20 books on popular science
The 20 books most often tagged popular science on LibraryThing:
- A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
- A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
- The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
- Chaos by James Gleick
- The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe… by Richard Dawkins
- The Code Book by Simon Singh
- Fermat’s Enigma by Simon Singh
- Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
- Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt
- The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose
- Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
- The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
- Blink: the power of thinking without thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
- Cosmos by Carl Sagan
- “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”; Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman
- The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene
- The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking
- Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley
No surpises. Every book on this list is wildly popular, but I can’t help wondering if popular also means ‘read’ or rather ‘owned’…
Improbable research
An ongoing series from the Guardian. This week about law and the paper clip…
d’Espagnat takes big prize for work on quantum mechanics
Earlier this week, the Templeton Foundation announced the 2009 winner of its $1.42 million Templeton Prize, French physicist and philosopher Bernard d’Espagnat. He is best known for his work to understand and test one of the strangest predictions of the theory of quantum mechanics: that particles are good players of The Newlywed Game. Pairs of them can give exactly the same responses to measurements conducted on them at the same time in isolated booths.
Additional reading:
10 Cool Sites
Exploratorium Ten Cool Sites is a collection of cool, interactive sites from the Web, hand-picked by the Exploratorium. Don’t blame me if you spend too much time checking this out.
Teleportation Milestone Achieved
…or “Beam me up Scotty“. Well not just yet:
Scientists have come a bit closer to achieving the “Star Trek” feat of teleportation. No one is galaxy-hopping, or even beaming people around, but for the first time, information has been teleported between two separate atoms across a distance of a meter — about a yard.
The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less
The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less by Eric Schulman.
The Vega Science Trust Videos
From The Vega Science Trust web site:
The Vega Science Trust has created a broadcast platform for the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) communities, so enabling them to communicate on all aspects of their fields of expertise using exciting Internet opportunities.
There are 12 categories of science videos.
Popular science books
Jennifer Ouellette put together a great list of pop-science books. Of course wikipedia has an extensive list of notable science books as well. My three favourite books are:
- The Feynman Lectures on Physics – Richard Phillips Feynman
- Philosophical Investigations (German: Philosophische Untersuchungen) – Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (commonly GEB) – Douglas Hofstadter
The Free Physics Textbook
The Free Physics Textbook, probably one of the best on the internet ! Just great !
Nanotechnolgy as Fashion Accessory: The Morph Concept by Nokia
Morph is a concept demonstrating some of the possibilities nanotechnologies might enable in future communication devices. Morph can sense its environment, is energy harvesting and self cleaning .
Morph is a flexible two-piece device that can adapt its shape to different use modes. Nanotechnology enables to have adaptive materials yet rigid forms on demand.
Related: The Museum of Modern Art “Design and The Elastic Mind” exhibition.
(via)
What would happen to Earth if the moon was only half as massive?
Among other things, a day would be, perhaps, 15 hours long.
Ancient Greek Science and Technology
List of links to Ancient Greek Science and Technology
Why is the future so different from the past?
Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll has been wrestling with the mystery of time. Most physical laws work equally well going backward or forward, yet time flows only in one direction. Writing in this month’s Scientific American, Carroll suggests that entropy, the tendency of physical systems to become more disordered over time, plays a crucial role. Carroll sat down recently at Caltech to explain his theory.
What’s the problem with time?
The irreversibility of time is sort of the most obvious unanswered question in cosmology.
Time has been talked about in cosmology for many years, but we have a toolbox now we didn’t used to have.
We have general relativity, string theory, discoveries in particle physics that we can use to help us find the right answer.
(via)
Further reading at wikipedia: time (general introduction) – Arrow of time (the fact that theoretical statements that describe physical processes are not true if the direction of time is reversed) – entropy and the arrow of time.
Another clear explanation of the arrow of time can also be found here.
Using Causality to Solve the Puzzle of Quantum Spacetime
How did space and time come about? How did they form the smooth four-dimensional emptiness that serves as a backdrop for our physical world? What do they look like at the very tiniest distances? Questions such as these lie at the outer boundary of modern science and are driving the search for a theory of quantum gravity—the long-sought unification of Einstein’s general theory of relativity with quantum theory. Relativity theory describes how spacetime on large scales can take on countless different shapes, producing what we perceive as the force of gravity. In contrast, quantum theory describes the laws of physics at atomic and subatomic scales, ignoring gravitational effects altogether. A theory of quantum gravity aims to describe the nature of spacetime on the very smallest scales—the voids in between the smallest known elementary particles—by quantum laws and possibly explain it in terms of some fundamental constituents.
Using Causality to Solve the Puzzle of Quantum Spacetime, an article at SCIAM.
A bit more on this quantum grafity question (from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics):
Quantum gravity is one of the greatest puzzles of all time: to combine into one unified picture the two most important achievements of 20th century physics—the quantum theory, and Albert Einstein’s theory of space, time and gravity. Each of these two remarkably powerful theories dramatically pushed back the boundaries of our understanding and forced us to think in completely new ways about the universe in which we live. Successfully combining them together promises to yield the deepest insights physicists have every achieved into how our universe works.
What did Einstein discover that made us think in new ways? That space and time are not separate entities as Galileo and Newton had conceived, but are intimately related aspects of a single, four-dimensional reality called spacetime. And that this spacetime is not merely a static backdrop on which everything else happens, but is in fact a dynamical player in the universe’s great dance: matter causes spacetime to warp, and this warping, in turn, affects the way matter moves, the net result being a beautiful, geometrical explanation of the phenomenon we call gravity. It superseded Newton’s theory of gravity and predicted a host of new phenomena: black holes, gravity waves, gravitational lensing; and is now the very framework within which we understand our expanding universe.
What did the quantum theory reveal? That in the ultra-microscopic world of atoms and subatomic particles, nature operates in very bizarre ways: a single particle can behave as if it is in two places at once; a pair of particles, even a great distance apart, can behave in some ways as a single entity. This led to discoveries such as: antimatter (which when combined with matter will annihilate both, releasing pure energy) and vacuum polarization (whereby “empty” space is never really empty, but rather is seething with “virtual” particles continuously being created out of nothing and returning back to nothing), as well as a host of practical devices like the transistor and the laser, the basis of much of today’s computing and communications technologies.
Why the desire to combine relativity theory (i.e. gravity) with quantum theory? First, such a unified theory will be needed to answer many profound questions, including: How did the Big Bang begin? Or: What is happening deep inside a black hole? But more importantly, the history of physics has taught us again and again that successful unifications of seemingly disparate theories are a natural direction of progress in physics, invariably leading to deeper insights into—and more profound questions about—the workings of our mysterious universe. The search for a quantum theory of gravity, which strongly challenges the entire foundation of our understanding of the universe, promises to be the greatest unification of all.
If you want another non-technical explanation, read this.
The hunt for the worst sound in the world
Fingernails scraping down a blackboard… the scream of a baby… your neighbour’s dog barking: what is the worst sound in the world? This is what this website has been trying to find out. According to over a million votes cast worldwide in this mass online science experiment, vomiting is officially the most horrible sound ever. For whatever it’s worth knowing this. (via)
Newton’s Cannonball
Newton was interested in two aspects of the Moon’s orbit:
1) Why, if all objects feel the acceleration due to gravity toward the Earth, doesn’t the Moon come crashing out of the sky and onto Earth?
and
2) Why, if as Galileo said, objects move with constant speed and direction until acted upon by an external force, does the Moon move in a circle rather than a straight line?
Newton’s cannonball was a thought experiment Isaac Newton used to hypothesize that the force of gravity was universal, and it was the key force for planetary motion. Learn how he uses a cannon to solve these questions.
Science and religion
Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect.
Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute. The media exaggerate their numbers and importance. The media rarely mention the fact that the great majority of religious people belong to moderate denominations that treat science with respect, or the fact that the great majority of scientists treat religion with respect so long as religion does not claim jurisdiction over scientific questions.
–Full article by Freeman Dyson, professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, and known also for Dyson spheres.
Is there an opposite to absolute zero?
Seems like an innocent enough question, right? Absolute zero is 0 on the Kelvin scale, or −273.15 on the Celsius (centigrade) scale. Absolute zero is also precisely equivalent to 0 °R on the Rankine scale (also a thermodynamic temperature scale), and −459.67 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale.
A Plan
Lately I have been thinking about starting a science blog. Not a blog for phd’s, but for ‘ordinary’ people. A blog with the objective of showing the beauty of science, where complicated subjects are explained in words that most people could understand. I’m not there yet : I need a name (‘Science for dummies’ sounds a bit disrespectful), I need to decide if I’ll be the sole author or if I should get some other guys/girls involved, should I report ’science news/gossip’ or should I limit this blog to explaining more general subjects, etc.
I definitely need a plan !
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