A Modest Construct

Posts tagged `physics`

¶ Physics for Future Presidents

Physics for Future Presidents by Richard A. Muller: Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.; Year: 2008; Pages: 384

I consider myself relatively well-informed when it comes to contemporary topics in politics and world affairs; this is especially true in topics of science, which tend to interest me. It becomes difficult to keep all the relevant facts organized, however, especially as the amount of knowledge necessary to cope with the news has grown.

Space exploration; nuclear energy; bioterrorism; global warming: these are only a few of the sensitive topics that a potential future president will have to deal with. This is exactly the hypothetical audience that Muller has written for: you, as reader, are a commander-in-chief-to-be, and are reading this as a primer to cut through the bullshit about the delicate decisions you will need to make.

¶ Death From the Skies!

Death From the Skies! by Philip Plait, Ph.D.: Publisher: Viking Adult; Year: 2008; Pages: 336

Call me a sucker, but I can’t seem to stay away from popular science books. When they’re good, they’re excellent (Outliers; the often-cited A Short History of Nearly Everything); when they’re bad, they can run the gamut from underwhelming (Physics of the Impossible) to “pretty damn bad” (Electric Universe).

I’m pleased to note, before getting to any discussion of substance, that Plait’s Death From the Skies! falls firmly in the former category.

¶ Condensed Knowledge

Condensed Knowledge by Will Pearson et al.: Publisher: Collins; Year: 2004; Pages: 345

My brother’s been reading mental_floss and its associated books for several years. Condensed Knowledge is, to the extent of my knowledge, the first of their [adjective] Knowledge compendia, essentially giant books of trivia. After having my appetite whetted by A.J. Jacobs (who, though is a contributor to mental_floss, does not have any material in this particular book), I decided to try my hand at one of these.

To be honest, Condensed Knowledge is a little hit-or-miss. Personally, I can’t quite figure out of it’s supposed to be a “Knowledge for Dummies” kind of book, or a “Bet You Didn’t Know…” kind of book. It’s organized into sections based on topic; e.g. “Condensed Religion,” “Condensed Geography,” “Condensed Art.” Each section contains a bunch of 1 or 2-page articles with a variable number of trivia. For example, “5 Famous Sculptors” or “7 Ancient Civilizations You Never Knew About.” Each subitem gets a little blurb.

Perhaps it’s just my own variable knowledge that made the book seem inconsistent. When I’m being told, somewhat condescendingly, about famous painters, I think to myself, “Why am I reading this again?” But when the books veers into the esoteric, like little-known painful rituals in history, it becomes genuinely interesting. Even within a section (each section being written by a different author or co-authors), there is remarkable inconsistency: religion, for instance, goes from the stupidly simple to the genuinely interesting.

Then, too, some of the authors seem to have a better grasp of neutrality than others. The author responsible for the philosophy section, for instance, really hates Jean-Paul Sartre, and made those feelings known on at least two separate occasions.

Remember, too, that the purposed of Condensed Knowledge is to tell you a little bit about a lot of things. There’s no in-depth analysis here; sometimes the author repeats a misconception or is so glib that they misrepresent their topic.

Despite its flaws, the book was a fun enough read. If nothing else, it should function similarly to Wikipedia: if you read a blurb that piques your knowledge, or that sounds suspicious, go research it. I know that happened with not a few topics in my case. In that respect, I suppose, the book has fulfilled its mission.

§1973 · February 8, 2008 · 1 comment · Tags: Book Reviews, books, economics, literature, memes, philosophy, physics, psychology, religion, reviews, science, sociology

¶ Black Bodies and Quantum Cats

Black Bodies and Quantum Cats by Jennifer Ouellette: Publisher: Penguin; Year: 2005; Pages: 336

At some point, my preconceptions of this book got crossed with another—likely Tyson’s Death by Black Hole, currently queued—and I expected it to be a collection of loosely-related physics articles. In fact, it is a chronology of anecdotes about important inventions or discoveries and the physical principles that underlie them.

One rhetorical tack that Ouellette likes to use is to introduce each anecdote or story with some applicable piece of modern culture—e.g. Buffy the Vampire Slayer as an illustration of chaos theory—which I’m sure is her attempt to popularize the subject and connect it, however tenuously, to the sugary pillars of modern televised culture. Xerography and electric paper? Think Harry Potter. Some examples are better than others.

I’ll admit, it does feel a bit like pandering, but the rest of Ouellette’s writing is still pretty good. My only other source of irritation was her insistence upon illustrating and describing what looks like Bohr’s atomic model, which isn’t considered accurate anymore. When she gets to quantum theory, she knows about electron “clouds,” but never uses that term and never specifies that this cloud model is a clarification of the simplistic satellite-like Bohr model.

It builds well, though: she starts with the earliest scientific discoveries and works her way forward through Galileo and Newton and Franklin, and through Morse, Edision, and the Age of Invention, through Einstein and Planck and finally string theory. I was aware of almost all of this history from Bill Bryson’s fantastic A Short History of Nearly Everything, and in fact Bryson’s history is much more detailed and informative (not to mentioned crossing many more branches of science), but Ouellette delves deeper into the mechanics of physics than Bryson dared.

As with most attempts to popularize esoteric subjects, Black Bodies and Quantum Cats both succeeds and fails. Ouelette’s book does a bit better than some, I think, but fails to capture the same magic as Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, a book she holds up as an icon of accessible science writing.

§1757 · March 13, 2007 · (No comments) · Tags: Bill Bryson, Book Reviews, books, physics, reviews, science

¶ A Brief History of Time

A Brief History of Time by Stephen W. Hawking: Publisher: Bantam Books; Year: 1988; Pages: 208

On the heels of a somewhat disappointing science book in this meme, I felt I’d be pretty safe with this one. Written in ’88, it’s a bit dated for a cosmology/astrophysics tome, but it’s landmark enough (cosmology for the layman? what a concept!) to merit it’s expansion in 1998. Sadly, my library only had the original.

While written in a distinctly different style than the subpar Electric Universe or the—dare I say it?—orgasmic A Short History of Nearly Everything, Hawking’s book manages to cover extremely highbrow scientific concepts in a way that, while still baffling, is most certainly readable. Take this excerpt, for example:

If the universe really is in such a quantum state, there would be no singularities in the history of the universe in imaginary time. It might seem therefore that my more recent work had completely undone the results of my earlier work on singularities. But, as indicated above, the real importance of the singularity theorems was that they showed that the gravitational field must become so strong that quantum gravitational effects could no longer be ignored. This in turn led to the idea that the universe could be finite in imaginary time but without boundaries or singularities. When one goes back to the real time in which we live, however, there will still appear to be singularities

Of course! It’s so simple! No, really, no matter how good a writer Stephen may be, his non-”Lucasian Professor of Mathematics” readers will only understand this material on a superficial level. Still, I found it absolutely fascinating, as Hawking manages to find a happy medium between technical specificity and reader-friendly vagueness. The only formula he includes is e=mc², and for very good reason: someone told him—kidding “on the square”—that every formula included halves the book’s sales numbers.

So, you never know what mathematician/cosmologist will end up penning a decent book. Had I let Brian Greene’s atrocious Nova special color my opinions of him, I never would have read The Fabric of the Cosmos, which was superb. Again, however, I must stress that if you aren’t a science/tech geek, even on a very basic level, this book might be too much for you, and you might be better off with the rather toothless scientific jaunts of David Bodanis.

§750 · September 10, 2005 · 1 comment · Tags: Book Reviews, physics, science