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

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

In the fall of 1952, shortly after my wife, Virginia, and I arrived in Princeton for a two-year stay at the Institute for Advanced Study, we were driving down Olden Lane approaching the Institute when we found our way blocked by an odd pair walking slowly and obliviously in front of our car. The taller man was quite unkempt while the other was immaculately dressed in a business suit and carried a briefcase. As I cautiously passed them, we could see that it was Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. "Einstein and his lawyer," Virginia quipped.
-Martin Davis, The Universal Computer: The Road From Leibniz To Turing, p.107

From the same book, a few pages earlier, page 100

The battle of words between Hilbert and Brouwer escalated to one of deeds when Hilbert resorted to quasilegal methods to dump Brouwer from the editorial board of the Mathematische Annalen, leading Albert Einstein to complain about "this frog and mouse" battle.

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Extras/Keynes_Newton.html

I know JMK's not one to be upstaged by one of his subjects, but is he also serious with that last bit? "The Devil"? Just because alchemy?

He was trying to get into the mindset of his hero and the age he lived in.

Anyway, that Keynes thing gets quoted all the time so it was nice to read from beginning to end.

Which if any Newton bios have you read?

None yet, but Westfall's is the standard. There's a shortened version too, I think.

Aw man

Close, Half-Life

The ambiguous life of Bruno Pontecorvo told in Close's crisp style. Pontecorvo was secretly a Party member who suddenly bolted with his family for the USSR in 1950 with no explanation. Politics aside, for an experimentalist this was a career disaster. Before then and after, he came up with brilliant ideas in neutrino physics which were the making of Nobel Prizes for other people, but not him. He thought of a way to detect neutrinos (as they were thought to be) from reactors, and proposed that there were two types of neutrinos, before anyone else. Later he invented the idea of neutrino oscillation. The correct idea of neutrino oscillation was put forward by him and Gribov in 1968.

Schwinger in his 1957 paper "A Theory of Fundamental Interactions," in which he invented intermediate vector bosons and mass generation with a scalar field, and began to unify weak and electromagnetic interactions, also decreed that there were two neutrinos.

(Pontecorvo) was just anticipating the possibility for some reason. This is building it into a theory. It's rather different.

I guess that puts Pontecorvo in his place.

There's still no documentary evidence that Pontecorvo was a spy, and the Russians still aren't talking. Close concludes that he probably was, since it would explain a lot of otherwise strange details. Other spies were caught, but ironically they paid less for it than Pontecorvo did.

Gil, by then fourteen years old, took note of the occasion [of Stalin's death]: there was "a week or ten days of solemn music on the radio. It was the first time I appreciated classical music."

Shurkin, Broken Genius. Philip Anderson wrote the definite review of this book. Anyone who reads that doesn't need these comments.

Shockley was hired by Bell Labs, which planned to develop a semiconductor alternative to vacuum tubes. After WWII broke out, they gave him the problem of designing a nuclear reactor and he solved it in two months. This was embarrassing for the government, which was pouring money into the Manhattan Project, which Shockley was not part of, and because Shockley had the patent rights. His design was buried and others had to reinvent it.

Shockley lead a team applying operations research to hunt German submarines, which was a deciding factor in winning the war in the Atlantic. His total inability to understand other human beings could have been a help in solving military problems. He was named Advisor to the Secretary of War, and received the National Medal of Merit.

At Bell Labs Shockley supervised the team working toward the not-yet-named transistor. The famous breakthrough by Bardeen and Brattain seems to have pushed him over the edge. Shockley immediately holed himself up and wrote down the theory of field-effect transistors. The Bardeen-Brattain discovery was a technical dead end and transistors ever since have worked according to the Shockley theory. The irony was that if Shockley had kept his head everyone would have been happy to give him his share of the glory, but instead he tried to take it away from the others.

Shockley went on to invent Silicon Valley. (There were technology companies there but no silicon.) He was unmatched at recognizing talent and hired the best people, including Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. If he had let them alone he would have become a billionaire. But after the experience at Bell Labs he was never going to do that. Instead he became an obnoxious micromanager who would not listen to ideas from anyone else. His best employees quit to found Fairchild, and then Intel.

From then on his life went downhill. It seemed like the more enemies he had, the happier he was. Except for his wife, he died in complete isolation.

Chiang, Madame Chien-Shiung Wu

When I proposed my plan to write this biography in 1987, Yang was greatly interested and warmly endorsed this effort... Mr. Yang even recommended and accompanied me to buy a newly published book, discussing the scientists and the surrounding events leading to the progress in physics in the late 20th century... The new book recounts the sequence of events leading to the discovery of the "J" particle by Samuel C. C. Ting. I was full of excitement and greatly moved beyond all description.

The book is not identified but it is clearly Second Creation by Crease and Mann:

The Patton of experimental physics, Sam Ting is famous for driving himself and his collaborators to exhaustion... His colleagues love to recount tales of Ting sleeping on the floor by his equipment, or being physically carried out of experimental halls by lab officials who have slated his experiment to be replaced by another

That is the American style of character description. Chiang's style is reserved and ceremonious, leaving implications unstated, which may be the Chinese manner. Opaque cultural details:

At that time, locals in the Jiangsu area liked to make fun of people from nearby Yangzhou, thinking that their frequent expression "like this, like that" was too folksy. Wu once jokingly asked Yen Mei-He, if an elegant lady like Lin Dai-Yu in The Dream of the Red Chamber would also use the expression "like this, like that". They both laughed heartily.

On the other hand, Chiang has Americans figured out.

There were many admirers of this beauty in the physics department; some jokingly included the sound of her last name "Wu" (sound of longing) in a love song circulating around the campus.

Wu became world-famous for her discovery of parity violation in beta decay. She was a perfectionist and her experiments were considered decisive. Unfortunately two of her students contributed to the confusion surrounding weak interactions in the mid 1950s.

Wu was very unhappy about the mistake made in the experiment of Ruby and Rustad. Ruby discussed the experiment in the Plaza Hotel... and regretted that he was so careless. He did not finish his PhD degree, worked for IBM for some time, and resumed research work at Stanford University. Rustad died in the early 1960s.

The incident bothered Wu.

I'll bet it did.

Many people felt that Wu should have won the Nobel Prize. The obstacle may have been that she worked with groups and they don't give Nobel Prizes to more than three people at a time. Since then experimental teams have only gotten larger, to the point where in some experimental papers the list of authors takes up more space than the rest of the paper.

Conant, Tuxedo Park. An interesting character study of an unclassifiable figure, along with a bird's eye view of the WWII radar project. More social history than science history.

Following a demonstration of uranium being bombarded with neurons

Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrodinger's Cat. Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life searching for a unified field theory, and made newspaper headlines every step of the way long after the rest of physics had stopped paying attention.

In Another Dimension with Unifying Intention

Schrodinger got into the act in the 1940s at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. De Valera created the DIAS and was attacked for it, so Schrodinger felt himself pressured to do something newsworthy. De Valera's newspaper played up Schrodinger's theory and implied that Ireland's own genius had succeeded where Einstein had failed. Einstein stopped talking to Schrodinger for a few years. It wasn't an important event in the life of either of them, so this book is a sort of long footnote. But who's to challenge Roland Orzabal?

As a fan of popular science books and someone who has used phrases such as "God does not play dice" and "Schrodinger's Cat" in my songs, I found Paul Halpern's book illuminating and entertaining. -- Roland Orzabal, co-founding member of Tears for Fears

Brown, Planck

If we personify quantum theory, against all reasonable advice, the adult version wears the darkest sunglasses, never gives us a hint of facial expression, and sits in the corner texting to unknown recipients.

It's metaphors like that that make America great. Even without them ("The teenaged theory wasn't just putting up a few posters -- it wanted to knock out some walls") this is a rather good book. And even with bakery metaphors, the physics is perennially gorgeous.

What?

Crazy!

Thanks as always for your extensive contributions to this thread. Really want to read that Planck bio but have been holding back for the time being.

That Planck bio is short enough not to take one's life hostage.

I mentioned Crease and Mann up there. Normally I don't make recommendations, but everyone has to read Crease and Mann.

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

― alimosina, Sunday, 30 November 2014 22:04 (10 months ago) Permalink

Close enough.

can anyone recommend a good book about relativity? i read david bodanis's book on e=mc2 a few months ago and it's decent, reads sort of like a good pop-sci article padded out to book length. there's a ton of "relativity made easy!" books from the 50s and 60s that have been reprinted by dover that look adorable but i'm not sure if any of them are still worth reading. also have einstein's own book on relativity but it's a bit intimidatingly packed with equations.

The Perfect Theory, by Pedro G. Ferreira, as mentioned in the first post, and a post or two thereafter.

ledge already took it

In one of those unfunny coincidences, Steven Weinberg and Toshihide Masukawa died on the same day.

And Miguel Virasoro, the same ****ing day.

Deser, Forks in the Road

A brief, informal memoir by the co-author of ADM and co-inventor of supergravity and superstrings. Deser provided early theoretical support for what became LIGO. The discrepancy between an amazing life and the casual matter-of-factness of the memoirs is striking. It's written as though anyone could have done as well. One funny part is the author's claim that he is not good at mathematics and tries to avoid it (he uses Chern-Simons forms in some of his later papers).

... my committee consisted of Julian plus Bob Karplus and Abe Klein, both of whom were under great stress: they had families and knew that they couldn't get tenure at Harvard; assistant professors almost never did. To land desirable positions elsewhere, their job at this point was to convince Schwinger how smart they were. There is no easier way to do that than via an unwitting graduate student. They had just made some nasty calculations in Electrodynamics. In the process they had discovered all sorts of esoteric mathematical functions, in particular, something called dilogarithms, which were still not in the textbooks. They knew about dilogarithms, I did not know about dilogarithms, so this was the moment they could really impress Schwinger, who could appreciate the finer points. During the first hour of that debacle, indeed after 15 minutes, it was clear that I could not contribute anything to that conversation, let alone answer questions. So they proceeded to entertain Julian with their Talmudic knowledge of these new aspects... I was totally destroyed. I was sent out of the room. After a very few minutes, Schwinger came out and said, "You realize that you failed this exam," a very rare occurrence in those days. "Yes," I replied. He smiled and I nearly fainted when he added "Don't worry about it."

It's always surprising to hear about how unfashionable research in gravity was in the 1950s.

That same year I got the chance to hear one of Einstein's last seminars. Oppenheimer (of Oppenheimer-Snyder black hole fame, ironically his one claim to Nobel glory) had gathered us new recruits to warn against having anything to do with the "old fool down the hall" or with Relativity in any form. There was little danger at that point, since none of us even knew what GR was.

On Andre Petermann:

Andre Petermann who stayed on at CERN for life, though mainly invisibly, showing up only in the wee hours. His accomplishments were many, if mostly unsung: only one, the renormalization group creation in his thesis is well-known. His advisor was the aristocratic Baron Stueckelberg, always accompanied by his large dog at (later) CERN seminars; both were tragically under-rated. They were antipodal: Andre came from the slums of Geneva (yes, even it used to have some -- albeit higher class) with an accent to fit. He also invented quarks independently of Gell-Mann and of Zweig, did still-not-widely-known important calculations including in QCD... and raced cars.

The author is a devoted reader of Proust, but a less Proustian memoir can hardly be imagined.

Zangwill, A Mind Over Matter: Philip Anderson and the Physics of the Very Many

God speaks to us through Phil Anderson. The only mystery is why He chose a vessel that is so difficult to understand.

-- Anatoly Larkin

Philip Anderson never wrote an autobiography, which is too bad, because it would have been very entertaining. Here he is refereeing a paper.

This paper will add immeasurably to the confusion on this subject and should not be published. It is a pity that the author's earlier paper cited as Reference 1 cannot be "unpublished".
Like many of his other papers, this work has a pedantic character that is the author's greatest weakness.
I don't know whether to be amused or sad that no one in the amazingly long list of individuals thanked by the author in his acknowledgements failed to see the basic physical fallacies of this paper or at least failed to convince the author of them.
This paper sets up a straw man and then knocks it down with great fanfare, arriving in the end at precisely Anderson's conclusions but very poorly understood and stated.

In his statement to Congress criticizing the SSC, he took a measured tone:

My name is Philip Anderson, Joseph Henry Professor at Princeton University. I worked for many years at AT&T Bell Labs, ending up with the rank of Director on my retirement, and I was a Professor at Cambridge University for a number of years. I won the Nobel Prize in 1977 for fundamental research in solid state physics. I may be the physicist most often cited by colleagues.

Zangwill is not a biographical prose stylist, but Anderson comes through in all his brilliance and arrogance. It is a philosophical moment to read about one's hero behaving not very well.

Anderson took an odd, proprietary attitude toward the theory of HTS. Participants recall a Gordon Conference where he announced that "all the other theorists should leave the room. I am the only one here who should talk to the experimentalists." Worse, he dismissed as "nonsense" and "folly" the work of other theorists who proposed mechanisms for cuprate superconductivity different from his own, even as his own ideas changed over time. Small wonder that some referred to RVB as "really vague bullshit."

The editing is pretty good, but the index isn't complete. "At the time, the truth of this statement was known only for the dimensional case studied by the quantum pioneer Hans Bethe in 1931" should read "one-dimensional." Stalin died in 1953. "Experimetal" is a nice typo.

Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat just turned 98. So may we all some day. Happy New Year!

Is it wrong of me to want some kind of Blurb Search so I can see what Sylvia Nasar has praised, to name one use?

Hubert Reeves to thread!

Although I don’t know anything about him apart from the one meme pull-quote.

Unfamiliar with this thread but I was thinking today: I wonder if I could get a book that would explain science to me?

Kenneth Watson turned 101 yesterday.

Close, Elusive

A history partly of Peter Higgs, partly of his boson, told in Close's precise and lively style. One gets the sense once again of how much the 2012 discovery was the end of an era.

Clary, Schrödinger in Oxford

Schrödinger found a temporary refuge at Oxford for a few years after 1933, partially funded by ICI. The author has collected a lot of interesting details about this period and later.

After the dinner Schrödinger was weighed on the college scales in the Senior Common Room. He came out as 10 stone 9 lbs (68 kg). This is a quaint tradition at Magdalen College on special occasions or when the Fellows are feeling especially happy, perhaps after some fine wine at dinner from the voluminous College cellar. It is a tradition that still occurs today and the records of the weights are kept in a special book. There are four records in the book of Schrödinger being weighed in this way -- the other three are in 1934, 1938, and 1948 and his weight hardly changed over this 15-year period.

There will always be an England. The Schrödingers lived two doors down from J. R. R. Tolkien and angered their neighbors by letting dandelions and weeds grow in their garden.

I do not think you fully realised how he behaved when he was in Oxford. Everything in England was wrong from the bicycle brakes and door knobs to more important things and only things in Germany were right. He freely commented on these things to people who wanted to hear them and those who did not. He was a menace to neighbors, not only because of his complicated matrimonial affairs about which he wanted everyone to know -- actually he seemed to be very proud of it, but also in many other matters where he behaved absolutely ruthlessly.

-- Fritz Simon

If anything, the famous equation is more important now than then, on account of improved analytical methods and computing power.

Schrödinger's family was impoverished after World War I and Schrödinger had a lifelong neurosis about money. He bought some plumbing items for £30, and when he left Oxford they were sold for £20. He wrote a letter to demand his £20 back and this demand went all the way to the board of directors of ICI. Also, he turned down a job offer from Princeton because his friends Einstein and Weyl were making a lot more money nearby at the Institute.

Even in his 60s he was having open liasons at scientific meetings.

Women loved the self-centered jerk and were willing to have his children. Walter Moore mentions three kids in his biography. (Clary throws shade on Moore.) One of Schrödinger's grandchildren became a physicist before he knew who his grandfather was. What is life? That's life.

I recently finished Where Is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall. In some ways it's perfectly crafted to appeal to someone who as a child devoured the adventures of Tom Swift Jr. in dusty old dog-eared hardbacks and was gradually and gently disabused of the expectation that that mid-century-vintage Space Age future was just around the bend. The book is many things: popular science, extrapolative future speculation, a polemic, anecdotes about private aviation. Hall takes some currently very unfashionable opinions and makes a strong case for them: such as the idea that the brightness of our future depends on increasing our energy consumption, rather than the reverse.

Polchinski, Memories. More dispiriting than interesting.

Pontzen, The Universe in a Box

The catered lunch that day happened to be American-style pizza, and I asked Governato -- a proud Italian -- whether his simulations looked a bit too much like thick-crust monstrosities, rather than the thin-crust beauties they ought to be. With a trace of irritation, he explained that other simulations had only ever managed to produce dough balls. We hit it off immediately.

Parisi, In a Flight of Starlings

This book is so short that you can't protest that things aren't covered enough. There is a chapter about flocking in birds, and another about the statistical mechanics of spin glasses.

There is also a crazy reconstructed conversation with 't Hooft about trying to do something with 't Hooft's calculation of the beta function for Yang-Mills theories. Forces become strong at larger distances and weak at small distances, kind of like the way quarks are confined in hadrons. Parisi asked 't Hooft about applying the result to hadrons. But what force to use? Electromagnetism wouldn't work. They gave it up as a bad idea.

We did not give a moment's thought to the color charge proposed by Gell-Mann. It would have been enough at that moment to have seen his name written somewhere (on a blackboard, for instance), or for someone to have casually mentioned Gell-Mann's model at lunch or supper, for me to have been able to run to 't Hooft with a cry of "Eureka!" In a couple of days we would have done the checks, written it up, and sent it for publication.

Gross, Wilczek and Politzer did it a few months later.

On that morning in 1973 we let slip the chance to win a Nobel Prize. Forthunately, for both of us, it would not be our only chance.

Not everyone can say that.

Stein and Newman, Spin Glasses and Complexity. This was a real find. Giorgio Parisi is a world authority on the subject, but in his book he managed so say almost nothing on it.

Hitler learns Jackson E&M