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

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

Sith Dog (El Tomboto), Monday, 8 February 2016 01:03 (eight years ago) link

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.

alimosina, Monday, 8 February 2016 16:45 (eight years ago) link

one month passes...

Wondering about this new book about gravity waves.

Woke Up Scully (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 26 March 2016 21:47 (eight years ago) link

one month passes...

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.

alimosina, Monday, 2 May 2016 20:06 (eight years ago) link

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.

alimosina, Monday, 2 May 2016 20:10 (eight years ago) link

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!

alimosina, Wednesday, 4 May 2016 17:45 (eight years ago) link

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.

The WLS National Batdance (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 5 May 2016 17:13 (eight years ago) link

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

seven months pass...

Well, this is odd.

alimosina, Sunday, 18 December 2016 02:08 (seven years ago) link

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.

alimosina, Sunday, 18 December 2016 02:09 (seven years ago) link

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

How I Wrote Plastic Bertrand (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 25 December 2016 22:30 (seven years ago) link

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.

alimosina, Sunday, 1 January 2017 03:23 (seven years ago) link

(They had quite a book launch)

alimosina, Sunday, 1 January 2017 03:28 (seven years ago) link

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

I hear from this arsehole again, he's going in the river (James Morrison), Sunday, 1 January 2017 11:07 (seven years ago) link

two months pass...
five months pass...

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.

alimosina, Wednesday, 30 August 2017 17:36 (seven years ago) link

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

frankfurters take on new glamour in this gleaming aspic (bizarro gazzara), Wednesday, 30 August 2017 17:39 (seven years ago) link

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

alimosina, Wednesday, 30 August 2017 20:09 (seven years ago) link

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.

alimosina, Monday, 4 September 2017 01:08 (seven years ago) link

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

Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Monday, 4 September 2017 09:52 (seven years ago) link

four weeks pass...

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.

alimosina, Monday, 2 October 2017 00:40 (seven years ago) link

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

alimosina, Monday, 2 October 2017 00:44 (seven years ago) link

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

alimosina, Monday, 2 October 2017 00:54 (seven years ago) link

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

Two-Headed Shindog (Rad Tempo Player) (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 2 October 2017 01:16 (seven years ago) link

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

alimosina, Monday, 2 October 2017 01:23 (seven years ago) link

No, I haven't read that one.

alimosina, Monday, 2 October 2017 01:23 (seven years ago) link

"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

alimosina, Tuesday, 3 October 2017 19:14 (seven years ago) link

three weeks pass...

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

alimosina, Monday, 30 October 2017 17:31 (seven years ago) link

six months pass...

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.

alimosina, Monday, 30 April 2018 00:47 (six years ago) link

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.

alimosina, Monday, 30 April 2018 00:54 (six years ago) link

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

Nashville #9 Dream (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 4 May 2018 04:11 (six years ago) link

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.

alimosina, Friday, 4 May 2018 15:23 (six years ago) link

Considered starting such a thread but thought better of it

Nashville #9 Dream (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 4 May 2018 23:21 (six years ago) link

two months pass...

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"

alimosina, Thursday, 5 July 2018 00:33 (six years ago) link

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...

alimosina, Thursday, 5 July 2018 00:52 (six years ago) link

two weeks pass...

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.

alimosina, Sunday, 22 July 2018 22:17 (six years ago) link

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.

alimosina, Sunday, 22 July 2018 22:19 (six years ago) link

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.

Isora Clubland (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 22 July 2018 22:42 (six years ago) link

More info here.

alimosina, Monday, 23 July 2018 22:54 (six years ago) link

three months pass...

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

alimosina, Tuesday, 6 November 2018 18:59 (five years ago) link

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.

alimosina, Tuesday, 6 November 2018 19:02 (five years ago) link

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

Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, 7 November 2018 02:13 (five years ago) link

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

alimosina, Wednesday, 7 November 2018 15:29 (five years ago) link

Thanks! I have ordered it.

Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, 7 November 2018 23:13 (five years ago) link

one month passes...

("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

alimosina, Saturday, 29 December 2018 04:17 (five years ago) link

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).

alimosina, Saturday, 29 December 2018 04:23 (five years ago) link

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.

alimosina, Monday, 31 December 2018 01:55 (five years ago) link

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.

Spirit of the Voice of the Beehive (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 1 January 2019 23:30 (five years ago) link


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