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

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

Nice. The NYC public school chase is bizarre, but that's what you get in a world city. There's probably an ilx thread on it.

Frank Wilczek went to Martin Van Buren. So did an Economics Nobelist. So it's got that going for it.

Considered starting such a thread but thought better of it

Reinders, The Life, Science and Times of Lev Vasilevich Shubnikov

In a few years Shubnikov discovered the Shubnikov-de Haas effect, type-II superconductors, and the Meissner effect. His work was in advance of theory until the 1950s. He probably would have won a Nobel prize eventually.

Rjabinin and Shubnikov’s discovery was actually earlier then Meissner and Ochsenfeld’s, and that this negative assessment by Landau, who is said to have called the results ‘bullshit’ (chush’ sobach’ja), was the main reason that it was sent to the journal later. It shows that having a theorist close at hand is not always an advantage.

Mezhlauk approved Shubnikov's arrest on July 24, 1937, and Yezhov signed Shubnikov's execution order on October 28. Yezhov had Mezhlauk arrested on December 1 and shot in 1938. Yezhov was shot in 1940.

In Soviet civilization everything was connected to everything else. A lot of this book is about other people.

As late as 1930, for example, (Frenkel) was a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota in that ‘most despicable’ of all countries, the United States of America. He had also played an important role in the discussion with the ‘philosophers’ about whether modern physics (relativity theory and quantum mechanics) could be reconciled with dialectical materialism. In this discussion the Czech-born ‘philosopher’ Ernest Kolman (21) had accused him in 1931 of Trotskyism and ‘rotten liberalism’.

(21) Ernest Kolman (1892–1979), a loathsome character who was especially keen on ‘wrecking in science’ which he spotted everywhere, often with serious consequences for the persons he ‘exposed’; he initiated the Luzin affair with the publication of the anonymous article “On enemies with a Soviet mask” (O vragakh v sovetskoj maske) in Pravda of 3 July 1936 and also accused other scientists, such as Landau, Vernadsky, Tamm, and Vavilov, of ‘wrecking’.

This Kolman attended a famous-at-the-time conference in London in 1931.

Why was Kolman even there? A clue lies in the disturbing fact that not only was Kolman the sole surviving member of the delegation to be interviewed about it by historian of science Loren Graham in the 1970s, he was practically the only member to survive to the end of World War II. Every other member (besides Ioffe) was executed in the purges or died in a prison camp. That they experienced that fate, and that Kolman did not, are related. On August 22, 1971 (before his defection) and on April 22, 1977 (afterward), Graham asked Kolman about the experience, and the philosopher related that he had been Communist Party secretary to the delegation, specifically tasked with keeping the others—many suspected of ideological deviations—in line. Party members were required to emphasize Marxism in their talks, and Kolman reported that Bukharin had fallen short of the mark, but Hessen (whom Kolman had previously attacked in print) had performed well. (This did not save Hessen; he was executed in December 1936.) Kolman had other duties, such as successfully helping to persuade physicist Peter Kapitza, then living in exile in Cambridge, to return to the Soviet Union.

-- Michael D. Gordin, "The Trials of Arnost K.: The Dark Angel of Dialectical Materialism"

Hessen, or Gessen, had earlier denounced relativity as un-Marxist and said there should be an ether. In 1931 Bronstein, Ivanenko, Gamow, and Landau sent him a postcard agreeing with him, calling Einstein a kook, and adding that they would study caloric fluid and phlogiston as well. They illustrated it with a cartoon of a cat (Hessen was supposed to have looked like a cat). It must have seemed funny at the time.

After being persuaded to return to the Soviet Union, Kapitza was duly barred from leaving, but not actually arrested.

Landau, Shubnikov and others could have seen it coming. They could have known from earlier experience (of Ivanenko, Bursian, Korets around 1935) that they were dealing with a criminal regime and that they were playing with a fire that would eventually consume them... They played a dangerous game and must have known it was a dangerous game.

Gamow saw what was coming and got away.

Zeldovich recalled the animosity of all Soviet physicists towards Gamow since he did not return to Moscow after the famous Solvay meeting of 1933... By this action Gamow hampered the possibility for all Soviet physicists to travel abroad after that date. He recalled how he was motivated by a matter of pure confrontation against Gamow for some time. As soon as Gamow presented the theory of a hot universe he himself presented an alternative theory of a cold universe, initially at zero temperature. The process of building up heavy elements was stopped in his theory by the presence of a degenerate sea neutrinos and only hydrogen would be born from an expanding Friedman universe. He stressed again, how building such a theory was motivated ideologically and politically. He recognized the crucial role of the Penzias and Wilson discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation which disproved his ‘political’ theory and proved instead the validity of Gamow’s theory. He finally concluded “Yes: although Gamow made many mistakes he is one of the greatest Soviet scientists!” And then recalling the fundamental contributions Gamow made to the understanding of the DNA structure he asked: “How many Nobel prizes did Gamow receive? Two?” I answered: “None.”

-- Remo Ruffini, "Moments with Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich"

Amaldi, The Adventurous Life of Friedrich Georg Houtermans

Houtermans grew up in Vienna.

Fritz started to show such a difficult behaviour that his mother, through her friend Anna Freud, arranged for Fritz to be taken care of by Anna’s father, Sigmund Freud. The sessions, however, did not last long because when Fritz realized that he had to relate his dreams to Freud, he and his imaginative cousin Anni began to invent dreams, which Freud soon discovered and stopped the psychoanalytic treatment.

Later he studied at Göttingen.

Once Fritz, with the permission of Franck, announced at the Colloquium the presence of a Russian professor in Göttingen and then introduced into the lecture room two dancing bears, whose owner he had met in the street just before.

Houtermans moved to Kharkov against Pauli's advice, and was duly arrested as part of the same fake conspiracy as Shubnikov. It was a common method to implicate people who were dead or out of reach. After being tortured, Houtermans claimed that he had been following orders from Laszlo Tisza, who had managed to get out of the country. (For a while, Tisza and Twitter existed simultaneously.)

Houtermans was handed over to the Gestapo but released. He worked for von Ardenne's independent nuclear weapons project in where else but the research department of the postal ministry. In a bizarre episode, he visited Kharkov in uniform under German occupation.

Houtermans was a fictional character with his greatness, his weaknesses, his internal conflicts, all governed by his humanity, his generosity and his particular personal humor that could not be tolerated by any totalitarian regime. This is why I believe that only a novelist of great talent could describe his character...

Dyson, Maker of Patterns

Freeman Dyson writes like an angel and is endlessly quotable. This book is an autobiography in the form of letters to his family, with commentary. There is surprisingly little overlap with Disturbing the Universe.

In my time as a professor I lost three young people whom I had invited as members, one by suicide and two who ended up in mental institutions. I do not know how many I saved. I only know that the institute is a dangerous place for young people, and as a professor, I bore a heavy responsibility for their mental health.

Dyson is not made of the same stuff as we are. Not only is he mathematically brilliant and ageless, he has more empathy than most people and is able to make friends with anyone.

Wolfgang Pauli, the great physicist from Zurich, was talking in German to a group of respectful listeners... Pauli told how Schwinger had come to Zurich and explained the new American physics clearly, not like the nonsense that Dyson had been writing. At that moment Fierz pushed me forward and said, "Professor Pauli, please allow me to introduce you to Professor Dyson." Pauli replied, "Oh, that does not matter, he does not understand German," and continued his discourse. Afterwards Pauli always treated me with great respect, and we became good friends.

These letters show superhuman forbearance when his wife runs away with his old college friend whom he'd helped to get a job (the blood-freezing Georg Kreisel). Luckily for the kids, they stay with Dyson, who soon finds lasting happiness. The reader can't help rooting for him.

Freeman Dyson, autumn 1948:

Oppenheimer is unreceptive to the new ideas in general and in particular to Feynman. Oppenheimer shocked me when he arrived by taking a semidefeatist attitude to the whole business... on Sunday I felt so irritable that I wrote the enclosed letter to Oppenheimer... On Sunday night I went for a walk into a field outside the town, where the sky was unobscured by lights, and sat down on the grass to make up my mind whether I should send the letter off. After some time I had decided to do it, and then suddenly the sky was filled with the most brilliant northern lights I have ever seen. They lasted only about five minutes, but were a rich bloodred and filled half the sky. Whether the show really was staged for my benefit I doubt, but certainly it produced the same psychological effect as if it had been.

Wallace Stevens, autumn 1948:

This is nothing until in a single man contained,
Nothing until this named thing nameless is
And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house

On flames. The scholar of one candle sees
An arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.

Ha, recently took that Dyson book out of the library, but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet (pvmic) whilst looking for another book written by a physicist- who is from Memphis!- that is not about physics.

More info here.

A colourful figure on this scene was Claud Lovelace. Austere in appearance, booming in voice, confident in attitude, he had been notorious while holding an appointment at CERN for his habit of sitting in the front row at other people's seminars reading the pile of preprints he had brought with him, but occasionally looking up to pose a pointed question. It is said that once, when Lovelace himself gave a seminar and the rest of Theory Division by arrangement turned up, each with his own pile of reading matter, he was not amused. Claud had gone into the resonance-hunting business in a big way. There was by now so much data to fit, and so many assumptions necessary to make the task tractable, that one could always indulge in a straight-faced application of statistics to 'prove' the total unreasonableness of a colleague's view, judged from one's own perspective. Lovelace pronounced the 'best-fit' results of his principal rival, Gordon Moorhouse from Glasgow, to have only a chance of one in 10^166 of being right. In reply, the milder Moorhouse conceded a chance of one in 10^24 of Lovelace's correctness.

-- Polkinghorne

That year I was fired by CERN for discovering too many nucleon resonances (all of which were subsequently confirmed)

-- Lovelace

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/400/1*jBHiPADEY2dq_vJA_5zDPQ.jpeg

Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

Bell Labs in all its majesty.

(John R. Pierce) was so thin and slight that even in late middle age he could fit into the slender office lockers that staffers used to stow their jackets or lab coats. "People think you can't fit into these, but you really can," Pierce said one day to Henry Landau, a Bell mathematician, who looked up from his desk to see Pierce walk unannounced into his office, squeeze himself into Landau's locker, close the locker door, open it, squeeze himself out, and then exit the room.

The building in Holmdel stood empty for a long time, a ruin from a vanished civilization, but they've adapted it to our ways.

Is that John Polkinghorne? I've enjoyed a couple of his books, should get more.

Yeah, Rochester Roundabout. If you like that quotation you will like the book.

Thanks! I have ordered it.

("Principles of Quantum Electrodynamics") was first translated into English and then into Russian. The Russian translation became a real bestseller with 50,000 copies sold. When I asked how this could be possible, I received the disillusioning reply, "Well, here all scientific books are cheap because the state subsidizes them. In the far corners of Siberia paper is expensive. That's why farmers buy these kinds of books and use them to roll their cigarettes."

Bruno Touschek once told me about a time when all of the civilian casualties of a military action were mentioned and that Heisenberg had replied, "but they were just Poles."

-- Thirring, The Joy of Discovery

Bojowald, Once Before Time

A popular account of loop quantum cosmology. It is translated from German, with quotations from Goethe, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Wittgenstein.

One may view this quantum gravitational base as analogous to the matter vacuum, but it is much more ominous... The vacuum of loop quantum gravity is of an inconceivable emptiness: no sound, no light, no stuff, no space; only time as a faintly glimmering hope to leave behind this wasteland.

Ashtekar is a mathematical physicist, an analyst equipped with technical brilliance and unparalleled mastery of the dark art of scientific power play. Senior to Rovelli and Smolin, he quite naturally saw the leadership role fall into his hands. And he seized it.

Especially Nietzsche. This book is for fans of hypothetical physics. It is non-technical but more demanding than others in this area (e.g. Ferriera).

Gordon, The Brookhaven Connection

Most people know Brookhaven National Laboratory as an underfunded but legendary institution where excellent science is done, home of the last American particle accelerator and other research facilities. Crease wrote a good history of its first 25 years.

The Initial Program Report called for an electrostatic accelerator to be built for the low-energy region... Van de Graaff himself had founded the High Voltage Engineering Corporation (HVEC; the company claimed the trademark "Van de Graaff") with two colleagues, John Trump (uncle of Donald, future real estate tycoon) and Denis Robinson, to build the machines commercially.

But Crease left out the most amazing part: BNL's secret research into time travel and alien contact! (Likely inspired by the nearby Montauk Project.)

"It was a representative of the Galactic Federation, or for want of a better term, an EBE. An EBE gave us the plans but didn't tell us how to follow them. The plans were a mathematical formula with a primer at the top of the page."

The story is reminiscent of Dante's Inferno, as the narrator is led by a guide through subterranean caverns, where unseen higher authorities with effectively magical powers are monitoring humanity's moral progress.

Suddenly, I looked up for a second at Mr. J and saw a strange expression on his face as he shook his head to say, "NO!" At the same time, I felt a gentle pressure on my right shoulder. As I turned slowly to my left and just before I fainted, I glimpsed a two-legged being staring intently at me through two beady reptilian eyes.

Unfortunately the narrative breaks off there and we haven't heard anything more. Maybe humanity is still not ready for the whole story. But the editor's note is dated summer 2001, soon after which the EBEs really let us down. For once John Trump's nephew can't be blamed. Happy New Year.

Thanks for all your good work on this thread, alimosina.

Just looked up that Bojowald book on a library app and the subject says Thriller, Thriller, Thriller.

Okay now it says Science, Physics, Nonfiction

More fiction than non, IMO.

RIP

http://www.heikegani.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Murray-Gell-Mann1.jpg

Murray the G?

He looks like he is channeling Harlan Ellison in that picture.

At Caltech Gell-Mann was almost as famous for his erudition as for his physics; he was enormously learned in subjects most of us didn't know existed. A story is told about a physicist, much bothered by this, who decided to become expert in some obscure corner of human knowledge, so that, just once, he could trump Gell-Mann. Of course, for the plan to work the subject had to be one that could be introduced naturally into the conversation. He knew that the dining room of the Caltech faculty club was decorated near the ceiling line with the heraldic shields of universities; he decided to learn blazonry, the technical descriptive language of heraldry. When next he had lunch with Gell-Mann at the faculty club, he allowed his gaze to drift upward. "How interesting," he said (and here I must make up babble, for I know no blazonry myself), "gules rampant on sable argent." Gell-mann looked up. "No," he said. "No, it's sable rampant on gules argent."

-- Sidney Coleman

Right. I believe he was known to be annoyed by Feyman’s clowning. Also think I heard about him hyper-pronouncing words of foreign origin such as “mayonnaise.”

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/08/magazine/the-man-who-knows-everything-murray-gell-mann.html

"Plectics" -- that one didn't catch on.

Plectic Murrayland

Wonder how this new Graham Farmelo book is.

Hoarding chalk.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2012/02/a_mile_or_two_off_yarmouth.html

Realizing that it will be difficult for a blind young man to find a girlfriend at the age of 18-19, Pontryagin's mother took into her family an orphan girl, Tasia (of his age), when her son was still a boy, and, when the time came, literally put her in bed with him. Tasia was an ordinary good-looking girl, and not stupid, completely undeservedly doomed to a bitter fate. She loved Lev Semyonovich from childhood. Having started studying at the Faculty of Mathematics at Moscow State University, Lev Semyononvich got into the intellectual elite and soon announced to Tasia that he would not live with her, because he would seek "true love", and she was too simple for him. Tasia studied biology at Moscow University; after graduating, she left for (Soviet) Georgia, where she did not marry, because she did not cease to love Lev Semyonovich. And Lev Semyonovich began to fall in love, I will not list the names of his "objects" -- the name to them is a legion -- I will only add one funny detail: they were all Jewish.

-- Rosa Berri

The detail is "funny", if that's the word, because Pontryagin was a notorious antisemite.

After reading about hypothetical matter, or mathematics pretending to be matter, it's a relief to read about actual data about real matter.

Hazen, Symphony in C

The author is the director of the Deep Carbon Observatory, which studies carbon on earth in the widest sense. This book cuts across atomic physics, geophysics, chemistry, biology and the origins of life, and nanoscience (graphene, nanotubes etc). Unlike popular books which have to spend chapters reviewing familiar topics before getting to something new, here new or unfamiliar material is on every page.

As well as being a very good writer, Hazen is a musician in an orchestra. The persistent symphonic metaphor used for organizing the book can be taken or left.

Werner and Eisenhardt, More Things in the Heavens

Though she be but little, she is fierce.

One doesn't hear a lot about the Great Observatories as such, but everyone knows about the Hubble Space Telescope. The Chandra is still on mission, and the Compton was crash-landed and replaced. This book is about the Spitzer Space Telescope for observing in the infrared.

Even the most cynical reader has to be amazed at all the data. "Torrents" of new exoplanets, planetary disk formation, star formation, galactic evolution, and the cosmic web of galactic cluster filaments. Not to mention buckyballs in space, measurement of the Milky Way bar (not the candy bar, but the bar at the center of our galaxy where the arms start), a ring of Saturn so huge that it would be twice the size of the moon if we looked up at it face-on from Earth, and the infrared signal from a collision of two neutron stars that was detected by LIGO. All this from a telescope about a yard across. It ran out of liquid helium after six years and some of its infrared channels shut down. The whole telescope is scheduled to shut down next month.

Galaxies can walk and chew gum at the same time.

These two made several other books I read this year seem pretty thin gruel.

RIP, Freeman Dyson. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/science/freeman-dyson-dead.html?referringSource=articleShare

Just coming here to post that. His autobiography is fascinating and I’ve long appreciated his NYRB pieces. Seems like he kept writing them right up to the end.

RIP Philip Anderson.

When one understands everything, one has gone crazy.

-- PWA

I hope this thread doesn't turn into a roll call this year.