Science can be hip! - by Mr. K.
thefonz on 28/10/2009 at 06:32
AND KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.
I've been reading alot about Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Quantum Theory, Reality etc recently....very very interesting stuff if you can wrap your brain around it.
Anyone?
Brian The Dog on 28/10/2009 at 08:19
Roger Penrose's "The Road to Reality" is good for those of you wanting to understand modern-day Physics theories without knowing tooooo much maths beforehand. Although his claim that "this book is for the lay-person" is genuinely laughable, chapter 6 is about integration in the complex plain :nono: Still, it's good if you want to ignore the maths at the beginning of the book. Hawking's "Brief History of Time" is a modern-day classic although maybe slightly out of date, String Theory has moved on a bit since the 1980's.
thefonz on 29/10/2009 at 07:11
I find Michio Kaku writes very well and explains the ideas floating around.
Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality is also a fantastic book that tracks the story of Quantum Mechanics all the way to M-Theory and where we are now in Theoretical Physics.
Very interesting stuff!
Sulphur on 29/10/2009 at 07:46
Cosmos, Broca's Brain, and Billions and Billions as well. All greatly informative and well-written.
Obviously everybody's sick to death of A Brief History of Time now, but that's a good primer too.
I haven't read anything about Bohr and Rutherford and Heisenberg since we had to back in my school and Uni days. That was more around the theories they postulated than their history, and of course they were important people to science, but I've had my fill of them and would rather hear the scrape of fingernails against chalkboard than read about them again.
demagogue on 29/10/2009 at 08:33
The best scientific stuff I've come across lately, first is hands-down the lecture sets of Walter Lewin ((
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-01Physics-IFall1999/CourseHome/index.htm) 1, (
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-02Electricity-and-MagnetismSpring2002/CourseHome/index.htm) 2, (
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-03Fall-2004/CourseHome/index.htm) 3), if you're really a lay person (I only did Classical physics and what I learned from chemistery/Bio-chemistry) ... so he's got me through electricity/magnitism and waves. His lectures are seriously a joy to learn from. Then Misner, Thorne, Wheeler's
Gravitation. Then Griffith's
Intro to Elementary Particles I liked a lot. He's got an intro to QM, too, but I haven't quite brought myself to tackle the quantum world yet. Someday.
As for popular books, I get a kick out of stuff that stirs the pot a little, without being complete quackary ... so I liked Smolin's
Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. But I'm smart enough to know the sure bets go with the classic chestnuts, so I like Weinberg's
The First Three Minutes, Greene's
The Elegant Universe ... I got Penrose's book, but it went a bit fast to say the least; I'd rather spread it all across more focused books.
But my concentration in undergrad was Cognitive Science (philosophy of CogSci anyway), which isn't quite as sure of itself as physics. If you had to pick one book, I'd think maybe Dennett's modestly titled
Consciousness Explained.
Brian The Dog on 29/10/2009 at 09:31
Quote Posted by demagogue
Then Misner, Thorne, Wheeler's
GravitationCrikes, that book is big enough to warp space-time itself - maybe that's why it's so good, it's actually gives practical demonstrations of gravitational lensing...
It's a good book, but iirc it uses different notation to what is currently used in GR courses so the maths might be even harder to follow than normal. Plus it's quite old now, the experimental proof of time dilation (GPS satellite clocks detuned before launch to make us observe them ticking at the right rate) only made it into later versions. Still, it's
the definitive book on general relativity, and it looks impressive on your bookcase :)
frozenman on 29/10/2009 at 15:12
Quote Posted by demagogue
Then Griffith's
Intro to Elementary Particles I liked a lot. He's got an intro to QM, too, but I haven't quite brought myself to tackle the quantum world yet. Someday.
This was actually my textbook for Quantum Mechanics I & II at University, and I'd have to say it feels entirely refreshing compared to the standard textbook. There's no bullshit like " [EQUATION 1] naturally you can see this is [EQUATION 2] " and between the two invoking a dozen trigonometric identities and various NOT-OBVIOUS rules to manipulate. Plus theres a cute picture of Schroedingers cat on the front, and on the back he's dead :(
But it's a proper textbook, not one of these popular-science schenanigans. (sp?)
Personally I abhor 90% of modern-physics popular-science books. They're all analogy, analogy, analogy, and I'm left jumping around from point a to point b that I never feel like I'm getting a glimpse of the subject itself. Perhaps I have a different perspective because I've studied some of these things properly...(although not very well)...so Kaku and Brian Greenes things are too dumbed down and glossy for me to care, but everything else is too advanced, so I'm left no middle ground. Either way one of the best 'popular-science' books I've ever read, although its getting on in years is
Chaos by James Gleick. That I think is an ideal common ground where the subject is approached as popular-introduction but you're still given meat behind the subject.
I want my meat.
Kaleid on 29/10/2009 at 16:07
Auto-tune is pure eeeevil. :devil:
