My Amazon Review of Andy Weir's "Project Hail Mary"

 

Junior High School Teacher Meets Space Alien

 

Software engineer turned sci-fi writer Andy Weir has offered up a novel that space nerds will love. The proof of this is over 31,000 reviews on Amazon. His protagonist is Ryland Grace, a former university professor of molecular biology whose heterodox views force him out of academia, and he ends up teaching junior high school science. Nevertheless, because his heterodox papers caught the attention of the powers that be, he is drafted into a global program to save the earth from being frozen because a mysterious force is draining the sun of its energy. That force is a stream of high energy microbes called astrophage.

 

Grace ends up on up on a mission to a distant star that seems to be unaffected.  The mission is a continuous series of near disasters that overwhelms the reader. The best I can tell, the physics of what is happening seems to be correct. Along the way Grace meets up with a spider-like space alien who breathes ammonia who is also on a similar mission to save his planet. So much for a spoiler alert.

 

I enjoyed the book, but Weir put too many “perils of Pauline” moments in his plot. It became exhausting over time. My guess is that when the motion picture comes out, much, but not all, of that will be edited out.

For the full Amazon URL see: Junior High School Teacher Meets Space Alien (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Jeffrey Orens' "The Soul of Genius: Marie Curie, Albert Einstein......."

 

The Rise of the New Physics

 

In 1911 Ernest Solvay the founder of Solvay S.A., then the largest chemical company in the world as a result of its new soda ash process, convened a conference of the world’s leading physicists in Brussels. Solvay was long interested in physics and theorized that energy and mass were inter-related. The idea of the conference came from German physicist Walter Nernst and it continues to this day at three year intervals with the 1927 conference being the most memorable for for its contents and participants.

 

In this book retired Solvay chemical engineer/manager Jeffrey Orens tells the story of the conference and its attendees, most notably Marie Curie and Albert Einstein. The purpose of the conference was to deal with the failure of classical physics to deal with the new world of quantum mechanics. To Orens the conference was Einstein’s coming out party because although his four path breaking papers came out in 1905, few scientists actually knew him personally. Thus, it was in Brussels where the scientific community recognized his true genius and he was soon off to a high post in Berlin, not bad for a lowly patent clerk in Bern.

 

Orens spends a good part of his book on the life of Marie Curie and how as a Polish émigré in Paris she would go on to win Nobel Prizes in physics in chemistry. The former for the discovery of radiation and the latter for isolating radium. She puts up with the rankest of sexism as the French scientific establishment fails to accept that women can do science.

 

The sexism comes to its head during the Solvay Conference where Curie is accused of having an affair her longtime married colleague Paul Langevin. Had she been a man, far from the affair being on the front pages of the tabloids, it would have largely been unnoticed. The couple loved each other, but it wasn’t to be. However, their grandchildren would later marry.

 

For a chemical engineer Orens tells a good story and it is worthy entry to the history of science.

For the full Amazon URL see: The Rise of the New Physics (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Nancy Forbes' and Basil Mahon's "Faraday, Maxwell and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics"

The Electromagnetic Underpinning of Economic Growth

The world doesn’t need another review of Nancy Forbes’ and Basil Mahon’s wonderful book. However, after thinking about it, I believe that the explosion in economic growth from 1870-1970 discussed by Robert J. Gordon in his “The Rise and Fall of American Growth” would never have happened were it not for Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. 

http://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2016/02/my-amazon-review-of-robert-j-gordons.html

What Forbes and Mahon describe are the lives of Faraday and Maxwell and how through their experiments they came to discover some of the most fundamental secrets in nature. What Maxwell does in his 1873 “Treatise and Electricity and Magnetism” is to put a mathematical foundation underneath Faraday’s brilliant experiments. The rest is history. The world became electrified, radio and mass communications became of age and only 32 years later, building on their foundations, Einstein publishes his essays on relativity and the photoelectric effect.

The science is so monumental that it offers support for Gordon’s thesis that the economic growth achieved from 1870-1970 was based on a series of one-off events.

For the full Amazon URL see:

https://www.amazon.com/review/R5ZMT2LIUV3T7/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Paul Halpern's "Einstein's Dice and Schrodinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

Not Physics for Dummies

Physicist Paul Halpern has written and interesting and difficult book about the lives and theories of two of the greatest physicists of the 20^th century. His discussion about the lives and philosophies of Einstein and Schrodinger is fascinating. This is especially true when he discusses Einstein’s deity in the context of Baruch Spinoza which leads him to believe that science is deterministic and not probabilistic. Hence Einstein’s aphorism that God does not play dice with the universe.  He also goes into great detail about Schrodinger’s very active sex life with more than a few women all the while being married. He spends more time on this than Schrodinger’s famous cat that is half dead and half alive.

At least for me, where he makes it difficult for the lay reader is his discussion of the science of Einstein and Schrodinger. Before reading this book I would suggest that the lay reader become very acquainted with the equivalent of “quantum mechanics for dummies,” “relativity for dummies,” and “unified field theory” for dummies.” Alas with only one course of college level physics there were many parts of this book where I was lost. The book needs clearer examples of the theories and diagrams would be of great help.

Finally his title is somewhat of a misnomer. Neither Einstein nor Schrodinger, try as they might, never arrived at a unified theory of physics. Even today’s standard model which Halpern acknowledges does not account for the role of gravity while accounting for electromagnetism and weak and strong forces of nuclear interaction. With that last sentence I am way over my head.

For the full Amazon URL see:

https://www.amazon.com/review/R3SUXTDP3XU1CY/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv