Physics Books
drorzel | February 1, 2017So, I tweeted about this yesterday, but I also spent the entire day feeling achy and feverish, so didn't have brains or time for a blog post with more details. I'm feeling healthier this morning, though time is still short, so I'll give a quick summary of the details:
-- As you can see in the photo (taken with my phone at Starbucks just before I took these to the post office to mail them), I signed a contract for a new book. Four copies, because lawyers.
-- The contract is with Oneworld Publications in the UK, who had a best-seller on that side of the pond with How to Teach Quantum Physics to…
drorzel | November 17, 2015Another talk-prep photo, because I wanted a shot to suggest the academic side of quantum physics. Of course, my actual textbooks are all in my office on campus, but then, they mostly have boring covers and titles, so they're not a great visual. So I stacked up some pop-physics books:
A selection of quantum physics books.
I meant to write out a couple of pages of equations, too, but I had to break off to cook dinner, and then I fell asleep at 9pm, so that never happened. Maybe today.
Anyway, I liked all these books, so, you know, check them out. Or read this post about good pop-quantum…
drorzel | October 30, 2015I've been slacking in my obligation to use this blog for self-promotion, but every now and then I remember, so here are two recent things where I was interviewed by other people:
-- I spoke on the phone to a reporter from Popular Mechanics who was writing a story about "radionics" and "wishing boxes," a particular variety of pseudoscience sometimes justified with references to quantum mechanics. The resulting story is now up, and quotes me:
It is hard to investigate the ethereal thinking around radionics, but physics is something that can be parsed. So I got in touch with Chad Orzel, a…
drorzel | August 14, 2015I forgot to do this last week, because I was busy preparing for SteelyPalooza on Saturday, but here are links to my recent physics posts over at Forbes:
-- What 'Ant-Man' Gets Wrong About The Real Quantum Realm: On the way home from the Schrödinger Sessions, I had some time to kill so I stopped to watch a summer blockbuster. The movie was enjoyable enough, thanks to charming performances from the key players, but the premise is dippy even for a comic-book movie. It does, however, provide a hook to talk about quantum physics, so...
-- Great Books For Non-Physicists Who Want To Understand…
drorzel | April 6, 2015Last week, Steven Weinberg wrote a piece for the Guardian promoting his new book about the history of science (which seems sort of like an extended attempt to make Thony C. blow a gasket..). This included a list of recommended books for non-scientists which was, shall we say, a tiny bit problematic.
This is a topic on which I have Opinions, so I wrote a recommended reading list of my own over at Forbes. I'm more diplomatic about Weinberg than Phillip Ball was, but I have ego enough to say that I think my list is way better...
I won't pretend that it's a truly comprehensive list, though, so…
drorzel | February 26, 2015There have been some good comments on last week's post about the Many-Worlds Interpretation, which I find a little surprising, as it was thrown together very quickly and kind of rant-y on my part, because I was annoyed by the tone of the original Phillip Ball article. (His follow-up hasn't helped that...) But then maybe that's why it succeeded in generating good comments. Tough call.
Anyway, I let these slide for a while because of day-job stuff, so I'm going to promote this to a new post, and try to address some of these. Because, apparently, we are never out of universes in which I'm…
drorzel | January 9, 2015Two new items about Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist:
1) WAMC has now posted the interview I did with Joe Donahue on The Roundtable. This was a fun interview, and covers a number of examples from the book, so I think gives you a really nice sense of what it's all about.
2) There's a review of Eureka in New Scientist, along with two other books. It's fun to see all these different publications do reviews, because every reviewer latches onto a different example to feature. You can almost deduce the entire contents of the book if you read all of the different reviews...
The New Scientist…
drorzel | December 22, 2014One of the very best books I ran across in the process of doing research for Eureka is The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics by Robert P. Crease and Charles C. Mann. It's an extremely detailed treatment of the development of quantum theory, and includes anecdotes that I haven't seen elsewhere. It also does a fantastic job of showing the essential interplay of experiment and theory through the difficult process of developing quantum field theory, which is often underplayed in popular treatments (which tend to be written by theorists, and often treat…
drorzel | November 17, 2014The first time you hear about dark matter, it sounds kind of crazy-- asserting that we're surrounded by tons of invisible stuff is usually a good way to get locked up. But the process of its discovery is surprisingly ordinary: it's just what you do when you play cards.
Here's the second green-screen video I've done to promote Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, which comes out three weeks from tomorrow (but can be pre-ordered today!). This one is about card games, modern astrophysics, and why you probbaly shouldn't play bridge against Vera Rubin:
For those who dislike video, I'll put…
drorzel | October 1, 2014Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist has officially been sent to the printers, so we're at the phase of things where I don't have anything to do but think about publicity. There are some reviews forthcoming, at least one of which I'm very happy about, but I'll share more about that when it becomes public. I've also picked up some nice blurbs from very smart folks:
"I know, I know, you think you're just not smart enough to be a scientist. Chad Orzel might convince you otherwise with Eureka. Drawing on basketball, stamp collecting, Angry Birds, Iron Chef, and Antiques Roadshow among his…
drorzel | September 22, 2014I get a fair number of books to review, but I'm often pretty bad about writing them up in a timely manner. Of course, most of them are well over 70 pages long, which is why I've managed to turn around Roberto Trotta's The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is in the course of a weekend.
As you can probably get from the title, this is a book about astronomy written in Up Goer Five style, using only the thousand most common English words (which are helpfully listed near the start of the book, in case you want to check whether he cheated...), plus proper names. And there'…
drorzel | September 8, 2014The new academic year starts this week-- first day of classes is Wednesday-- and I'm dealing with the usual chaos associated with the influx of a new class of students. Who now look to me only a tiny bit older than SteelyKid and the Pip in the above picture (and if you think that sharing that extremely cute photo is part of the motivation for this post, well, you're not wrong...).
This year, the madness of the new term is complicated by having been away for essentially all of August, and by the fact that I'm teaching an entirely new class this term: Astronomy 052: Relativity, Black Holes, and…
drorzel | July 25, 2014I should really know better than to click any tweeted link with a huff.to shortened URL, but for some reason, I actually followed one to an article with the limited-reach clickbait title Curious About Quantum Physics? Read These 10 Articles!. Which is only part one, because Huffington Post, so it's actually five articles.
Three of the five articles are Einstein papers from 1905, which is sort of the equivalent of making a Ten Essential Rock Albums list that includes Revolver, Abbey Road, and the White Album. One of the goals of a well-done list of "essential" whatever is to give a sense of…
drorzel | June 19, 2014As noted earlier, I was a guest on the Read Science! hangout on G+ earlier today. If you weren't able to watch it live, the video is available at that link, and I'll embed it here:
There were some feedback problems with the audio for a little while-- annoyingly, it only got bad once the hangout went live-- there was a tiny echo when we were talking about logistics beforehand, but not enough to justify screwing around with earbuds. then when we started the actual event, it suddenly got completely awful for a while. It does get better, though-- I have no idea why, but later on, the echo is…
drorzel | June 4, 2014I'm working on some short pop-quantum explainers for reasons that I'll be a little cagey about. In casting around for a novel way to introduce Schrödinger's cat states, I hit on something that probably works, but illustrates the problems inherent in being both a professional physicist and a pop-science writer.
The hook, as I mentioned on Twitter a little while back (early on a weekend morning, so nobody read it) is that you have Schrödinger's cat to thank for the computer you're reading this on. The core idea of the infamous cat paradox is that it's both alive and dead at the same time,…
drorzel | May 8, 2014This coming fall term, I'll be teaching Astronomy 052, "Relativity, Black Holes, and Quasars," because the guy who has traditionally taught it (a radio astronomer who studies active galactic nuclei) has to do other courses instead. But I said "Well, hell, I've written a popular audience book explaining relativity. I can teach that." And since I get to make teaching assignments (the one and only positive feature of being department chair), well, I put myself down to teach it. Now, of course, I find myself thinking about ideas for that class, months in advance, when I ought to be working on…
drorzel | May 3, 2014Below you'll find the slides from my Physics Day presentations at Space Center Houston, embedded via SlideShare. I was doing the TED-style minimal text thing, so they're probably not all that comprehensible on their own.
The event was supposed to have a pop-culture connection, so I decided to use space travel and extrasolar planets as a hook for talking about relativity, thus all the movie images near the beginning. The original idea I had was to look at different fictional ways of evading the ban on faster-than-light travel, but they wanted something more in the half-hour range than the hour…
drorzel | May 1, 2014One of the pop-physics books I've read recently was Amanda Gefter's much-discussed Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn. I was going to post a review of it back in March, but literally the day I was planning to write it, I got email from an editor at Physics Today asking if I had any books I'd like to review for them. So it ended up there instead of here:
Amanda Gefter’s Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn comes with a super-sized subtitle: “A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything.” It’s a mouthful, but also rather fitting for a book that manages to be many things…
drorzel | March 4, 2014In October 1988, I trashed my parents' basement in order to get into college.
OK, the causal connection is a little indirect, but it's there. I was applying to college that fall, and needed to write an essay to go with my application. I've always been able to write stuff with very little effort, so I banged out something that I thought was adequate, and showed it to my guidance counselor, who said "No way." My parents backed her up on this, and I had to go write another one.
The problem was that while what I had written was reasonably polished, it was also glib and superficial-- because I'm…
drorzel | October 11, 2013I'm sure I've done more than enough wibbling about TED for this week, but the only major physics story at the moment involved the Higgs boson, and I'm thoroughly sick of that. So let's talk about Malcolm Gladwell and journosplaining.
Gladwell has a new book out, David and Goliath that from all reports is pretty much exactly what you expect from a Malcolm Gladwell book. I greatly enjoyed the digested read by John Crace in the Guardian. Among the many bad reviews of this were a trio by my colleague at Union, Christopher Chabris-- first a paywalled review in the Wall Street Journal, then a post…