Science Books
drorzel | November 13, 2007The indefatigable Bora Zivkovic is soliciting contributions for the science blogging anthology The Open Laboratory. He's titled the post "Last Call for Submissions," but the actual deadline is December 20th. On or about December 19th, I expect a post title along the lines of "Wolf! Wooooolllllfffff!!! Oh My God, a Wolf!" but that's neither here nor there.
Being a commmitted advocate of Open Science, Bora has posted the full list of submissions to date. Looking it over, my main reaction is "Where's the Physics?" It's not just that this blog isn't nominated, but a general lack of physics posts…
drorzel | October 10, 2007Attention-grabbing anecdote about science-related issue.
Short biographical sketch of quirky researcher working on scientific problem.
Short explanation of the scientific problem's history and significance.
Anecdote about quirky researcher's work on scientific problem.
Short explanation connecting back to initial attention-grabbing anecdote.
Pithy summary of What It All Means.
(Repeat steps 2-4 as needed to fill out word count.)
I got a review copy of The Best American Science Writing 2007 from Seed a little while ago, but I haven't had much time to read lately. I spent six hours on a bus…
drorzel | September 13, 2007James Nicoll has a question about pop science:
Who today fills the niche of science popularizer once filled by people like Ley or Asimov? That is, who writes essays covering a wide range of the sciences, as opposed to covering one in detail for the public?
If you look in the comments, the second plugs Bill Bryson's science book, and you'll find me saying positive things about Natalie Angier's The Canon. (You'll also find me quibbling about Asmiov, but that's a side debate...)
They're not coming up with a whole lot over there, but surely ScienceBlogs readers have some ideas. So, are there…
drorzel | August 7, 2007In case you can't pick up his direction from the subtitle of The Theory of Almost Everything ("The Standard Model, the Unsung Triumph of Modern Physics"), Robert Oerter lays it all out for you in the second paragraph of the Introduction:
the Standard Model has a surprisingly low profile for such a fundamental and successful theory. It has deeper implications for the nature of teh universe than chaos theory, and unlike string theory, which is purely speculative in nature, it has a strong experimental basis-- but it is not as widely known as either. In physics news itesm, the Standard Model…
drorzel | July 25, 2007Some time back, I was offered a review copy of Why the Sky Is Blue by Götz Hoeppe by Princeton University Press. Looking at their web site, I noticed a forthcoming book by an emeritus professor at my alma mater, so I asked if they'd send me a copy of that, too. I'm all about the free books.
The Grand Contraption is an excellent example of what I call a Smart People Book, in which the author pulls together a wide range of material to take an exhaustive look at some topic or another, and basically show what a smart person he or she is. This particular book is subtitled "The World as Myth,…
drorzel | July 16, 2007The Powers That Be at Seed were kind enough to send all the ScienceBlogs bloggers copies of the new book by Natalie Angier, The Canon, which is being pushed fairly hard by the publisher. I've been reading a lot more pop-science stuff recently, for self-interested reasons, and this was pretty attractive, so I carried it around for a while, reading bits and pieces in restaurants while Kate was away, and eventually finished it during our Michigan vacation.
The book is subtitled "A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science," and Angier has set herself a large task: to present the…
drorzel | July 5, 2007Looking back at the archives, I see that I never did get around to blogging about Jennifer Ouellette's Black Bodies and Quantum Cats, which I finished back in May. This is a particularly shameful oversight, as she visited campus in late May, and gave two excellent talks for us, so the least I can do is to post a measly book review.
Jennifer Ouellette (pronounced "Woah-lette," more or less, in case you were wondering) should be no stranger to regular readers of this blog, as I fairly regularly link to her blog, Cocktail Party Physics. If you're not reading it, you ought to be. And if you are…
drorzel | June 28, 2007George Gamow was a Russian-born physicist who is known for, in roughly equal proportions, his work on nuclear physics, his popular-audience books, and his really weird sense of humor. He famously added Hans Bethe's name to a paper he wrote with his student, Ralph Alpher, just so the author list would be "Alpher, Bethe, Gamow," a pun on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet. When Robert Herman did some later extensions of the model, Gamow supposedly tried to get him to change his name to "Delta," to no avail.
This book is a collection of two of Gamow's pop-physics books, Mr. Tompkins…
drorzel | June 19, 2007One of my colleagues raves about David Lindley's Where Does the Weirdness Go? as a basic introduction to odd quantum effects, but somehow, I've never managed to get around to reading any of his books until now. I recently had a need to know a bit more about the historical development of quantum theory, though, and ran across Lindley's Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the Struggle for the Soul of Science in the library, which promised to contain the information I was after, so I checked it out.
As you can guess from the title, the book deals with the early development of quantum…
drorzel | May 30, 2007Why the Sky Is Blue, by Götz Hoeppe is subtitled "Discovering the Color of Life," so I was a little puzzled when Princeton University Press asked me if I wanted a review copy. But, hey, free books!
This is ultimately a physics book, but it's really in the category that I think of as "Smart People Books," those books that take an exhaustive look at some phenomenon from a wide range of different perspectives. In this case, it's a survey of several thousand years of thought about the blue color of the sky.
This is an extremely comprehensive look, and I'd be surprised if there's any historical…
drorzel | January 8, 2007Paul Davies's forthcoming book Cosmic Jackpot is subtitled "Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life," so you know that he's not going after small questions, here. The book is a lengthy and detailed discussion of what he terms the "Goldilocks Enigma," and what others refer to as "fine-tuning"-- basically, how do you account for the fact that the universe allows us to exist? A small change in the values of any of the constants of nature would very likely make it impossible for life as we know it to exist. And yet, here we are-- so how did that happen?
Though this book won't be released for a…
drorzel | October 10, 2006Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics is probably the hot physics book of the year. Granted, that's not saying very much, relative to whatever Oprah's reading this week, but it's led to no end of discussion among physics types. And also, frequently, the spectacle of people with Ph.D.'s squabbling like children, so reviewing it is a subject that I approach with some trepidation.
I'm coming to this late enough that it's hard to talk about the book without also talking about the various responses to the book. I'll do my best to split that material off into a separate post (if I post it at all),…
drorzel | September 12, 2006The two most talked-about books in physics this year are probably a pair of anti-sting-theory books, Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics, and Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong, which shares a name with Jacques Distler's favorite weblog. I got review copies of both, but Not Even Wrong arrived first (thanks, Peter), and gets to be the first one reviewed.
Of course, I'm coming to the game kind of late, as lots of other high-profile physics bloggers have already posted their reviews, and various magazine reviews have been out for months. Peter has collected a bunch of links in various posts. I don't…
drorzel | August 9, 2006Like The Pontiff, I am always happy to receive an email from a publicist offering me a free book to review. In this case, the book was Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, of UC Santa Cruz.
I have to admit, the title made me a little uneasy. There have been a great many very stupid things written about quantum mechanics and consciousness over the years, after all. It's published by Oxford University Press, though, so I figured they can't be total cranks, and hey, free book!
I'm happy to report that this book does not add to the tally of stupid…