Redshifted In Memphis: Thread for a discussion of books about science or its history aimed at a general audience but not playing to the crowd

Promising: Einstein's Clock's, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, by Peter Galison.

Overview of various books about Einstein two years after the centenary of the annus mirabilis, written by Lee Smolin and interesting in its own right. Be sure to read the Exchange of Letters as well. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/jun/14/the-other-einstein/

Breizman and van Dam eds., G. I. Budker: Reflections And Remembrances. Budker was the leading Soviet accelerator physicist from 1946 to 1977, and this is a volume of remembrances of him by friends and disciples in the now-familiar heartfelt Russian style. Migdal's sketch is called "A Divinely Favored Physicist."

One day we were discussing a very difficult and intricate question, which required our complete attention. With his hyperactivity, (Budker) made it altogether impossible for us to concentrate on the question. After several "final" warnings, I just pushed him out and closed the door. Even then, however, he did not calm down, but shouted through the door, "Make the substitution 1/x!" ...I held my head in my hands and groaned, "My God, what am I to do?"

Eventually they gave Budker his own institute in Novosibirsk, over doubts that such a random number could run anything. Budker was similar to Fermi in that he could take a theoretical idea and push it all the way through to apparatus that worked. Landau gave him a typically backhanded compliment, "relativistic engineer," which Budker loved. These essays were written in 1987, and only one alludes to the political harassment Budker faced during the 1970s which led to his fatal heart attack at age 59.

Budker: Tell me, please, Kadya, do I know physics?
Migdal: Yes, you do.
Budker: But if I read nothing and nevertheless know physics, therefore I must be a genius.
Migdal: (after some deliberation) No, Andrei, you just know physics by hearsay.

Forbes and Mahon, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field. This book is balanced between the history of something inanimate, electromagnetism, and the two eponymous lives. The separate parts don't completely fuse, although the exposition is good. Faraday started out as a chemist, and Maxwell did profound work on statistical mechanics and like Budker was a theorist who managed a lab. A unified book would suppress much of that, and not dwell on their early lives. Toward the end, a third biography emerges, that of the maverick Heaviside. (Mahon has also written a biography of Heaviside.) Enjoyable as a collection of interesting topics arranged in a episodic narrative. I'd planned to read Mahon's other book on Maxwell but he may have stolen his own thunder.

No jokes of any kind are understood here.

Polkinghorne, From Physicist to Priest. As the title suggests, this is a book of two halves(, Brian). The first 70 pages are devoted to his early life and physics career, and the remaining 100 to his life after becoming a priest. Theology is now the center of his life, so one can't honestly protest that there isn't enough physics in his autobiography.

We are not allowed to stick swords into people, though in the Middle Ages the clergy were permitted to hit people on the head with a heavy mace, provided they did not draw blood.

Polkinghorne has also written a huge number of books about religion and science, none of which I've read. I have read Rochester Roundabout. It conveyed the excitement and confusion of the Rochester meetings and contained some vivid portraits. On Schwinger lecturing:

Schwinger, quiet in ordinary conversation, becomes like a man possessed on the platform. It seems to be the spirit of Macaulay which takes over, for he speaks in splendid periods, the carefully architected sentences rolling on, with every subordinate clause duly closing.

Elsewhere, Polkinghorne had some rather English ironic praise for the charismatic Geoffrey Chew, whose anti-field-theory program in the late 1950s and 1960s influenced a lot of researchers (including Polkinghorne), maybe not for the best. One doesn't find such things here. Polkinghorne has had a good life and is clearly at peace with himself and the world. It's an enviable condition, and the book has a mellow serenity. I prefer Rochester Roundabout, though.

That's a great article. I've read Isaacson's biography, which is really good. I want to read the Pais, but need to brush up on my tensor calculus first... Also very good is Einstein and the Quantum by Stone, which makes up for an imbalance in Isaacson.

Toward the end, a third biography emerges, that of the maverick Heaviside

Speaking of Polkinghorne, have you read The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, by Graham Farmelo?

Pais book is great for first hand quotes -in German! - from AE, but yeah feel like I should learn some of the math and physics better from some other sources first.

Have both the Isaacson and the Neffe bios. The latter is more snappily written, even if at times venturing into speculation and sensation, so reading that first.

Pais also wrote a book about Bohr as well as one with short bios of about a dozen scientists. As of today know a lot more about tensors than I used to. Maybe need to look at one of the more spherically symmetric post-Newtonian solutions. Oh wait summer is over.

Also very good is Einstein and the Quantum by Stone
Love the subtitle of this: The Quest of the Valiant Swabian.

This book has a good, intuitive treatment of vector calculus under the standard coordinate systems and then of Cartesian-tensors as well as many other topics: Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics by Frederick W. Byron, Jr. and Robert W. Fuller.

Do you recall what Heaviside called his own, unfinished autobiography?

"Wicked People I Have Known"!

have you read The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, by Graham Farmelo?

Yes, and it was the "gateway drug." Kragh has written a more technical one, which I'd like to get to some day.

Pais also wrote a book about Bohr as well as one with short bios of about a dozen scientists.

I've read the second, and also Pais' autobiography. I haven't read the Bohr biography and may never, having recently ground through a related book by the ubiquitous Kragh. However I did look at the preface. Pais quotes an unnamed colleague, "one of the best-known and successful physicists of my generation" or something similar, who asks Pais, "what exactly did Bohr do?" Pais didn't bother to add, "whose initials are R. F."

Love this passage from the Dirac book by Farmelo:

In Dirac’s bailiwick, the leader of the drive was George Batchelor, an Australian-born mathematician with an uncompromising manner that made clear the extent of his ambition to anyone who doubted it. Then in his late thirties, Batchelor was an expert in fluid mechanics, the branch of applied mathematics concerned with the flow of gases and liquids, a subject for which Dirac had little time - he regarded it as the small fry of theoretical physics. Nor did he like Batchelor, one of the few people who could bring out the snob in him; their colleague John Polkinghorne recalls that Dirac once offended the rhino-skinned Batchelor by dismissing George Stokes, one of the pioneers of fluid mechanics, as ‘a second-rate Lucasian professor’.

Also:

Since the mid-1920s, Gamow and Landau had been two leaders of the informal group of young Soviet theorists nicknamed the ‘Jazz Band’. In its seminars, the group discussed new physics, the Bolshoi Ballet, Kipling’s poetry, Freudian psychology and any other subject that took their fancy. The Jazz Band was mastering the new quantum physics much more quickly than their professors - ‘the bisons’ - whom they teased unmercifully, while taking care to remain within the bounds of decorum.

One more:

Of all the months in the Cambridge academic calendar, June was the most relaxed. The examinations over, it was time for the students to leave the university, but only after the catharsis of the summer ball. The intoxicating mix of music and dancing, free-flowing champagne, gorgeous frocks and sharply cut dinner suits could cheer up the most abject examinee. Dons could put on their summer suits and wind down to the ‘long vac’, when they had no administrative duties and were free to spend the long, languid afternoons doing nothing except sit in a deckchair and watch a game of cricket. Dirac was nonplussed by the appeal of an activity that involved twenty-two men spending hours - sometimes days - playing a game that often ended in a draw, which devoted spectators would often deem exciting. The game had no more ardent admirer than G. H. Hardy, for whom it was akin to pure mathematics: all the more beautiful for its lack of useful purpose. A few years later, he gave pride of place in his study to a photograph of the Australian batsman Donald Bradman, one of Hardy’s three greatest heroes (the others were Einstein and Lenin).

That A. Douglas Stone book is really well written, from what I've been able to read so far. Thanks for the recommendation.

Weisskopf, The Joy of Insight
Peierls, Bird of Passage

Weisskopf was born in 1908 and Peierls in 1907. They appear in each other's autobiographies and Peierls' has a blurb by Weisskopf on the cover. They also appear in the same photograph.

http://histclo.com/imagef/date/2012/09/heis-men30s.jpg

That's Peierls sitting on Heisenberg's right and Weisskopf sitting behind his left shoulder.

Because Heisenberg was not yet married, he spent a lot of time with his students. Among other things, he was a great Ping-Pong player. He had one Japanese co-worker, Yoshio Nishina, who played better than he and who beat him regularly. I recall one occasion when Heisenberg, who was not a good loser, disappeared for three days after a defeat by Nishina. Heisenberg was also an amateur pianist. I still recall how he played Beethoven's extremely difficult Hammerklavier Sonata for us. His performance was technically perfect but almost completely devoid of passion.

Peierls remembers the winner as Chinese. Nishina's biography didn't mention a stay in Leipzig. Weisskopf's book is full of small errors of fact, so there's no way to know.

Weisskopf likes general statements, whereas for Peierls life is a sequence of events described in a mellow tone. Weisskopf's efforts on behalf on nuclear arms control were noble, but is a chapter called "Working with the Pope for Peace" as dull as it sounds?

The work of the academy is carried out in plenary sessions held every two years and through conferences on special topics. A general theme is chosen for the plenary sessions, and a few people are asked to give talks, which lead to much discussion among the members. Examples of such general themes are "The Responsibilities of Scientists," "Basic and Applied Science," or "Science and Society."

Pretty much, even if one is Catholic. I also could have done without the chapter on the sublimity of classical music and an attempt to describe the modern world. Very Central European.

Weisskopf was the director general of CERN. Peierls worked on more kinds of physics. I was hoping to get a non-technical explanation of what Peierls brackets are, but there probably isn't one. Peierls does mention with some pleasure that Dyson predicted that they couldn't exist.

I recall a conversation I had with Fermi about Chadwick's discovery of the neutron. It followed Irene Curie's experiments, which, as one can now see by hindsight, were clear evidence that the radiation in question consisted of heavy neutral particles and not gamma rays, as she believed. Fermi expressed sympathy that she missed the discovery, but his tone made me suspect that he had known the result all along. I found out later that, on seeing the report of the Curie experiment, Majorana had immediately said, "How stupid these people are! This is a heavy neutral particle!"

Segue to:

Magueijo, A Brilliant Darkness. A biography of the Italian Dirac. Ettore Majorana not only deduced the existence of neutrons two years before they were officially discovered (Fermi didn't believe him), he wrote down Heisenberg's theory of the nuclear force before Heisenberg, and Pauli and Weisskopf's scalar field theory of 1934 in 1931. He liked to write theories on cigarette packs, show them to Fermi's group, throw them away, and then laugh when other people rediscovered them. This careless attitude enraged Fermi, but there was nothing he could do about it.

Majorana had psychological problems and eventually became a recluse. He talked openly of suicide and then disappeared, apparently drowned. He's entered Italian culture and is depicted in films and comic books, variously forseeing nuclear weapons, leaving Earth on a flying saucer, and being invisible to everyone except cats.

Magueijo has a case of hero worship (I know the feeling), which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but he is also in touch with his inner 13-year-old.

The institute is in a bizarre location, at Via Panisperna. The street name sounds horribly like "pane e sperma," "bread and sperm" -- undoubtedly an odd type of sandwich.

His talent looked supernatural, and he scared the shit out of them -- especially Fermi.

If all of this weren't enough to make Sir Isaac Newton barf in his tomb...

It's ambidextrous in time. It simultaneously throws up and eats its meals. A Majorana neutrino flushing the toilet defies imagination.

As usual when there are so few facts, Magueijo has had to make a narrative out of his own research. "And so I go to Rome..." John Bahcall is referred to as Bachall, and at one point Ida Noddack is called Ida Novak.

Avanti!

Since the mid-1920s, Gamow and Landau had been two leaders of the informal group of young Soviet theorists nicknamed the ‘Jazz Band’.

Gamow escaped to the West, which made it tough on the others. They arrested Ivanenko first, but let him go, and they shot Bronstein. They arrested Landau but Kapitza was able to get him free. An astronomer once told me that Gamow "started an experiment on the long-term effects of heavy alcohol use, using himself as the subject." Here is a portrait of Gamow at a conference in 1956:

"Landau is a genius, Ivanenko a police spy, and here I am," and with his glass he pointed to himself, sprawled on the couch.

The examinations over, it was time for the students to leave the university, but only after the catharsis of the summer ball. The intoxicating mix of music and dancing, free-flowing champagne, gorgeous frocks and sharply cut dinner suits could cheer up the most abject examinee. Dons could put on their summer suits and wind down to the ‘long vac’, when they had no administrative duties and were free to spend the long, languid afternoons doing nothing except sit in a deckchair and watch a game of cricket. Dirac was nonplussed by the appeal of an activity that involved twenty-two men spending hours - sometimes days - playing a game that often ended in a draw, which devoted spectators would often deem exciting.

I can't picture this except through the lens of Monty Python.

The lens of Sam Peckinpah as diffracted through the Python filter?

Here is blog article by Bronstein's biographer: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/07/14/why-is-quantum-gravity-so-hard-and-why-did-stalin-execute-the-man-who-pioneered-the-subject/

Nice. I'm itching to read Gorelik's biography of Landau, which looks definitive, but it hasn't been translated yet.

Online, available to public copy of From c-Numbers to q-Numbers: The Classical Analogy in the History of Quantum Theory, by Olivier Darrigol, which looks like it might be interesting.
http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft4t1nb2gv&brand=ucpress

A cursory look found nothing else of interest publicly available, but it certainly seems to be worth digging.

Interesting but demanding!

There's an article by Aitchison, MacManus, and Snyder called "Understanding Heisenberg’s ‘magical’ paper of July 1925." I haven't tried to read it either, but it starts out with this great quote by Weinberg:

If the reader is mystified at what Heisenberg was doing, he or she is not
alone. I have tried several times to read the paper that Heisenberg wrote on
returning from Heligoland, and, although I think I understand quantum mechanics,
I have never understood Heisenberg’s motivations for the mathematical
steps in his paper. Theoretical physicists in their most successful work tend
to play one of two roles: they are either sages or magicians....It is usually not
difficult to understand the papers of sage-physicists, but the papers of magician-
physicists are often incomprehensible. In that sense, Heisenberg’s 1925 paper
was pure magic.

Perhaps we should not look too closely at Heisenberg’s first paper......

My God, if Weinberg can't understand it...

Darrigol:

The Theory of Bohr, Kramers, and Slater (Bks)

I have already described how, in spite of his acute awareness of fundamental difficulties, Bohr publicly rejected Einstein's and Rubinowicz's conceptions of radiation. He saw them as self-contradictory or strategically impotent.[215] However, from contemplation of his opponents' arguments he drew some essential characteristics of a future theory of radiation.

Poor Kramers. He calculated what would soon become known as the Compton effect (recoil of photons), which Compton got the Nobel Prize for. But his director, Bohr, didn't believe in photons so he forced Kramers to suppress the work. Kramers' health broke, and he emerged from the episode even more psychologically in thrall to Bohr, and participated in the bizarre BKS theory.

Then Kramers wrote down the first correct quantum mechanics relations. Heisenberg moved in like a shark, added a page to the paper, and demanded that his name be included. Next year Heisenberg generalized the approach, producing quantum mechanics.

In the 1930s, when field theory was in crisis, Kramers invented the idea of renormalization, which was the way out. After the war, at the 1947 Shelter Island conference, as the only non-American to be invited, he gave a lecture on his idea. In the audience were Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman. You can guess what happened.

After Kramers' death, Heisenberg tried to cheer up Kramers' wife with his famous insightfulness into human situations. "Your husband deserved the Nobel Prize. For some reason I never got around to nominating him."

Close, Neutrino
Sutton, Spaceship Neutrino

Close's writing is clear and precise, though not beautiful. The Infinity Puzzle is like a superior detective story with many subplots, but it took time for it to build up a head of steam. I think the problem with Neutrino is its shortness. Sutton has the luxury of perhaps twice the word count, and some 20% of the book consists of very interesting historical photos, which lend a certain momentum. Sutton is able to go into a lot more detail, and in this subject the details are everything. Sutton's book is dated (1992 vs. Close's 2010) but it wins. There's a time-traveling effect as projects that are planned in Sutton are accomplished in Close.

Sutton oddly describes Majorana as "brilliant but charismatic."

But Majorana refused to publish his ideas or to give Fermi permission to promote them, and soon others, such as Dmitrij Iwanenko, produced similar theories.

Sounds right. Sutton quotes Pontecorvo writing in 1982:

In the late fifties and in the sixties the opinion was frequently expressed that neutrinos a la Majorana, although beautiful and interesting objects, are not realized in nature...[Since then] the question raised by Majorana has become more and more important and nowadays is, in fact, the central problem in neutrino physics.

Pontecorvo is the hero of Close's book, but Close doesn't mention Majorana at all, let alone the question of neutrinos being Dirac or Majorana, which according to this article from February is still open.

More on the subject from Frank Wilzcek.

The Neutrino Oscillation Industry page, complete with job openings, and a bunch of neutrino experiments.

Franklin, Are There Really Neutrinos? I sure hope so, otherwise I've wasted a lot of time reading about them.

We know that the world is a social construction and has no independent existence, but Franklin clings to the old, discredited view that over time, science can provide reliable knowledge about the so-called physical world. His writing is not memorable, but he gives a detailed account of beta-decay and neutrino experiments from the earliest days to 2000, complete with multiple wrong turns.

One of the experimental results mentioned in Sutton (the 17 eV neutrino) was just coming under fire as her book was published. It receives a burial in Franklin.

All very interesting, thanks. But where are you getting copies of all of these very out-of-print books? Oh I see, a university library, no?

I would LOVE to read a book like this about the development of wireless communication technology, starting with the discovery of radio and moving into later communication developments

Well, if there are some suppressed Russian scientists involved on that, I'm sure alimosina has read it.

In the meantime, you could try Einstein's Clock's, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, by Peter Galison,which I finally made some headway in. Hilary Putnam called it "indispensible" and "wonderful."

Docked for added in extra 'e' to the first name of Humphry Davy.

We know that the world is a social construction and has no independent existence, but Franklin clings to the old, discredited view that over time, science can provide reliable knowledge about the so-called physical world. So do Winston Smith and Louis Pasteur, for a while.

Hilarious typo in Forbes and Mahon's Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field.
Giordano Bruno is referred to as "Giardino Bruni."

Not sure what alimosina is getting at: is it that Franklin seems to be asking a philosophical question rather than a scientific one?

Well, if there are some suppressed Russian scientists involved on that

Funny you should say that. Feinberg's book of biographical articles contains a memoir of the physicist Alexandr Mintz, who was literally dragged into radio communications research.

"As for the third arrest -- this was shortly before the war, everything was much more serious. I was arrested and waited for an interrogation for a long time. There came a day when I was taken to an investigator. I was going along a wide corridor with doors along it, cries of torture were heard through them. Finally I was led into one of the rooms. At the desk, with his back to the window, there sat an investigator. I approached, grabbed a heavy inkstand from the desk and said, 'If you touch me I will hit you with this until you kill me or I kill you.' Suddenly there happens a miracle. 'Not at all, Alexandr L'vovich, I have summoned you here not at all for this. Comrade Narkom wants to see you.' Apparently he did not know what for...

So, they led me though stairs and corridors. Finally we enter a big room and they lead me to Beria. Near him there stands some NKVD colonel. Beria says: 'This has to be done in three months. If you do it -- you are free.' I looked though a description of the task, thought for a while, and said: 'Well, I can do it, but not in three months but in six.' After these words the colonel exploded, jumped to me from the side, shaked fists at my face and shouted: 'How dare you! Comrade Narkom extends such trust and honor to you and you are saying that you need twice more time for this!' I turned to him and said: 'Do you think that I like it here so much that I want to stay longer?' Beria laughed and said: 'OK, let it be your way.'"

"Did you do it?" I asked.

"Yes, of course. Our group that worked on this was kept is special conditions, excellent lunches were brought."

He's referring to a sharashka. You can read about life in them in Solzhenitsyn's First Circle.

I'd like to know the story behind the Russian Woodpecker, but I'm not holding my breath for that.

Not sure what alimosina is getting at: is it that Franklin seems to be asking a philosophical question rather than a scientific one?

Yup. He writes that he was seeing some beginning students coming in with slogans like that, which led him to write the book as a detailed challenge to those who defend the slogans. For example, for while it looked like Fermi's theory of beta decay had problems, and another theory (Konopinski-Uhlenbeck) fit the data better. But with more data, Fermi's was supported, and Konopinski conceded that his theory was not the right one. There were a lot of reversals and wrong trails because the phenomena are so elusive. One of the slogans was that theories become accepted not because of evidence but because of the social power of the people making the theories.

So would you say Feinberg's book of biographical articles conformed to Euler's formulation or not?

No it didn't. I don't know of a reference, actually.

Sorry, just was making sort of a bad joke about "Euler's formulation." Also love this quote about him from François Arago: "He calculated just as men breathe, as eagles sustain themselves in the air."

Euler proved the existence of God to Diderot very efficiently.

Here's an interesting view of one of the Long Lines towers.

Isn't that story a myth?

Maybe so, but it's funny.

Reminds me of a certain James Thurber cartoon.

http://gocomics.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c5f3053ef0168e8fe7bd3970c-pi

Ha. It's the one with the caption "perhaps this will refresh your memory!"

http://math.oregonstate.edu/bridge/papers/

Get on it

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/science/huge-trove-of-albert-einstein-documents-becomes-available-online.html?_r=0
http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/

But you might prefer http://www.alberteinstein.info/

Veltman, Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics. Martinus Veltman is a large, bear-like Dutch physicist with a stubborn streak.

http://www.mediatheque.lindau-nobel.org/Content/Assets/Medium/32341___personal-picture-of-martinus-veltman.jpg

It took someone with his personality to persist in studying quantum field theory through the 1960s, when many people had given up on it. People at Harvard produced a mathematical proof that what he was doing was futile, but he ignored them.

It made me deeply conscious of the fact that diagrammatic methods and perturbation theory worked very well, and this stimulated me to continue using these techniques even in the dark times in the middle sixties when false gods were dominating particle theory.

As mentioned, Veltman is a big guy.

When quarks were not immediately discovered after the introduction by Gell-Mann he took to calling them symbolic, saying they were indices. In the early seventies I met him at CERN and he again said something in that spirit. I then jumped up, coming down with some impact that made the floor tremble, and I asked him: "Do I look like a heap of indices?" This visibly rattled him, and indeed after that he no more advocated this vision, at least not as far as I know.

This book is an introduction to the Standard Model in a slight accent, with many biographical notes and personal asides. Some writers try to propitiate their readers; then there is Veltman.

If you do not know what complex and imaginary means then that is just too bad

That is the philosophy of quantum mechanics, and you better get used to it.

What about supersymmetry and string theory, you ask. Veltman handles them in the final two paragraphs.

The fact is that this book is about physics, and this implies that the theoretical ideas discussed must be supported by experimental facts. Neither supersymmetry nor string theory satisfy this criterion. They are figments of the theoretical mind. To quote Pauli, they are not even wrong. They have no place here.

't Hooft, In Search of the Ultimate Building Blocks. Gerard 't Hooft became Veltman's student at the end of the 60s and completed his program.

Veltman and 't Hooft came from different backgrounds. Veltman is a skeptic, 't Hooft speculates wildly, and on one account is ultra-competitive. In 1999 they shared the Nobel Prize.

't Hooft started out by bringing the Higgs (et al...) ideas into Veltman's machinery. Did it work? Yes it did. ("Either this guy's a total idiot or he's the biggest genius to hit physics in years." -- Sheldon Glashow)

Veltman was very skeptical about such ideas; it was not easy to convince him that what we call empty space is actually filled with invisible particles. Would these, he said, not betray their presence by their gravitational fields?

In fact that is a major unsolved problem.

't Hooft provides another anecdote about Veltman and gravitation.

...he was one of the last persons to enter an elevator that was already loaded with people. When the button was pushed, a buzzer sounded and a signal flashed: overloaded! Since Veltman was the heaviest person in the elevator, and also one of the last to enter, all eyes fell on him. But Veltman did not agree that he should step out. "When I say 'yes' then press!", he said. He bent his knees and then jumped, higher than was to be expected for a person of his stature. "YES!" he yelled, and the elevator took off.

't Hooft and Vandoren, Time in Powers of Ten. This book is what it sounds like and being pure exposition is off-topic. But 't Hooft is a visionary, and it's fun to follow the authors as they zoom through the powers of ten from the Planck time to the dark eternities. The Netherlands gets ample mention along the way.

Looking into this now, thanks. I like the capsule bios and the great paper excepts, in German. Assume M. H. signifies "Mein Herren."

They've determined that Majorana was alive in Venezuela in the late 50s. Unfathomable.

my friend Sam's book about the Huxley brothers is good!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/519xHIgAhHL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Thanks and welcome to thread!

The Calculus Wars, reviewed by Brian E. Blank. http://www.ams.org/notices/200905/rtx090500602p.pdf

Richard Garwin turned 95 on Friday.

Peter Lax turns 98 today. Surely the last living participant in the Manhattan Project, and also a friend to computers.

RIP James H. Simons.

Nadis and Yau, The Gravity of Math. Dumb title, fast and informative read.

Have my eyes on the recent book ESCAPE FROM SHADOW PHYSICS.

Nadis and Yau, _The Gravity of Math_. Dumb title, fast and informative read.

C. N. Yang turns 102 today!

Whereas Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat remains a relatively youthful 100.

Some interesting news.

Whereas Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat remains a relatively youthful 100.

101!

To characterize H. S. Green is impossible. I have never met any one like him. It is not that he was without talent. He had plenty, in a bizarre fashion… Green was unique in his complete disinterest in the outside world. He had absolute confidence on anything that he came up with… My duty, it appeared, was to listen with enthusiasm to every idea and to applaud at regular intervals. Even the Institute did not require this particular service. I sincerely tried for what seemed like an eternity, more likely a few weeks, to act as a responsible audience, and then gave up. Later back at the Institute, Bram Pais said to me “I could have told you about Green.” He then described how Wolfgang Pauli had once entered his office quivering… “For heavens sake”… said Pauli… “protect me from that green monster.”

-- John Ward

One day I had the idea of radiation implosion...

I explained how important it was to move the energy fast to the other end, and emphasized the need for compression. There was then a great hush. Evidently, it was now Penney’s turn. I spell his words verbatim: “this is too much like a piece of clockwork. If this were wartime, we might consider something along the lines of these waveguides of yours.” Cook said, rather softly I remember: “this should be looked into.” The meeting was then promptly concluded...

There followed a month or two of absolute silence. I took off a few weeks to drive Robert Graves down to Barcelona.

-- Ibid.

Oscar Greenberg turns 93 today.

Sabine Hossenfelder is not trying to be popular.

Weinberg writes in classical English and if he ever writes an autobiography it will be a prose masterpiece.

― alimosina, Wednesday, 11 November 2015 03:07 (nine years ago) link

Weinberg, A Life in Physics

Masterpiece may be too much, but the prose can be described as august.

I loved working in my study (formerly T. S. Eliot's bedroom)

RIP Peter Lax, 99!

Aw, man. And Richard Garwin, four days ago.

I can tell you one or two personal Peter Lax stories if you want.

Yes, I need cheering up after all this death. Now I see that Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat passed away back in February.

Just thought of some funny Peter Lax stories if you want to hear them.

Péter Lax even

Keep seeing these popularization books by a gentleman named, wait for it, Jason Socrates Bardi, that seem potentially interesting but ultimately maybe content free.

Three of the most impressive people I know are Gil Strang, Don Knuth, and Peter Lax. Each of these world-famous mathematicians has a perception that is simply at a higher level than other people's. And all three give outstanding talks.

Yet these heroes of mine have a curious point of style in common: all of them, when giving that talk, act a bit bumbling and helpless. Poor Gil can't quite get his head around the mathematical point he's trying to make, it seems -- is there anyone around who might have some ideas? Poor Don can't quite finish a sentence, such a struggle -- can anyone help? Poor Peter is such a kindly gentleman, so courtly in that old European way, but he can't quite begin to put together his thought at all -- is there anyone in the audience please who could lend a hand?

The trickery can be annoying, but boy is it effective. Strang and Knuth and Lax get just where they were aiming by the end of the hour, and you're on the edge of your seat. Is the bumbling unconscious? Intentional? A symptom of genius? The frailty of older men? Should I, too, learn to hesitate and swerve when I talk?

-- Lloyd Trefethen

Real physics versus not real physics.
Real physics versus not real physics.

Love that quote from Trefethen.

I could listen to Strang's lectures all day.

You studied with him?

Oh no, I just mean his lectures on Youtube. His linear algebra course is like ASMR.

I don't know what I did with my copy of his book, so maybe I will check those out

I’ve also noticed myself trying to emulate his style a little bit when doing presentations, lol. i.e. Keep the language really basic, act like you're working through your puzzles about the topic as you're speaking. It works.

Nice

Another pro-tip: those on a first name basis with Trefethen call him Nick, perhaps to distinguish him from the other Lloyd Trefethen.

Who was his dad, I just learned.

He has a sister Gwyned who is a quilter.

Mom was cool too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Newman_Trefethen

Listen to the part about Péter Lax here: https://ecepastandpresent.blogspot.com/2014/03/extended-profile-life-and-career-of.html

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1988/11/10/nabokov-and-jolan-foldes/