When we got home from visiting Kate’s family yesterday, there was a large shipping envelope from my agent waiting for us. This can mean only one thing: author copies of foreign editions! That’s the Czech edition, Jak nauÄit svého psa fyziku, which seems to have used the same glasses-wearing golden retriever as the Brazilian edition.… Continue reading Dog Physics Around the World, and Beyond
Category: Science Books
What Not to Say to a Pop-Science Author
(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… Continue reading What Not to Say to a Pop-Science Author
Non-Famous Non-Fiction
I 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… Continue reading Non-Famous Non-Fiction
Greatest (Nonscientific) Nonfiction
While I was off at DAMOP last week, the Guardian produced a list purporting to be the 100 greatest non-fiction books of all time. Predictably, this includes a tiny set of science titles– five in the “Science” category, two under “Environment,” and one each under “Mathematics” and “Mind.” And that’s being kind of generous about… Continue reading Greatest (Nonscientific) Nonfiction
The Manga guide to Relativity by Nitta, Yamamoto, and Takatsu
Right 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… Continue reading The Manga guide to Relativity by Nitta, Yamamoto, and Takatsu
Child of Scientist-Approved Beach Reading
While 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… Continue reading Child of Scientist-Approved Beach Reading
One Person’s Golden Age Is Another Person’s Catastrophic Crash
One of the interesting things about reading David Kaiser’s How the Hippies Saved Physics was that it paints a very different picture of physics in the mid-1970’s than what you usually see. Kaiser describes it as a very dark time for young physicists, career-wise. He doesn’t go all that deeply into the facts and figures… Continue reading One Person’s Golden Age Is Another Person’s Catastrophic Crash
How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser
I 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… Continue reading How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser
The Real Point of Zero Point
While 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… Continue reading The Real Point of Zero Point
Why So Many Theorists?
When 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,… Continue reading Why So Many Theorists?