If you’re interested in the intersection between science and literature, you might be interested in my recent musings on Julio Cortázar’s book From the Observatory, recently published in English.
And even if you’re not interested in my musings, you should still check out the book.
Along with Gleick’s outstanding biography, Lawrence Krauss’ Quantum Man is now one of the essential Feynman books. While Gleick’s book is biography at its finest, Krauss’s is the best picture of Feynman’s position within the physics community, which is obviously something that could only be written by a serious physicist, like Krauss. Krauss, better than anyone else, has explained why Feynman was seen as a great scientist by physicists themselves, who are not the types to be swayed by the anecdotes that made Feynman popular with the public. Feynman was a great public communicator, and purposely developed a particular public persona, but his physics accomplishments were completely equal to his fame, as Krauss makes clear. I learned more about Feynman’s style of doing science (including its weaknesses of insularity) from this book than from any other.
So here’s how I would categorize the existing Feynman biographies: Continue reading “I can’t decide whether Quantum Man is the best Feynman biography”
150 years later, biology still suffers from the tension between creating a rigorous theory and creating a descriptive narrative of experimental results:
From Toulmin and Goodfield’s The Architecture of Matter, p. 331:
[Claude] Bernard not only succeeded in stating acceptable terms for reconciling physiology with physics and chemistry, but also demonstrated in his own experimental enquiries how this compromise was worked out in practice.
Today Bernard is thought of as a scientist – as one of the founders of modern physiology – and so he was. But he spoke of his own work as ‘experimental medicine’, and the name is significant. For, throughout the two hundred years which separated him from Harvey and Descartes, the central problem had been to combine the natural philosopher’s theoretical vision with the medical anatomist’s fidelity to experience. (This was the problem Hippokrates dismissed as insoluble.) The secret of Bernard’s success ay in his capacity to bring these two elements in physiology into fruitful intellectual harmony. Both in his original researches and in his analysis of physiological method, Bernard treated the animal frame as a functioning whole. Though his experimental work was rigorously quantitative and chemical, he always saw the particular process he was studying in their relation to the rest of the body; and this made him the natural successor to Harvey and Galen, as much as to Liebig and Descartes. As we shall see, it also made him less dependent that his predecessors on the hypothesis of a ‘vital principle’. For he showed that the special characteristics of organisms could be explained as resulting from the complexity and interconnectedness of their bodily processes, without the need to introduce any uniquely ‘vital’ cause into one’s account.
Today we still have trouble straddling the line between what Eric Davidson calls “bits of causality swimming in a sea of phenomenology” and rigorous, quantitative theories that explain how complex interactions between ordinary physical molecules give rise to living processes.
Wow, definitely a must-read for anyone who likes physics, history of science, and understanding why trends and fads in science come and go. (Read an excerpt at Scientific American.) Kaiser, a physicist and historian of science at MIT tells the story of a group of physicists who, finishing their PhDs in the late 60’s/early 70’s, emerged from graduate school into a job market whose bottom had just dropped out as the Defense Department funding for physics was sharply reduced from its earlier Cold War peak. Jobless and bored with the traditional questions of physics, these hippie physicists became obsessed with some non-traditional questions, and through a convoluted series of causal links, influenced the resurgence of interest in quantum entanglement and the emergence of the now billion-dollar business of quantum computing.
The post-WWII physics boom had been characterized by a ‘shut up and calculate’ attitude, as physicists focused on research questions that fell within or built upon the existing mainstream framework laid down in the 30’s and 40’s. Ignored were questions about the ultimate foundations of quantum mechanics that had long troubled Einstein. Students who showed an interest in such questions were quickly redirected. Continue reading “Go read How the Hippies Saved Physics”
From Edwards Mendelson in the NYRB, a great piece on an obscure topic that affects us every day – “The Human Face of Type:”
In 1928 the German designer Jan Tschichold championed sans-serif faces in his influential modernist manifesto, Die neue Typographie. The modern man’s vision of the world, he wrote, “is collective-total, no longer individual-specialist.” We need a “typeface expressive of our own age,” and that typeface “must be free from all personal characteristics; it will be the work of a group.” Of all the available typefaces, sans-serif, he wrote, “is the only one in spiritual accordance with our time.” In 1933 the Nazis arrested Tschichold for Communist sympathies, but he escaped and over the next few years renounced his modernist ideas: “To my astonishment I detected most shocking parallels between the teachings of Die neue Typographie and National Socialism and fascism.”
Uh, wow. I didn’t know that the type you use says so much about you. So what does that abominable MS Word default type Cambria say about Microsoft?
The Finch and Pea 