Books

In which I use my double license as a physicist and a science fiction fan to engage in some half-assed futurism spinning off Chris Hayes's much-discussed book. ------------- I don't read a lot of political books, because I tend to find them frustrating. They're usually surprisingly ephemeral, trying to spin Deep Meaning out of a collection of recent events that are highly dependent on short-term context. They also tend to be much better at identifying problems than suggesting plausible solutions, coming off like that famous Sidney Harris cartoon with a bunch of equations on the left side of a…
It's a banner day for science explainer things I wrote, as a piece I wrote has just gone live at Tor.com: Why Gandalf Is Wrong Even as a kid, reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings at the golden age of twelve or so, Gandalf’s response to Saruman never sat well with me. Splitting white light into its component colors is awesome, and taking things apart is the best way to learn how they work. Knowing how things work is the first step toward making them work better, a process that leads to the technologies that make modern life comfortable enough to, among other things, provide Oxford…
In which we look at how the Brave New Publishing World makes it really hard to find something good to read. ------------ In a recent links dump, I included a link to this post about the current state of publishing, which is a follow-up to an earlier post about the current state of publishing. Elsewhere in my social media universe, this has come in for a lot of derision from anti-publishing friends, particularly the bit where the author complains that there are too many books published. "How can there be such a thing?" is the basic thrust of the thing. "The more books, the better!"…
Last night, as I was flying in to San Francisco, Matt Cain pitched the first perfect game in Giants history. Now, a casual observer might think these events were unrelated, but to ancient alien theorists, the connection between them could not be more obvious. Thus, you should come to Kepler's Books in Menlo Park this evening at 7pm, to see what amazing events will happen next. Well, OK, the most that will probably happen is that I might read a bit from the How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog in a silly voice. But you don't know that I won't use my awesome ancient alien magic to transmute lead…
Two How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog items: First and foremost, I'll be appearing at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, CA, this Thursday, June 14 at 7:00pm. I'll probably read a bit of the book, so if you've ever wanted to hear me do the silly dog voice live, here's your chance. Provided, of course, that you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, or will be this Thursday night. This will be my second trip to California in as many weeks, because all last week I was at DAMOP in Anaheim (the Chain-Restaurant-est Place on Earth). I spent a fair bit of time there explaining the whole talking-to-the-dog…
In which I talk about why it is that particle physics and cosmology are so over-represented in popular physics, and why my own books contribute to that. [The too-short excerpts on the new front page are beyond my ability to change, so I'll be doing Victorian-style "In which..." summaries at the start of posts as a work-around, so a casual visitor has some idea what a psot is about before clicking through.] One of the maddening things about the recent upgrade of the ScienceBlogs back end has been that a lot of things have been posted during that time that I wanted to respond to. Near the top…
I was going to post something noting that the great WordPress transition will begin at 7pm tonight, and comments after that time will be lost like Roy Batty's tears. However, I have much happier news: tomorrow's Science Times (available on the Web already) will include a review of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog! I considered reading this book aloud to my dog, even though I doubted he would understand relativity, even as explained by the witty and clear-thinking Chad Orzel. Maxwell does seem to show some interest in Newton's first law: A body at rest tends to remain at rest, and a body in…
So, you find yourself living in the San Francisco Bay area, and you maybe have a dog who would like to know something about relativity, or you maybe want to someday have a dog who will want to know something about relativity, or you maybe want to know something more about relativity yourself, in case you ever find yourself cornered in a dark alley by a Rhodesian ridgeback who snarls "Explain time dilation to me, or I'll eat your face!" Well, in that case, you definitely want to be at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park on the evening of June 14th, when I'll be doing a book promotion thing for How to…
This has been out for a little while now, and Chris has been promoting it very heavily, and it's sort of interesting to see the reactions. It's really something of a Rorschach blot of a book, with a lot of what's been written about it telling you more about what the writer wants to be in the book than what's actually in it. A lot of conservative responses to it are basically case studies in the sort of motivated reasoning Chris is writing about, but I've even seen some liberals jumping on it as completely confirming their own pre-existing biases, for example, claiming that this means Chris…
There's been a bunch of discussion recently about philosophy of science and whether it adds anything to science. Most of this was prompted by Lawrence Krauss's decision to become the Nth case study for "Why authors should never respond directly to bad reviews," with some snide comments in an interview in response to a negative review of his latest book. Sean Carroll does an admirable job of being the voice of reason, and summarizes most of the important contributions to that point. Some of the more recent entries to cross my RSS reader include two each from 13.7 blog and APS's Physics Buzz. I…
One final thought on the Big Science/ Space Chronicles stuff from last week. One of the things I found really frustrating about the book, and the whole argument that we ought to be sinking lots of money into manned space missions is that the terms of the argument are so nebulous. This is most obvious when Tyson or other space advocates talk about the need for "inspiring" people, but it shows up even in what ought to be relatively concrete discussions of actual science. Take, for example, the argument over humans vs. robots. Given the success of the robotic missions to Mars and other bodies,…
Some time back, I reviewed a cool book about Fermi problems by Aaron Santos, then a post-doc at Michigan. In the interim, he's taken a faculty job at Oberlin, written a second book on sports-related Fermi problems, and started a blog, none of which I had noticed until he emailed me. Shame on me. Anyway, his new book is just out, and he's running an estimation contest with a signed copy as the prize. So, if you're the sort of person who enjoys Fermi problems, read his post then grab a convenient envelope and start estimating on the back. You have until June 1.
A few more links that have turned up of people talking about either How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog: Andrew Johnston has a review of the UK edition, praising it because "it's bang up to date, and goes beyond the basic quantum concepts into more complex areas like decoherence, entanglement and quantum teleportation," which I like to see because that's one of the things I especially wanted to do. Natasha Zaleski, a grad student, has a review of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, which is good but not great, because it hit the usual failure mode: the…
I've been falling down on the shameless self-promotion front, lately, but that doesn't mean I'm not tracking How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog obsessively, just that I'm too busy to talk about it. Happily, other people have been nice enough to talk about it for me, in a variety of places: The most significant, in terms of probable impact on sales, is this excerpt at BoingBoing, which is the text for the dog dialogue from Chapter 8. This is the same dialogue that became the "Looking for the Bacon Boson" video, and, indeed, they were nice enough to include the video in the post, too. Woo-hoo…
My Google vanity search for my name and the book titles is really frustratingly spotty, often missing things in major news outlets that I later find by other means. For example, I didn't get a notification about this awesome review in the Guardian, from their children's book section: I am a ten year old who likes Physics. What is Physics, you might ask! Well, Physics is the science of pretty much everything around you. It asks big questions like where did we come from? How long ago was the Big Bang? Quantum Physics is the part of physics which talks about atomic and sub atomic particles,…
The big publishing news this week is the US Department of Justice bringing an anti-trust suit against the major book publishers and Apple for allegedly colluding to force the "agency model" of ebook pricing on Amazon and other retailers, resulting in higher prices for consumers. I already links dumped an article about the detailed charges, and three of the six companies involved have agreed to a settlement that will change the way their books get priced. A couple of the publishers, particularly Macmillan, whose nasty public spat with Amazon kicked this whole thing off, have decided to fight…
I'm re-instituting the quota system for the moment-- no blogging until I make some substantive progress on the current work-in-progress-- but I'll throw out a quick post here to note a media appearance: Physics World has a podcast about books on quantum physics up today: Since its inception in the early part of the 20th century, the theory of quantum mechanics has consistently baffled many of the great physicists of our time. But while the ideas of quantum physics are challenging and notoriously weird, they seem to capture the public imagination and hold an enduring appeal. Evidence of this…
A passing mention in last week's post about impostors and underdogs got me thinking about Michael Faraday again, and I went looking for a good biography of him. The last time looked, I didn't find any in electronic form, probably because the Sony Reader store has a lousy selection. I got a Nook for Christmas, though, and this time, Alan Hirshfeld's 2006 biography, The Electric Life of Michael Faraday was right there, so I picked it up and read it over the weekend. It was a fast read, both because this is a short popular biography-- 250-odd pages-- and because Faraday's life story makes for…
I'm trying not to be Neurotic Author Guy and obsessively check online reviews of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog every fifteen minutes. I've actually been pretty successful at it, so successful that I didn't notice the first posted review at Amazon until my parents mentioned it to me. It's a really good one, though: I'm at the point know where I could answer some of the most basic questions that his dog has, but I remember a time when I couldn't and when the questions the dog asks would've been exactly the questions that I would have had. Pretty much every time a statement by the author…
Over in Scientopia, SciCurious has a nice post about suffering from Impostor Syndrome, the feeling that everyone else is smarter than you are, and you will soon be exposed as a total fraud. Which is nonsense, of course, but something that almost every scientist suffers at some point. The post ends on a more upbeat note, though, when she thinks about fighting it: The more I thought about ways to combat imposter syndrome, either by myself or in academia in general...the more I came up with nothing. Until today, when I was working out. I'm doing circuit training, and as I worked my way through…