How-to-Teach

If you're allergic to hype, you might want to tune this blog out for the next couple of days, because How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is officially released tomorrow, so it's all I'm going to talk about for a little while. Because, well, I'm pretty excited. And tonight's exciting finding is that it's mentioned in the Washington Post: If "Physics for Dummies" left you baffled, maybe it's time to go a step further: Why not physics for pets? In "How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog," physics professor Chad Orzel attempts to explain Einstein's theory of relativity via a dialogue with his dog,…
Hey, you might not know this, but I wrote a book... The official release date for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog isn't until Tuesday, but a friend reported buying a copy in Missouri, so when I was headed out to do some work this afternoon, I went to the cafe at the local Barnes&Noble so I could check for myself, and there it was: That's How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog spotted in the wild. I'm not going to say "in its natural habitat," because it's really a domestic animal, which belongs in a loving home, with people to care for it. Copies in the bookstore are feral editions,…
I'm grading exam papers at the dining room table when Emmy trots in. "Hey, dude," she says. "Where do we keep the superconducting wire?" I'm not really paying attention, so I start to answer before I understand the question. "Hmm? Wire is in the basement, next to the--wait, what?" "The superconducting wire. Where do we keep it?" "We don't have any superconducting wire. And you're a dog. What do you need superconducting wire for, anyway?" "I'm building a particle collider! I need superconducting wire for the beam-steering magnets." How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog goes on sale next Tuesday…
A correspondent from the UK sends along this picture from the Waterstones outlet in Heathrow airport: As you can see, How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog is #55 on their bestseller rack, just ahead of Confessions of a London Call Girl. I'm not sure what this says about London call girls, but I'm pretty psyched that it's still selling well over there. On this side of the Atlantic, I got a note from my editor at Scribner the other day that they've just printed another batch of the US paperback of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, which is also good news. There's probably a blog post in…
So, the big How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Photoshop contest concluded on Friday. We got five really good entries, and the judges (me and Kate) had a hard time reaching a decision. After long deliberation, though, we've come up with a solution. But first, the entries: Jane Di Giuseppe has Emmy as the dog pulling Einstein's strings: John Pearce has Emmy playing with Einstein as well: And Joseph Roith tells Maxwell's Demon to respect Emmy's authoritah!: But in the end, it came down to two pictures: Tristan Croll's take on the famous chalkboard photo: It's a little-known fact that not…
I've been falling down a little in the area of shameless self-promotion, but I will be at Boskone this coming weekend, where I'll be doing three program items: Reading: Chad Orzel (Reading), Fri 19:30 - 20:00 This will be a section from the forthcoming book, probably involving Emmy and particle physics. Or possibly William Butler Yeats. How to Wreck Your Career with Social Media (Special Interest Group) (M), Sat 16:00 - 17:00 What are the new opportunities for public humiliation opened by the Internet? Join this entertaining discussion about authors getting into nasty public spats with…
I have a Google alert set up to let me know whenever my name or the title of one of my books turns up in one of the sources they index. This is highly imperfect, sometimes missing interesting articles, and often blorting out 57 different pages on which my name appears in a sidebar link. It comes in handy from time to time, though, such as this morning, when it coughed up a whole bunch of pages linking to the Polish edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Finally, dogs in the ancestral homeland of my father's family can learn all about quantum physics. I'm a little surprised to learn…
A quick reminder: How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog (cover in the left sidebar) will be released at the end of the month. If you'd like to win a signed copy early, though, you can enter our Photoshop contest. Just edit a picture of Emmy into another picture having something to do with physics. Like this: (See the transcript here for the source of this comment.) The deadline for entering is this Friday. We've already got some quality entries, but the more the merrier.
It's now officially February, and the release date for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is only a few weeks off-- the official release date is Feb. 28. Of course, I've got a copy already: If you would like a copy of your very own, you can either wait until the release, or take part in this shameless publicity stunt: The second-ever Dog Physics Photo Contest! Last time around, we did a LOLEmmy contest for a bound galley proof of the first book. This time, I'm giving away a signed copy of the finished book, so we'll go for something a little trickier: I've picked three pictures from my…
I was going to write something about the politics of scientific publishing, but instead, I want to focus on what's really important in modern publishing: That's right, I got a couple of early copies of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog in the mail this morning. It's a real book, with pages and everything... You can see it above, next to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, and various clutter on my desk, for scale. There's not much else to say, other than "Woo-hoo!" They're printing lots more, of course, and it will be available wherever books are sold starting Feb. 28th.
So, back when How to Teach Physics to Your Dog was coming out, I did a few "dramatic readings" of bits of the book, such as this one on the Quantum Zeno Effect: This was made with Windows Movie Maker, because it was free (came with the computer) and dead simple. However, Movie Maker on my new computers is hopelessly broken-- I've made a couple of attempts to do the same sort of thing with my laptop, but I've never managed to get more than a couple of steps in before it crashes. (To be fair, this is one of only two things that are worse under Windows 7 than Vista, and the only one that's…
I will eventually do a "Year in Blog" post with a bunch of links to top posts and so on, but not until the year is actually over. At the moment, I'm too busy prepping next term's class to do all the link chasing. That doesn't mean I can't engage in a little self-promotion, though. After all, my second book, How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog will be out at the end of February. And the first pre-publication review is in, from Publishers Weekly: Physics professor Orzel follows his How to Teach Physics to Your Dog with a compact and instructive walk through Einstein's theory of relativity,…
Three quick items relating to science in book form: 1) It's that time of year again when every media outlet of any consequence puts out a "Year's Best {Noun}" list, and John Dupuis is checking the lists for science books so you don't have to. It looks like a pretty reasonable year for science in the best non-fiction-book-list world, but you can see for yourself. 2) In the "good books about science coming next year" category, the line-up for The Open Laboratory anthology of outstanding science blogging has been announced. I'm very pleased to report that my write-up of the OPERA preprint was…
I'm looking at an email from my editor when Emmy wanders by the computer, sniffing around just in case a crumb of food has fallen on the floor in the last five minutes. "Hey," I say, "Come here and look at this." "Look at what?" "This:" "It's the cover for my new book." "A-hem." "OK, fine, it's the cover for our new book. Anyway, what do you think?" "Hey, that's not bad. I'm way better than that dog, though." "Yeah, well, they didn't want to make the owners of inferior dogs jealous." "Oooh. Good point. See, this is why I could never make it in marketing." "It's Madison Avenue's loss, I'm…
When we got home from visiting Kate's family yesterday, there was a large shipping envelope from my agent waiting for us. This can mean only one thing: author copies of foreign editions! That's the Czech edition, Jak nauÄit svého psa fyziku, which seems to have used the same glasses-wearing golden retriever as the Brazilian edition. The overlaid equations and graphics are lifted directly from the translated figures, which is nice. My new favorite edition, though, is the Korean edition, whose cover designer went for "Puppy Innnn SPAAAAAACE!!!" as a concept: There's nothing remotely…
I've been going through the manuscript for the book making up a list of glossary words (a frighteningly long list), and also noting miscellaneous pop-cultural references-- quotes, direct mentions, paraphrases, etc. I'm sure I've missed a few-- many of them occur in section titles, which my eyes tend to slide right over as I read (in the previous book, one section was titled "Clever Section Title Here" until distressingly late in the process)-- but for your amusement, here's what I have at the moment, in approximately the order in which they appear in the book: Star Wars The Adventures of…
(Note: This was not prompted by any particular comment. Just a slow accumulation of stuff, that turned into a blog post on this morning's dog walk.) It's been a couple of years now that I've been working on writing and promoting How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, so I've had a lot of conversations where the subject of writing a popular audience book on quantum physics comes up. I've had enough of these now that I can recognize a few different categories of responses, one of which drives me up the wall. I suspect that the same is true for most pop-science authors, so as a public service, let me…
"Hey, Dude, what'cha doin'?" "I'm checking out the dog drawings I commissioned for the book-in-progress. Here, take a look:" "Hey, wait just one minute. That looks like me!" "That's the idea. Since you're in the book, I thought it would be nice to have some pictures that look like you, rather than just a clip-art German Shepherd from Office." "I look kind of worried, dude." "Yeah, well, you get that look a lot when we're talking about physics." "Good point. So, was there a point to this, other than showing off the spiffy drawings an art student did for you?" "Sure. It's a reminder that I'm…
I learned today that the National Georgraphic Channel video I mentioned last week has actually already aired on the network. It was last week's episode of the series "Naked Science," titled Living in a Parallel Universe. I haven't seen it, obviously, but it's running again, tomorrow (the 26th), at 4pm (Eastern (US) time). Set your DVR accordingly. (I'm also very pleased to have learned of the air date via email from Alan Guth...)
Well, on video over the web, anyway... If you look at the Featured Videos on the National Geographic Channel web page, or, hopefully, in the embedded video below: You'll see a short video clip of a program about quantum physics, that includes me and Emmy among the experts on camera. I'm pretty psyched, though I'm not sure what Alan Guth and Lawrence Krauss will think about sharing the bill with my dog... This is from a show, tentatively titled "Parallel Universes," which is why I went to Buffalo back in October. Most of the scenes in that clip were shot in the abandoned railway station in…