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

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.

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

Kenneth Watson turned 101 yesterday.

Close, Elusive

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

Clary, Schrödinger in Oxford

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

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

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

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

-- Fritz Simon

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

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

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

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

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

Polchinski, Memories. More dispiriting than interesting.

Pontzen, The Universe in a Box

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

Parisi, In a Flight of Starlings

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

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

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

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

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

Not everyone can say that.

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

Hitler learns Jackson E&M