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book reviews
Ridiculously short book reviewsreviewed by T. Nelson |
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book reviews
Ridiculously short book reviewsreviewed by T. Nelson |
Reviewed by T. Nelson
This one is not really iconoclastic, just a collection of human interest stories about famous people. There are interesting bits of information that we've all heard but never really gotten the details about, like that time Napoleon was attacked and defeated by rabbits, or how Arthur Conan Doyle believed in magical fairies, or how Ada Lovelace, whose own mother called her an ‘it’, died at age thirty-six of ovarian cancer after gambling away her family jewels. Then there was Charles Darwin, who liked to eat strange animals so much that the anatomy of the lesser rhea, a flightless bird, had to be reconstructed from the crew's stew during his voyage to South America.
According to the back cover, the person who wrote If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal really liked this book. And indeed, if you liked cracked.com, where the writers are (or were: I haven't been there in a while) so juvenile they think ‘fucking’ is a synonym for ‘big’ (as in Tesla's “fucking death beam”), or if you think the idea of NASA having trouble with people urinating and having periods in space is amusing, you'll like this book. It's always fun to laugh at famous people for the horrible things that happened to them, though about halfway through the book the author runs out of geniuses to laugh at.
jun 23, 2023
Reviewed by T. Nelson
Physics is mathematical, so many textbooks on quantum field theory bombard the reader with pages of equations without explaining their connection to real particles. As a result many people decide that the subject is just too difficult and give up. This one tries a new approach: it focuses on Feynman diagrams, which are intuitively easy to relate to interactions among subatomic particles, and explains clearly how the equations can be derived from the diagrams, piece by piece, using the path integral formalism. In the end the reader realizes that those complicated-looking equations are built up from parts and they're a lot less mysterious.
This approach also helps the reader understand why QFT is so good at describing the quantum world. Lots of physicists use Feynman's method themselves. The book starts out with easy models in zero dimensions and gradually builds on this foundation. Outstanding chapters on gluons, Higgs, and weak interactions.
Disclaimer: I am still reading this one, but so far it is excellent.
Update The author isn't kidding when he says this book is for physicists, not for mathematicians. It uses a lot of cowboy math. As far as I can see, there's no online errata list yet.
apr 03, 2022
Moved to here
Reviewed by T. Nelson
I ordered this book thinking it would be a compendium of ideas from ancient wise thinkers. There's some of that—a recounting of Solomon, Socrates, and so on—but mostly it's a bunch of philosophers spending eight hundred pages trying to figure out what wisdom is and making almost no progress. Maybe that tells us something: that wisdom is ineffable and no amount of effing can ever produce it. Or maybe something can only be judged as wise in retrospect when it was originally thought to be foolish but later revealed not to be so. Or maybe it illustrates the expression “Those who speak don't know. Those who know don't speak.” Whoever said that was wise indeed. Or were they? It's a classic paradox: if they said it, did they know?
Disclaimer: I gave up on this one after the first 300 or so pages.
apr 08, 2022
Reviewed by T. Nelson
This book, nicely translated from the original French, consists of conversations among three mathematicians about the history of quantum physics. The style is like that of a Socratic dialogue, with the other two math profs asking Connes questions and raising their doubts. Connes is a renowned expert on non-commutative geometry and has brilliant insights on quantum gravity.
Topics include why the square root of 2π shows up in the formula for a Gaussian curve, whether spacetime can have non-integer dimensions, the beauty of Nash's game theory, how to interpret quantum mechanics, and Kronecker's foliation model of time. Full of interesting facts like the fact that Einstein skipped Minkowski's course on spacetime and why it is impossible to model fire mathematically.
Connes is a remarkably clear writer and has a chapter in Conversations on Quantum Gravity.
apr 03, 2022
Reviewed by T. Nelson
Way back in what we now call the Dark Ages, people used to look back at their ancestors and ridicule them for their lack of knowledge about hygiene and public health. People dropped like flies from curable diseases and lived almost like animals. Plagues swept through the population, forcing people to stay in lockdown for months at a time. Some of them even wrote books about it that consisted mostly of excerpts from famous writers of the time, while trying to keep it light and unscientific to appeal to a wide audience.
Luckily, we're far too sophisticated to do that today.
apr 03, 2022