Returning to our mostly-chronological ordering after yesterday’s brief excursion, we come to one of the great problems of the 1700’s, namely determining the longitude at sea. Latitude is easy to find, based on the height of the Sun at noon– we told that story last week— but longitude is much trickier. Thanks to the rotation… Continue reading Advent Calendar of Science Stories 12: Time Tables
Category: Science Books
The Problem of Science Stories
Last week Kate pointed me to this post about heroic stories of science saying “This seems relevant to your interests.” And, in fact, a good deal of the post talks about Patricia Fara’s Science: A Four Thousand Year History, the Union library’s copy of which is sitting on my desk, where I had looked something… Continue reading The Problem of Science Stories
Advent Calendar of Science Stories 11: Feynman’s Plate
I’ve been trying to keep to a roughly chronological ordering of these stories, but this slow-motion snow storm that was waiting to greet us on our return from Florida made the schools open on a two-hour delay today, which eats the time I usually use for blogging and books stuff. So I’m going to jump… Continue reading Advent Calendar of Science Stories 11: Feynman’s Plate
Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist: Release Day!
Today is the official release date for Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, so of course there are a bunch of exciting things happening: — There’s a short excerpt at the Science of Us blog from New York Magazine. This is a chunk of the Introduction, about how scientists are smart, but not that smart. —… Continue reading Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist: Release Day!
Advent Calendar of Science Stories 9: Newton’s Bodkin
I tooke a bodkine gh & put it betwixt my eye & [the] bone as neare to [the] backside of my eye as I could: & pressing my eye [with the] end of it (soe as to make [the] curvature a, bcdef in my eye) there appeared severall white darke & coloured circles r, s,… Continue reading Advent Calendar of Science Stories 9: Newton’s Bodkin
Eight Things You Need to Know About Science
Copies of Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist have been turning up in the wild for a while now, but the officially official release date is today (available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, IndieBound, Powell’s, and anywhere else books are sold). To mark that, here’s some stuff I wrote about the core message of the book,… Continue reading Eight Things You Need to Know About Science
Eureka: Bridge to Dark Matter
The first time you hear about dark matter, it sounds kind of crazy– asserting that we’re surrounded by tons of invisible stuff is usually a good way to get locked up. But the process of its discovery is surprisingly ordinary: it’s just what you do when you play cards. Here’s the second green-screen video I’ve… Continue reading Eureka: Bridge to Dark Matter
Eureka: Quantum Crosswords
My new book comes out one month from yesterday, or four weeks from tomorrow. Of course, yesterday was Sunday, and tomorrow’s a federal holiday, both lousy times for promotional posts, so I’ll drop this in today instead. Here’s a promotional video I put together, about how the history of quantum mechanics can be compared to… Continue reading Eureka: Quantum Crosswords
The Copernicus Complex by Caleb Scharf
I enjoyed Caleb Scharf’s previous book, Gravity’s Engines a good deal, so I was happy to get email from a publicist offering me his latest. I’m a little afraid that my extreme distraction of late hasn’t really treated it fairly, but then again, the fact that I finished it at all in my current state… Continue reading The Copernicus Complex by Caleb Scharf
Eureka: “Fun, Diverse, and Accessible”
The exciting news of the week: Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist has gotten a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Woo-hoo! They’ve said nice things about my previous two books, but getting the star is a big deal. And it’s a really good capsule description of the book, with a great pull quote in the last… Continue reading Eureka: “Fun, Diverse, and Accessible”