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

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.

Hawking must be one of the most overrated "popular" science writers ever. Every now and then he gets publicity for some inane "aliens will invade" or "robots will rise up and kill us" think-piece. If he wasn't reductively seen as a genius in a wheelchair then nobody would care what he had to say. Suspect the movie is heavy on that interpretation of him.

Of Tunnel, Nobel or Spooky - which should I pick if I can only pick one?

Of Tunnel, Nobel or Spooky - which should I pick if I can only pick one?

Nobel Dreams if you can find it. It's a narrative with vivid characters. Tunnel is painstaking historical scholarship, and Spooky is a grab-bag of past and present ideas, interesting but which you can pick up through articles like the one linked or Wikipedia.

Wondering about this new book about gravity waves.

Freund, A Passion for Discovery

A short book of anecdotes and reflections. Freund is a serious person who writes in a deceptively casual manner.

Nicolae Ceaușescu's daughter Zoia was a mathematician. Wikipedia: "Allegedly, her parents were unhappy with their daughter's choice of doing research in mathematics, so the Institute was disbanded in 1975."

According to Freund, Zoia didn't return home one night and her parents ordered the secret police to find her. She was in a hotel room with a boyfriend, also a mathematician. Her parents were so outraged that they shut down the Institute of Mathematics. The institute's math journal stopped being published. Eventually it reappeared, with Zoia as the editor.

Freund also writes about Oppenheimer behaving badly. Weinberg:

Oppenheimer always sat in the front row, asking questions that demonstrated that he knew as much about the speaker's subject as the speaker. Of course he was showing off, but no one else could have gotten away with it. He *did* know as much as the speaker.

Freund explains that it was done with preprints, which were scarce in those pre-electronic, pre-copier days. Oppenheimer always got preprints.

After receiving his "That is a very good question..." compliment, Oppenheimer would turn around from his first row seat with the demeanor of a pianist receiving applause for having performed a technically difficult piece.

Kerson Huang (...) introduced a parameter and Oppie interrupted:

"Kerson, what about the sign of this parameter"?

"That is a very good question." Oppie took his bow and Kerson went on "Its sign must either be plus or minus" -- a polite way of saying it is totally irrelevant. Ten minutes later Kerson introduced a second parameter and emphasized that it must be positive, its sign can never be minus, making it clear that Oppie had asked his prepared question in the wrong place. The people could barely suppress their laughter.

That was over fifty years ago. Here is Huang in 2013 presenting a theory of dark matter.

the Einstein era lasted to about 1925 when, as we saw, Heisenberg appeared on the stage. The Heisenberg era endured till 1943 and was followed by a transitional period dominated in a sense by Enrico Fermi. During this Fermi era physicists began exploring the subnuclear realm using ever more powerful accelerators. Then in the early Fifties Murray Gell-Mann was anointed and the Gell-Mann era extended into the early Seventies, followed by the Gerard 't Hooft era and finally beginning the the Eighties the Edward Witten era whose end is now approaching.

Maybe this is the Nima Arkani-Hamed era.

Miller, 137: Jung, Pauli, and the Story of a Scientific Obsession

Farmelo's biography of Dirac is subtitled Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom. Dirac wasn't a mystic at all, but Pauli was. Farmelo on Miller: "The book serves as the first popular biography of this outstanding scientist and is long overdue."

Pauli had a psychological crisis when his first marriage ended and turned to Jung, which began a decades-long association. Jung included a lot of Pauli's dreams in his books. They also collaborated on a book about synchronicity. The only true example of synchronicity was the famous way mechanical things would break whenever Pauli was nearby.

it is striking that Oppenheimer should have turned down such a distinguished scientist (for the Manhattan Project). Perhaps the Pauli effect was on Oppenheimer's mind? After all, there was plenty of delicate machinery, not to mention powerful explosives, at the site.

This is a biography of Pauli with a lot about Jung, but both were very interesting. Things are left out (Pauli wrote down a Yang-Mills type theory before Yang and Mills but didn't publish it, and when Yang gave a lecture on it Pauli harassed Yang until Oppenheimer told Pauli to shut up) and what is put in (dreams and numerology) wouldn't matter if it wasn't about Pauli.

Jung referred not to "my" but to "our dream psychology," a phrase he never used to anyone else. His patient had become a co-worker.

Pauli had dreams in which a Chinese woman appeared. Later, a real Chinese woman showed experimentally that parity was violated. He took that as a message from the collective unconscious instead of a funny coincidence.

http://images.iop.org/objects/ccr/cern/52/10/26/CCins3_10_12.jpg

All this didn't prevent Pauli from having a manic episode later in life in which he collaborated with Heisenberg on a wrong theory of everything, and may have encouraged it.

Do alchemy and solar myths have anything to do with the self? Shakespeare is probably a more valuable guide than Jung.

Steinhardt and Turok, Endless Universe

The authors invented the ekpyrotic cosmological model.

According to Wikipedia, current versions of the model avoid the use of branes and extra dimensions, but those were developed later. The book describes two infinite branes 10^-30 centimeters apart, which collide periodically and create Big Bangs. The good part is the authors' account of how their ideas came together.

The book makes a case against inflation. The BICEP2 results initially seemed to confirm inflation and rule out their model, but that turned out not to be the case. More data is on the way.

Theoretical physics is in some respects similar to certain Asian philosophies, according to which enlightenment is attained only at the price of great pain and personal suffering.

Frampton, Did Time Begin? Will Time End?

This is a 100-page book that doesn't waste time. It is an essay on the author's idea that the equation of state for dark energy could be less than -1, and that plus certain branes can make the universe cyclical.

The author subsequently made the news for other reasons. He'll want to avoid that the next time around.

Penrose, Cycles of Time

Roger Penrose's huge book The Road To Reality provides "a reason to live," according to Jaron Lanier. That's a high bar for this book to meet, but it is worth reading. It has a very interesting treatment of the thermodynamics of gravitation and the low entropy of the big bang. Penrose does not use string theory, but wants the rest mass of all particles to fade away leaving a timeless universe that can be extended into another one at an asymptotic boundary.

Penrose is in the English tradition of speculative cosmology (Eddington, Milne, Hoyle). He even discusses the large number coincidences of Dirac.

The appendices contain more 2-spinor formalism than most books published by Knopf. A few Weyl curvature tensors have leaked into the main part of the book.

After all this cyclical speculation it's a relief to turn to getting observational results.

Levin, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space

This book appeared a month or so after the announcement that gravitational waves were observed. The author had already been doing interviews for a few years. Or, as she puts it:

We put aside misgivings. We're at the summit already, the surface of the Earth. The summit is a location, wherever we are. It's also a time, in our future, when the advanced machine will be fully operational. On the ascent we lost Weber and, for all intents and purposes, Ron Drever. Still, the numbers on the climb grow. No matter who falls away, others take their place, and the ascent continues. the expedition is alive; the march picks up pace and heads toward the collision.

This book is really writerly.

His observations synced with the dark phases of the Moon, he'd travel into the heavier dusk to dawn of the countryside, receptive to pale astronomical flashes, the Moon redirecting the sunlight away from the Earth, the less luminous messages straining at visibility... He was surveying the skies before he drilled deeper.

Scientists are like those levers or knobs or those boulders helpfully screwed into a climbing wall. Like the wall is some cemented material made by mixing knowledge, which is a purely human construct, with reality, which we can only access through the filter of our minds. There's an important pursuit of objectivity in science and nature and mathematics, but still the only way up the wall is through the individual people, and they come in specifics -- the French guy, the German guy, the American girl. So the climb is personal, a truly human endeavor, and the real expedition pixelates into individuals, not Platonic forms. In the end it's personal, as much as we want to believe it's objective.

The author also has a first-person, present tense, diaristic mode.

Some are affixing cables, some are sitting underneath the tube near a gate valve and doing something, I don't know what, but I take note of their confidence. No one tells anyone else what to do. Everyone seems to understand the next step needed and seems expert. One person is in full bunny suit behind temporary clean-room drapes. He stands on top of a structure. Is that my friend Aidan? He would be installing parts of the thermal compensation system, which adjusts for distortions of the mirror due to laser heating. But it's hard to make out individuals under a bunny suit and it's not like you can drop in and chat, so I fall onto my stomach and crawl to the civilization side of the arms.

I'm infiltrating the experimentalists' ranks. I have questions. Geniune questions that are not taxing and are not intended as tests of anyone's competence. They are the experts on the instrument. I'm the outsider. So I'm glad when the initial curiosity over my attendance on the best night of the week, Taco Tuesdays, subsides -- Jamie says, in an undertone, "you're a scientific dignitary," I hope without sarcasm -- and the drinks flow and inappropriate stories are told and I become one of the guys.

The thick subjectivity makes a curious contrast with the indifference of nature. It's a great story in any case.

That linked Frampton story was fascinating. For what it's worth, the two novels by that journalist, Maxine Swann, are really good.

The Levin book quotes are lovely. Will seek that one out.

Oh, it's Janna Levin! Her "A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines" is a great novel.

Money!

Took a copy of that Janna Levin book out of library and skipped. Yes, very interesting angle -the human angle!- and writing, as you guys point out.

Ok, i just finished Levin's book, and really enjoyed it. Thanks for bringing it to our attention!

Well, this is odd.

Wilczek, A Beautiful Question

Another book by the well-known Wilczek.

Does the world embody beautiful ideas?

The author calls this a "meditation." There is a chronological sequence from Plato to Newton to Maxwell to the 20th century, but the history is very abstract. The tone of one of certainty and the subject matter is completely aestheticized. There is certain to be something in this book that you've never thought of before.

That decision will lead me to use some slightly unconventional expressions, such as "quantum fluid theory" where you would elsewhere find "quantum field theory."

The author's exuberance and habit of replacing conventional terms with new ones can grate on those of a more saturnine temperament.

Happy Birthday to Isaac Newton, a first rate Lucasian professor by any standard!

Famiglietti, The Flight of AMS
Pol, Inside CERN
Ginter, LHC: Large Hadron Collider

Three collections of experiment porn.

Essentially all of the photos in Famiglietti can be found here.

The AMS hasn't discovered any anti-universes yet, but it has found something. Here is a really good interview with Samuel Ting.

Pol is mostly interested in offices, corridors, and people at work. The buildings at CERN are kept shabby and there is not enough room, so some sit at desks in incongruous places. The usual joke posters that white-collar people put around their work areas. This book is nicely bound and printed on thick paper.

Ginter was given a lot of access to the experiment halls and he has produced a large square coffee-table book, suitable for buying as a gift and then keeping for yourself. In that generous spirit, happy new year.

(They had quite a book launch)

Ed yong: i contain multitudes -- rather wonderful book on the microbiome

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/science/ron-drever-physicist-who-helped-confirm-einstein-theory-dies-at-85.html

Lederman and Teresi, The God Particle

This famous book launched the most loathed epithet in physics. Leon Lederman was a central figure in experimental high-energy physics for decades and was director of Fermilab for years. This book was written at the height of enthusiasm for the SSC, of which Lederman was naturally one of the main promoters, which seemed to be just around the corner, and which this book was surely intended to promote. Time and CERN have passed the book by. The best parts convey the feeling of what it's like to stay up all night with an experiment.

Blurb from the WSJ: "A relentless gagman, Mr. Lederman treats us to a host of jokes..."

Weinberg's book The First Three Minutes was one of the best, though now dated, popular accounts of the birth of the universe. (I always thought the book sold so well because people thought it was a sex manual.)

(rimshot)

A meticulous, driven, precise, organized experimenter, Ting worked with me at Columbia for a few years, had several good years at the DESY lab near Hamburg, Germany, and then went to MIT as a professor. He quickly became a force (the fifth? sixth?) to be reckoned with in particle physics. My letter of recommendation deliberately played up some of his weak points -- a standard ploy in getting someone hired -- but I did it to conclude: "Ting -- a hot and sour Chinese physicist."

These are the jokes. After marching grimly through 200 pages of history stuffed with gags, the reader reaches a chapter about accelerators, Lederman's specialty. Here the book gets better, although the gags don't.

There are better books out there. This is melancholy.

Bartusiak, Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony: The Story of a Gamble, Two Black Holes, and a New Age of Astronomy

Maybe not essential if you've already read Levin. Bartusiak doesn't employ Levin's novelistic magnification of personalities, but she gives a lot more context. There's also material on future projects (assuming we don't all get blown up first).

De, Unchallenged Privilege: The Billion-Dollar Trilateral Gravitational-Wave Discovery Scam

No wait -- it's fake physics! Bibhas De exposes the entire LIGO experiment as a colossal hoax.

Rainer Weiss has been promoted as LIGO's original architect, a kind of an Argo to Thorne's Jason. Facts on the ground prove otherwise: He is the architect of LIGO's doom.

Some smart people agree with him on some points. It would be good to see his charges answered.

what the actual fuck at that last book on ligo

i know and work with some people who work on ligo, maybe i should buy a copy and challenge them to refute it

Sure, why not? Probably nothing to it. I don't have enough background to have an opinion.

Rigden, Hydrogen

Hydrogen might seem banal.

One such conversation was with Steven Weinberg in Austin, Texas. When our paths crossed in Austin, he asked me, "What are you writing?" I told him about the hydrogen book. After a pregnant pause he said, "That's nice... that's nice."

Hydrogen and its cousins are so simple that any deviations from theory imply that the theory is wrong. Rigden follows hydrogen through quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, the strong force, masers, NMR, deuterium in cosmology, and the Bose-Einstein condensate (among other things). If you're bored by this you're bored by physics.

Rigden doesn't mention hydrogen bombs, like the one NK just exploded. Get your reading done while you can. I'm taking my own advice.

That sounds like a really good and elegant idea for a book. Will seek.

Muller, Now

This is a pretty good review.

Richard Muller started an experiment to observe the CMB in the 1970s. Later he invited George Smoot to join the experiment and eventually to lead it. Smoot won the Nobel Prize in 2006. Muller also started an experiment to observe distant supernovas to measure the Hubble constant in the 1970s. Later he asked his student Saul Perlmutter to lead it. Perlmutter won the Nobel Prize in 2011. Muller has very good ideas. This book is speculative and veers off into philosophy, but Muller's experimental point of view grounds it better than other speculative books.

I tried to enter this special group but was rejected, although I had an advantage in comparison with other students – I had passed the first examination session at the Physical Faculty. David Kirzhnits (a future corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences) was also rejected, although he had a recommendation from Landau.

It is interesting how he got this recommendation. Kirzhnits was a student at MAI (Moscow Aviation Institute). The teacher of physics (a women) noticed his nonordinary abilities. She knew Landau and told him about this talented student. Landau invited Kirzhnits for a conversation. After the conversation Landau said: “I will write a letter of recommendation to Predvoditelev – the dean of the University Physical Faculty.” He took a sheet of paper and a pen, sat down and started to think. “I cannot write 'Dorogoi (dear) Alexander Savvich'" said Landau... "He is not dear to me. I cannot write 'Uvazhaemyi ..' (respected): I have no respect for him.” He thought a little more, then exclaimed: “Oh, I will write him: 'Dear' – in English 'dear' has no definite meaning." The reason of rejection of Kirzhnits and me was our nationality – antisemitism was on the rise.

-- B. L. Ioffe

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/UA035-10.jpg

Meanwhile, things are not looking so great on the energy frontier.

Have you read that Dennis Overbye book, what is it called Einstein in Love?

Giaever, "I Am The Smartest Man I Know"

Ivar Giaever was born in 1929 to a poor family in Norway, emigrated to Canada and then the US, and got a job by chance at GE where someone suggested doing experiments on quantum tunnelling. He won the Nobel Prize in 1973.

they had asked NTH, my alma mater, to support me, but the only letter they got from Norway was that somebody with my name had graduated from NTH in 1952 in mechanical engineering with bad grades.

The title is intentionally ironic for a book in which things just sort of happen. Yuval Ne'eman:

But there was someone who gave Feynman a taste of his own medicine. The Norwegian-American physicist Ivar Giaever once suffered through a lecture with Feynman. Two years later, he came back to Caltech to give another lecture. This time, however, Giaever not only answered Feynman to the point, but also made him look stupid. Obviously, he had done a good job of preparing ahead, deliberately slipping in remarks to provoke Feynman -- who walked straight into his trap. Everyone in the lecture hall could feel how stunned Feynman was.

Typically, Giaever writes that he hadn't planned anything, he just happened to say something humorous and everyone took it as a crushing reply.

Giaever started dating his future wife when they were 14, and writes that they are still in love at 86. (Aw.)

http://mediatheque.lindau-nobel.org/Content/Assets/Large/34126___cover.jpg?635465528037670000

No, I haven't read that one.

"Barish said he had set an alarm in anticipation of a call from Nobel officials — though when it did come at 2:41 a.m., it beat his alarm by 4 minutes."

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-nobel-prize-physics-201701003-story.html

Nice interview with Weinberg here. (It's the 50th anniversary of his famous paper.)

Feynman, QED
Schwinger, Einstein's Legacy

The two Alps of mid-20th-century American theoretical physics. Schwinger had his centennial in February, and Feynman will have his in May.

Feynman was the Damon Runyon of physics lecturing, while Schwinger was the Henry James. Editors have made these books less idiosyncratic. Both books are a slightly dated at the edges, but timeless at the core. They are as close as ordinary people can get to those unimaginable minds.

Kalai, Gina Says

Over a decade ago, Smolin and Woit wrote popular books criticizing string theory. This led to a lot of dispute on blogs, including Woit's. Several unusual characters took part. The author of this book has collected the exchanges between his sock puppet and everyone who responded to "her."

One participant writes:

Personally I considered “Gina” to be a tedious semi-troll and was glad when Woit decided to ban “her”...

Looking back on those discussions now, they seem both tedious and entertaining at the same time.

Tedious for sure. The book describes a psychological experiment by Kalai (except for an appendix about math). Passive-aggressive "Gina" contributes nothing of value, and Kalai presents "her" the way a first-grade teacher might present a student. It's a relief to escape.

Vignale, The Beautiful Invisible

Theoretical physics for poets, almost literally. Not only does the author constantly refer to poetry, he sometime sounds like Wallace Stevens.

Needless to say, this tangential reality is purely conjectural -- it did not happen and could not happen in real life, but its value lies not in having or not having happened; it lies in giving a sharp meaning to a concept

There is a great chapter on spin near the end. Since QED covers everything except spin, it's a nice complement. I wish the author would go farther into his specialty at this level.

Recent revival of this thread reminds me that this winter was high school application season here in NYC and during one of the many accompanying discussions one parent said something about Townsend Harris not having any Nobel Prize winners and I had to correct