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

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.

RIP
Anderson accuses researchers of "looking under the streetlight".
I say this all the time, only in the variant "looking where the light is."

"looking under the streetlight"

A regrettable, but nearly universal, side effect of academic training and grant-funding dependence.

It turns out, contrary to my expectations, that funding is by no means necessary for creativity, in fact the relationship may be inverse.

I think it is more like this -- everyone has an age at which he stops thinking originally, but that age is enormously variable. I know good physicists whose useful lifespan is in the forties or younger -- the name I have for them is "young fogies" -- but I know plenty of others who haven't reached it at 80 or more.

RIP, JHC.

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."

https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07D7NFQQY/ref=atv_dp_watch_trailer?autoplay=trailer

I. M. Khalatnikov is 101!

Oh hi, I wrote a quiz that some of you might be interested in looking at. Guess I will post a link upon request.

???

^^^

I posted it on ILB as well but will repost here as well https://www.learnedleague.com/oneday.php?isaacnewton

I meant to say elsewhere on ILB.

ledge already took it

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

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

Deser, Forks in the Road

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

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

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

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

On Andre Petermann:

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

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

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

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

-- Anatoly Larkin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hubert Reeves to thread!

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