at a workshop in September (first talk, no less...), I better have some opinions..
The original post is very long, but can probably best be summarized by the following paragraph:
My thesis is that it's not yet possible to get a science education from reading science blogs, and a major reason for this is because bloggers don't have the…
drorzel | June 24, 2008I'm deep in book revisions at the moment, which largely accounts for the relative blog silence. This is expected to continue for a while yet, broken by the occasional post when something comes up that is irritating enough to push me to write about it. Such as, well, now.
In the chapter on the Copenhagen Interpretation, I spend some time laying out the basic principles of quantum mechanics, and mention the Schrödinger equation. I noted in passing that the name is taken from "the Austrian physicist and noted cad Erwin Schrödinger." Kate questioned whether this was really appropriate, but I left…
drorzel | June 3, 2008The World Science Festival happened while I was at DAMOP (I missed getting to talk to Bill Phillips, because he left shortly after his talk to go to NYC), and by all reports it was a success-- they claim 120,000 attendees on their web site, and sold more tickets than expected for several events, and favorably impressed journalists. Good news, all.
Of course, at the same time on the opposite coast, the annual Book Expo America was going on, and as Jennifer Ouellete reports, science was shut out:
Every conceivable genre was prominently represented -- sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, romance, foreign…
drorzel | May 29, 2008If you're reading this shortly after it's posted, you may notice ads for this book popping up in the sidebar and on top of the page. This is probably not entirely a happy coincidence-- I was offered a review copy in email from the author and his publisher, and I suspect that they had ScienceBlogs on their radar as a likely forum for web publicity.
With a title like The Drunkard's Walk, the book could be about one of two things, and the subtitle "How Randomness Rules Our Lives" pretty much rules out any Hunter S. Thompson style gonzo ranting. This is a book about probability and statistics,…
drorzel | May 10, 2008Via Swans On Tea, I see that Comedy Central has put up the video of George Johnson's appearance on the Colbert Report. Or, I should say, they claim to have put it up-- their video player didn't work worth a damn on my computer.
I saw this on the day-late rerun, and it was hilarious. Not because Johnson is at all witty or amusing-- he's not. But toward the end it turns into an xkcd comic, and achieves a sort of accidental brilliance.
Check it out, if you can get it to play.
drorzel | April 1, 2008I'm a Bad Blogger.
I got a free review copy of this book last summer, and it's taken me nine months to getting around to reviewing it. I started it as soon as I got it, but it seemd like it would be tempting fate to take it to St. John on vacation, and then I couldn't really justify lugging a hardcover to Japan on vacation, and then I was busy writing my own book, and so on-- I had good reasons for every postponement, I did, but the end result was an unconscionable delay. But, hey, I'm still getting this out ahead of the paperback edition...
This is the follow-up to The Republican War on…
drorzel | December 2, 2007I don't really want to turn this blog completely over to bitching about the poor representation of science in "Year's Best" lists of books, but it's that time of year when every media outlet puts out their lists of favorite books, so it's hard not to talk about it. Today's list is from the Washington Post's Holiday Guide, where they helpfully break their non-fiction list down into categories. By my count, there were 94 non-fiction books listed, divided among 11 categories:
Arts: 7
Biographies: 17
Culture and Society: 9
Current Events: 8
Foreign Affairs: 9
History: 23
Literature: 2
Memoirs: 9…
drorzel | November 29, 2007In comments to my earlier cranky post about the New York Times, Carl Zimmer pointed out that they hadn't released their "Ten Best Books" list, so there was still an outside chance of a science book turning up. They posted the list today, and there's nothing on it that wasn't also on the Notable Books list, so no dice.
Another common response to my complaint was along the lines of "Do they ever list science books?" I was looking for a way to kill a little time at one point yesterday, so I went back through the last few lists and counted science books. The tallies for 2003-2006 (using a fairly…
drorzel | November 27, 2007Scott Eric Kaufman draws my attention to the fact that the New York Times has posted its Notable Books for 2007 list. The list is divided into "Fiction & Poetry" and "Non-Fiction," and Scott correctly notes that the "Fiction & Poetry" books all have terrible blurbs, but I'd like to point out a much larger problem with the list, relating to the "Non-Fiction" category:
There is not a single science book on the list of "Notable Books" for the year.
There are books on history, books on politics, personal memoirs, collections of critical essays, but nothing about science. There are…