I just finished reading The best American Science and Nature writing 2006. This is the seventh version of this book series and I definitely wish I had found out about it earlier. Each book is made up of about 25 articles that a guest editor selects from about a hundred articles chosen by Tim Folger.
The 2006 edition is edited by Brian Greene who just happens to be one of my favorite physics writers. The articles span everything from bittorrent and blogs to animal psychology, anthropology and advanced physics. Coming from sources like Scientific American, The New York Times and Wired, most articles are easy to read and don't get detailed to the point of being boring. I had actually managed to read some of the articles already, but the others were a great way for me to be introduced to areas of science I knew very little about.
Some of my favorite articles are Dr Ecstasy about the chemist Alexander Shulgin, His brain, her brain about the differences between the male and female brain, and The coming death shortage describing how the increasing life expectancy of humans will affect us.
I encourage everyone interested in widening their scientific horizons to read this book. It's only 280 pages long and reading one chapter per night before falling asleep was perfect. 9 out of 10 points for this book from me.
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
2007-09-19
2007-07-11
Digital Fortress
My lovely girlfriend just finished reading Dan Browns Digital Fortress and handed it over to me. I finished it in two nights, just as his other books, and I think this book is at least as good as The Da Vinci Code.
Unfortunately it's not as detailed on the cryptology part as I would have liked, but at least he succeeds with a bit of name dropping. I remember Diffie-Hellman and ElGamal being mentioned, along with some other cryptology terms. The classic Caesar cipher was described more in detail as it's easy for anyone to understand how it works.
The story is basically the same as his other books, shy academic guy is forced to play detective instead of solving the problems he has with his beautiful and clever girlfriend. The plot is based around the search for the key to an "unbreakable" code. The NSA can't break it, and send the professor David Becker to Spain to get it back. Meanwhile, things are not going according to the plan back at the NSA Crypto headquarters...
It's a fun story and very fast paced as usually. Everyone is lying to everyone and it's not obvious right away who is fooling who. Feels like a perfect book to bring for a lazy summer day, except that you'll finish it in a few hours of reading.
Unfortunately it's not as detailed on the cryptology part as I would have liked, but at least he succeeds with a bit of name dropping. I remember Diffie-Hellman and ElGamal being mentioned, along with some other cryptology terms. The classic Caesar cipher was described more in detail as it's easy for anyone to understand how it works.
The story is basically the same as his other books, shy academic guy is forced to play detective instead of solving the problems he has with his beautiful and clever girlfriend. The plot is based around the search for the key to an "unbreakable" code. The NSA can't break it, and send the professor David Becker to Spain to get it back. Meanwhile, things are not going according to the plan back at the NSA Crypto headquarters...
It's a fun story and very fast paced as usually. Everyone is lying to everyone and it's not obvious right away who is fooling who. Feels like a perfect book to bring for a lazy summer day, except that you'll finish it in a few hours of reading.
2007-06-26
The Seashell on the Mountaintop
I just finished reading The Seashell on the Mountaintop, the Swedish version. Picked it up as a cheap pocket book and I was pleasantly surprised. The book was a fascinating read and showed many of the troubles scientists faced during 17th century, both political and religious.
The story involves Nicholas Steno, born in Denmark as Niels Stensen and starts when he has just finished his anatomy studies. Being exceptionally skilled with the scalpel, Steno is the first to discover the saliva glands and the tear canal and his public dissections are quickly becoming famous events. He travels all over Europe, through Amsterdam, Paris, Florence and Hannover, spending most of his time working at the then famous Accademia del Cimento in Florence. The academy was funded by the brothers Ferdinando II and Leopoldo de Medici and was the first one focusing solely on "experimental philosophy".
After years of thinking about the problem of seashells being found inside rocks and mountains everywhere Steno figured out the final piece in the puzzle. By carefully studying layers of rocks in hills of Tuscany he realized that sediments in water were deposited at the bottom with the largest particles first and then smaller and smaller particles on top. Steno concluded that the layers and strata in the cliffs and mountains had been deposited in the same way with the newest layers in the direction of the smaller particles above the bigger ones. He also suggested that the seashells inside were real seashells from the sea, not growing inside the rock. He realized the significance of being able to tell the age of the layers of rock apart and opened the way to study the ancient history of Earth.
In 1669 he published his findings in a short booklet called De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento dissertationis prodromus, that translated means Preliminary discourse to a dissertation on a solid body naturally contained within a solid. This was the first published study of geology performed in a completely scientific way that included the previously ignored time dimension that's so clearly embedded in the rock layers.
The rest of the book describes how Steno continues his studies of sediments and mountains, but also his increasing devotion to Catholicism eventually earning him the title of bishop. The book is well written and I could not put it down until I finished reading the last page.
Something that surprises me with the book is the amount of famous scientists and philosophers that Steno meets. He becomes friends or colleagues with such celebrities as Baruch Spinoza, Giovanni Borelli, the contemporary members of The Royal Society of London, Gottfried Leibniz and many more. Opinions and observations concerning Stenos interests in anatomy and geology made by thinkers like Descartes, Da Vinci and even earlier Aristotle is also included in the book.
Even if the world feels a lot smaller now with easy communication and quick traveling across the globe, it's still inspiring to see how people have always liked to travel and exchange ideas. The Seashell on the Mountaintop made history feel more vibrant to me than it has in a long time.
The story involves Nicholas Steno, born in Denmark as Niels Stensen and starts when he has just finished his anatomy studies. Being exceptionally skilled with the scalpel, Steno is the first to discover the saliva glands and the tear canal and his public dissections are quickly becoming famous events. He travels all over Europe, through Amsterdam, Paris, Florence and Hannover, spending most of his time working at the then famous Accademia del Cimento in Florence. The academy was funded by the brothers Ferdinando II and Leopoldo de Medici and was the first one focusing solely on "experimental philosophy".
After years of thinking about the problem of seashells being found inside rocks and mountains everywhere Steno figured out the final piece in the puzzle. By carefully studying layers of rocks in hills of Tuscany he realized that sediments in water were deposited at the bottom with the largest particles first and then smaller and smaller particles on top. Steno concluded that the layers and strata in the cliffs and mountains had been deposited in the same way with the newest layers in the direction of the smaller particles above the bigger ones. He also suggested that the seashells inside were real seashells from the sea, not growing inside the rock. He realized the significance of being able to tell the age of the layers of rock apart and opened the way to study the ancient history of Earth.
In 1669 he published his findings in a short booklet called De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento dissertationis prodromus, that translated means Preliminary discourse to a dissertation on a solid body naturally contained within a solid. This was the first published study of geology performed in a completely scientific way that included the previously ignored time dimension that's so clearly embedded in the rock layers.
The rest of the book describes how Steno continues his studies of sediments and mountains, but also his increasing devotion to Catholicism eventually earning him the title of bishop. The book is well written and I could not put it down until I finished reading the last page.
Something that surprises me with the book is the amount of famous scientists and philosophers that Steno meets. He becomes friends or colleagues with such celebrities as Baruch Spinoza, Giovanni Borelli, the contemporary members of The Royal Society of London, Gottfried Leibniz and many more. Opinions and observations concerning Stenos interests in anatomy and geology made by thinkers like Descartes, Da Vinci and even earlier Aristotle is also included in the book.
Even if the world feels a lot smaller now with easy communication and quick traveling across the globe, it's still inspiring to see how people have always liked to travel and exchange ideas. The Seashell on the Mountaintop made history feel more vibrant to me than it has in a long time.
2007-02-20
The Fabric of the Cosmos
Last night I finished Brian Greene's excellent popular physics book The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. I would recommend it to any one interested in theoretical physics or just curious about how far the scientists have come in trying to understand our universe.
The book is quite a heavy read, 493 pages plus a lot of endnotes and references. Having read The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory I can say that The Fabric of the Cosmos (TFotC) is an even better book. It takes up some of the same theories mentioned in Elegant Universe, but includes a lot more about The Big Bang and general relativity. In TFotC Greene starts out with water in a spinning bucket hundreds of years ago, through the discoveries of general relativity, the uncertainties involved in quantum mechanics to the latest super string theories, finding the key to "the arrow of time" along the way.
It's not easy to describe all this in a way that makes in understandable to people who aren't theoretical physicists, but Greene does a great job. It's barely any mathematical formulas or equations, instead he relies on similes and methaphores to get the point through.
Overall it's a very thought provoking book. In the middle of the book there's a lot of discussion about spacetime and the implications of quantum mechanics and general relativity. The more you learn about these things, the more obvious it seems that there is no such thing as free will. I find this very difficult to accept and my mind opposes it, but it's hard to contradict his logic reasoning.
I find the chapter on entropy and the arrow of time to be well written and the examples he is using are very fitting. Sometimes he gets a bit too excited over the numbers, printing a page or two with zeroes trying to describe the enormous values of some probability or metric. It's still well beyond what you can grasp.
Even if Greene is a strong supporter of string theory, he does a fair comparison between that and Loop Quantum Gravity in the last chapter of the book. But I still think that the way the book is written, most people will convinced that Branes in superstring and M-theory is the way to go.
As a final grade, I'll give it 8/10. It's a great book, but you really need to focus and think while reading.
The book is quite a heavy read, 493 pages plus a lot of endnotes and references. Having read The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory I can say that The Fabric of the Cosmos (TFotC) is an even better book. It takes up some of the same theories mentioned in Elegant Universe, but includes a lot more about The Big Bang and general relativity. In TFotC Greene starts out with water in a spinning bucket hundreds of years ago, through the discoveries of general relativity, the uncertainties involved in quantum mechanics to the latest super string theories, finding the key to "the arrow of time" along the way.
It's not easy to describe all this in a way that makes in understandable to people who aren't theoretical physicists, but Greene does a great job. It's barely any mathematical formulas or equations, instead he relies on similes and methaphores to get the point through.
Overall it's a very thought provoking book. In the middle of the book there's a lot of discussion about spacetime and the implications of quantum mechanics and general relativity. The more you learn about these things, the more obvious it seems that there is no such thing as free will. I find this very difficult to accept and my mind opposes it, but it's hard to contradict his logic reasoning.
I find the chapter on entropy and the arrow of time to be well written and the examples he is using are very fitting. Sometimes he gets a bit too excited over the numbers, printing a page or two with zeroes trying to describe the enormous values of some probability or metric. It's still well beyond what you can grasp.
Even if Greene is a strong supporter of string theory, he does a fair comparison between that and Loop Quantum Gravity in the last chapter of the book. But I still think that the way the book is written, most people will convinced that Branes in superstring and M-theory is the way to go.
As a final grade, I'll give it 8/10. It's a great book, but you really need to focus and think while reading.
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