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

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.

Schwinger, Einstein's Legacy

Following alimosina's link about the Russian Woodpecker brought to mind this ilx thread.

Hiltzik, Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex

The author is a historian not of science but of large institutions and projects, appropriate to the subject. This book does not replace the official biography by Childs, but it provides a historical perspective that Childs didn't have.

People have disparaged Lawrence, but he invented a new branch of physics. When Bethe and Rose proved that the cyclotron had an upper limit on energy, he knew to ignore them and the cyclotron breezed past the limit. Alvarez:

Ernest said, "You mean to tell me that all these particles have very nearly the same mass and the same half-lives and yet they aren't the same particle?" Lynn said the theorists had reasons why the particles couldn't be the same. Ernest said, "Don't you worry about it -- the theorists will find a way to make them all the same."

So they did.

Hiltzik: "...and a young Caltech physicist named Richard Feynman, who exercised radio skills to pester the post's balky shortware to life." Feynman wasn't at Caltech in 1945.

Monk, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center

A belated "What are you planning to read in 2014?" Monk has organized a huge body of facts into one judicious narrative.

This was certainly the case when God himself, Niels Bohr, came to Pasadena in the summer of 1933.

Judicious except for that sentence. Monk is evenhanded when describing Oppenheimer behaving badly or doing great things.

Steinberger, Learning About Particles. The report of Nambu's passing last summer made me sad. Inspiringly, Steinberger is still here at 94.

In line with long U.S. tradition, the large bulk of physics research was supported under contract with some armed services organization. The Columbia University Nevis laboratory, for instance, was entirely supported by the Office of Naval Research...

I am ashamed to admit that sometimes this generous navy help was misused. When Joan, in 1960, decided that it was no longer possible to live with me and, instead, preferred to join a fellow painter in the New York’s Greenwich Village, her personal belongings followed in a navy truck.

This is a short autobiography with dense detail about hadron and neutrino physics and CP invariance and not a lot about the author. Steinberger writes about himself so modestly that the reader wonders how he could have done so much. He remains opaque. It's an agreeable book, although lightly edited: "barions", "The normal to the place of..." It's interesting that when Pontecorvo first laid the foundation for the "Universal Fermi Interaction" aka weak force, Fermi didn't believe him.

I remember the pleasure Landau had in recognizing the genius of Gell-Mann and in discussions with him. I myself, one evening, was in Landau's apartment for dinner. The choice of food was limited, but there were very good strawberries, lots of them. There was no toilet paper in the toilet, but there was a book whose pages substituted for the missing commodity. It was a book on the life of Stalin.

Steinberger won the Nobel Prize, but his son's electric bass may have wider fame.

Wilczek, The Lightness of Being

Frank Wilczek is a writer who can't resist a quip, so this book is soaked with jokes.

They are called hadrons. (Footnote) *Not* a typo.

Gross (cf. the Khrzhanovsky article) and Wilczek, and independently Politzer, showed that in QCD the gluon force diminishes to nothing at close range and becomes huge at large distances. Wilczek concentrates on giving an intuitive feeling for this side of the Standard Model. His book is expansive and verbal, compared with Veltman's bruque and diagrammatic one. Wilczek is relentlessly forward-looking and his neologisms and optimism give this book a sort of hum. For him progress should occur in two steps: from the Standard Model to a bigger symmetry, SU(10) (what used to be called a GUT), and from there to supersymmetry. (Seven years later, the outlook for "natural" supersymmetry is
apparently not so good. GUTs imply proton decay which has never been detected.)

I'm very fond of axions, in part because I got to name them. I used that opportunity to fulfill a dream of my youth. I'd noticed that there was a brand of laundry detergent called "Axion," which sounded to me like the name of a particle. So when theory produced a hypothetical particle that *cleaned up* a problem with an *axial* current, I sensed a cosmic convergence. The problem was to get it past the notoriously conservative editors of Physical Review Letters. I told them about the axial current, but not the detergent. It worked.

Wilczek also co-invented time crystals.

Weinberg, Lake Views

A collection of occasional articles. Peierls:

(At Columbia) was Steven Weinberg, who later became famous and earned a Nobel Prize through his work on the foundations of the modern synthesis of electromagnetic and weak interactions. He was a pleasant young man, with quick reactions and a somewhat bitter sense of humour.

Several of the articles are about American policy on nuclear weapons and missile defense, for which a bitter sense of humor is appropriate, but the author does not indulge in it.

Weinberg's concluding words to The First Three Minutes are famous:

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless... The effort to understand the universe is one of the few things that lifts human life above the level of farce, and give is some of the grace of tragedy.

There is more of that outlook in this book. Weinberg was prominent in the effort to persuade Congress to fund the SSC in the early 90s. I wonder whether the vision of ordinary human life as farcical and of expensive particle physics research as one of the few things that lend it the grace of tragedy would have been an effective selling point. In actual fact, the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012 was an international news event, and the feeling wasn't of tragedy in the face of a pointless universe but of excitement, happiness and fun (with Higgs boson t-shirts and stupid physics rap songs). It seems to me that this is a data point in favor of humanity's good sense and particle physics both. I say more: huge accelerators have been described as the cathedrals of today. Weinberg wants to eliminate religion, but I say the impulses to build the one and the other have the same irrational root. A completely rational society would not have either.

In this collection, Weinberg's determination to have no illusions is stronger than to explain physics. He has no interest in ingratiating himself with the reader.

Glashow, Interactions

I wonder if Sheldon Glashow's first name influenced the writers of The Big Bang Theory.

Glashow and Weinberg graduated from the same high school the same year, went to the same college, and shared the same Nobel Prize. Weinberg writes in classical English and if he ever writes an autobiography it will be a prose masterpiece. It will probably not contain passages like this:

The alleged hashish resembled a thousand-year-old Hershey bar. We took it to our apartment overlooking the Bosphorus and smoked, and smoked, and smoked. Nothing happened.

Another criminal, Ceri... purveyed a superior product. This stuff really worked! I spent the night before one of my lectures hallucinating, and by morning it still hadn't worn off. I delivered one of the best lectures of my life. On another occasion, Sidney, Salam and I visited Ceri at his home in beautiful downtown Istanbul. Salam, the faithful Muslim, watched but did not smoke. I argued so eloquently for the unification of the electromagnetic and weak interactions by a gauge theory that I almost rivaled the prophet Mohammed. So said Salam afterward...

As with Steinberger you sense that life was pretty sweet during that postwar physics boom. Glashow nowhere denies that he was a babe magnet. Most of this book is about physics from his very personal perspective.

...every residence, humble or grand, must contain an object of no great beauty despite the efforts of architects, interior designers and plumbers. The flush toilet is a rather ugly thing, but it works and no one has ever come up with a plausible alternative. Thus, one may regard Steve Weinberg as the Thomas Crapper of elementary-particle physics.

For anyone worried about being a smart alec, this book is reassuring. Glashow is simply on a higher plane of smart-alecness.

Bogdanov and Bogdanov, 3 minutes pour comprendre la grande théorie du Big Bang

The authors are a couple of mysterious people who may be more remarkable than anything they've written. They would have been perfect for Khrzhanovsky's movie.

This short book consists of impressive illustrations and historical photos with some text, and a CD. John Mather, who shared a Nobel prize for his work with the COBE satellite, wrote an introduction. The book has content, although the line between fact and imagination is thin. Bronstein, Gamow, Ivanenko and Landau may have taken courses from Friedmann, but it's unlikely that they vowed to carry on his legacy. H. A. Lorentz was Dutch not Danish. The authors claim that Godel's theorems from logic apply somehow. Things tend to be "stupifying", "incomprehensible", "unheard-of" (that one's fair enough), and leave other physicists "speechless".

This isn't my favorite area of physics. It's too abstract and draws weird, unsupported speculation. Philip Anderson called it "quasi-theological." But it has a lot of glamor and books about time and the universe get published a lot. They give the reader a sort of sugar rush. Give me expositions about real matter in exotic states backed up with experimental evidence. Give me, in fact:

Dars and Papillault, Au coeur des atomes froids : L'aventure de l'IFRAF

This is a book of photographs of people working at the institute for cold atoms in Paris with just enough text to explain what is going on. It hits the spot.

We aim to create a superfluid gas of atoms in which certain of the atoms interact to form a particle called a "Majorana bound state." Majorana particles, unlike all particles known to date, do not belong to either of the established categories.

This year at another laboratory, they've discovered Weyl fermions, which neutrinos were once thought to be.

After this wonderful book, I never want to pick up another book about time.

Rovelli, Et si le temps n'existait pas?

Carlo Rovelli is one of the inventors of loop quantum gravity, which has sparked such controversy.

It turns out that Rovelli was a young radical during the "Skank Bloc Bologna" days. He also writes with emotion about a walk he took with John Wheeler, who as a young man took the same walk with Einstein. This sense of passing on a tradition from one generation to the next is at the heart of conservatism. Rovelli, like Weisskopf, is prepared to write about science and civilization in the most general terms.

Recently, at an international conference, I met a young researcher, brilliant in technique, with whom I spoke about two theories: general relativity and "N = 4 supersymmetric Yang–Mills theory." When I mentioned the fact that one of these theories had been experimentally verified and the other not, he asked me frankly, "Which one?" And he was not joking.

Gubser, The Little Book of String Theory

The more abstract physical theory gets, the more vague become the popular expositions, and parts of this book are really vague. Still, it is pleasant to read, even for someone who is not crazy about hypothetical physics. The best part is near the end, where high-powered "gauge/string duality" is applied to something real (the quark-gluon plasma, observed experimentally at places like RHIC).

Gaillard, A Singularly Unfeminine Profession

Mary K. Gaillard is a distinguished professor of physics at Berkeley, where she has been chairman of the department. To get there she had to face a long series of slights and career obstacles. I am not part of the intended audience for this book, but I got a lot out of it. Everyone who took part in developing the standard model has a different perspective.

Should we recommend construction of a proton-proton collider, with an energy of 20 trillion billion electron volts per proton

That's a typo, unfortunately.

Nadis and Yau, From the Great Wall to the Great Collider. From the jacket flap:

Shing-Tung Yao is the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Physics at Harvard University, where he has served on the faculty since 1987. He is the winner of the Fields Medal, the National Medal of Science, the Crafoord Prize, the Veblen Prize, the Wolf Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Yau has received honorary degrees from ten universities. He is also the director of six mathematical institutes in China. Yau has written and edited more than twenty books and is the editor of numerous mathematics journals.

Yau is about as eminent in mathematics as it is possible to be. He is also leading an initiative to build a hadron collider in the range of 100 Tev in China. He is not just writing a book about it, either.

Although one extremely prominent Chinese leader did not give the proposal an outright yes, the response was not negative either.

Other scientific eminences support this proposal. There's a remarkable photo of an onstage panel with, among others, Yau, Incandela, Witten, Gross, 't Hooft, and Arkani-Hamed.

About 60% of this book is history covered elsewhere, but the rest, dealing with recent and future Chinese physics, is probably new to most people. There was support for building a proton collider in China even while Chairman Mao was alive, apparently based on a remark he made in 1964 that matter should be infinitely divisible.

the project was put on hold until October 1976 when the "Gang of Four" -- a faction of Communist Party leaders that were hostile to high-energy physics research and unfavorably disposed toward basic scientific research in general -- was finally deposed.

If all goes as planned, the collider will start up in 2042. As with the architects of cathedrals, some of the senior proponents may not be around to see it happen. Here in the US our time horizon is about one year ahead, and we prefer to pour money into bank bailouts and wars with the enemy country of the moment. Happy New Year.

Likewise!

Riordan, Hoddeson, and Kolb, Tunnel Visions

Subtitle: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider. Burton Richter calls this book "a true techno-thriller". That's doubtful. It is patient, impartial, and dense with bureaucratic detail. The story proceeds inexorably toward failure and avoids cheap shots.

At the end of a long day, the exhausted SSC director complained volubly about interference from the DOE and Congress. "...The SSC is becoming a victim of the revenge of the C students." Published in the Times, it was a politically damaging statement

Side note, someone should write a biography of Samuel Ting. Nadis and Yau:

Ting is, by most accounts, a driven personality who cannot easily be deterred from his goals, once telling the U.S. Department of Energy (after one of his proposals had been turned down): "I reject your rejection."

...It took tireless lobbying on Ting's part, and a vote by both houses of the U.S. Congress, to authorize an additional space shuttle flight that would put the AMS in orbit before the shuttle program was terminated for good. "Without (Ting's) absolute unwillingness to give up, we would not have gotten it," says former U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who helped secure funding for the project.

Shortly before the instrument's scheduled launch in 2010, Ting decided to remove the powerful superconducting magnet at the center of the device and replace it with a permanent magnet that would be somewhat weaker yet would enable the experiment to keep running many years longer. That last-minute switch caused an additional delay, resulting in another missed flight, but the AMS finally lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center on May 16, 2011.

Riordan et al:

Rumors circulated that the huge industrial firm Martin Marietta planned to prepare an M&O proposal in collaboration with MIT professor and Nobel laureate Samuel Ting.

Ting versus the combined management of all American high-energy physics labs would have been an interesting competition.

Nations that attempt to go it alone on such immense projects are probably doomed to failure like the Superconducting Super Collider.

Compare previous book. Eventually the SSC complex was used as a set for a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.

Taubes, Nobel Dreams

A profile of Carlo Rubbia in the early 80s, when after discovering various things that didn't exist, he discovered the W and Z, won the Nobel Prize, and went on nearly to discover more things that didn't exist.

Steinberger had been Rubbia's advisor at Columbia, and had worked with him for several years at CERN. But then he had broken with Rubbia, and now the two never talked.

When I tracked down some of the students, post-docs, and assistant professors Rubbia had taken on at Harvard, I found that many of them had before long left Rubbia, or left physics altogether. One dropped out and went to business school. Another dropped out and floated around the California drug crowd; a third drove a cab in Cambridge for years; several just disappeared. I found one working successfully in industry in California, who told me that he had been in love with physics until he met Rubbia, and that anything bad I had heard about the man was probably true. Of those who are left in high-energy physics, few still have pleasant dealings with Rubbia. One told me, "You need a skin like a lion and a heart like Jesus to work with him." Another said, "He's just a crazy man."

The Italian translation of this book is called "The Nobel Hunt," which is more accurate.

"Carlo is a high-energy physics animal, perfectly adapted to the milieu. Those who complain about him are no longer adapted to the milieu."

This is physics red in tooth and claw.

At this time Sulak was refused tenure at Harvard and turned to the University of Michigan for both tenure and support on the proton decay experiment. Rubbia wrote a letter of "dis-recommendation" for Sulak that has become renowned among Harvard physics alums. As he described it, "Essentially everything that Carlo had done wrong in the previous eight years was attributed to me. Many of these things I didn't heve anything to do with. It was explicit as to how I had screwed this up or screwed that up." Sulak received tenure in spite of the letter, however, being helped considerably by recommendations from Glashow and Weinberg, and also by a telegram from Glashow suggesting that Michigan ignore one of the letters from Harvard since one of his colleagues "might be mad."

Rubbia inevitably became the general director of CERN, and helped to kill the SSC by spreading FUD.

Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance

Quantum nonlocality was swept under the rug for a long time, but these days it's all over the place.

Einstein foresaw these difficulties. "Perhaps... we must also give up, by principle, the space-time continuum," he wrote. "It is not unimaginable that human ingenuity will some day find methods which will make it possible to proceed along such a path. At the present time, however, such a program looks like an attempt to breathe in empty space."

This book contains some very thin air.

A faraway object is actually sitting right next to you; it looks small because it really *is* small. You can't touch it not because it's distant but because it's so tiny that your fingers lack the finesse to manipulate it. When things grow or shrink, we perceive that as movement toward or away from us.

Musser's style is annoying ("That is why modern particle accelerators have to be so ginormous"), but that is the way people write these days.

It's hard to make progress in this area.

"I wonder whether I should spend my life doing this. It's not like you see a lot of results." When I caught up with her again a year later, she had left science to study industrial design.

Quantum mechanics keeps getting stranger. Here is a more recent article by Musser.

Just watched the Jane and Stephen Hawking movie. Meh.

Thanks for your continued interstellar work in this thread, alimosina.

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

Richard Garwin turned 95 on Friday.