History
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Hotel Sarov
‘A plane flies from Moskou to Sarov. Whoever comes here will never go back.‘― Anonymous
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New weapons
‘If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of the warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.‘― J. Robert Oppenheimer
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Exploring the Navigo Museum: A Fisherman’s History
Last week we visited the Navigo museum in Nieuwpoort. We last visited it a number of years ago when they had a photo expo from Stephan Vanfleteren. Since then the museum has modernised the presentation of its collection and is well worth a visit even if you visited in the past like us. The museum…
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Einstein’s Wife. The Real Story of Mileva Einstein-Maric, Allen Chesterton & David Cassidy (ISBN 9780262538978, MIT Press)
I read about this book in the paper when it came out in 2020 but didn’t buy it immediately. Then, not so long ago I decided to buy and read the Einstein biography by Walter Isaacson and I also got this book about Mileva Maric which I read first. Mileva Maric, Einstein’s first wife was…
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The Great Beyond: Higher dimensions, parallel universes and the extraordinary search for a theory of everything, Paul Halpern (ISBN 9780471741497, Trade Paper Press)
I got a tip about this book from somewhere I cannot remember. But it was a lucky tip. The book is basically a short history of what has lead us to string theory. It starts of with the mathematical extension of Euclidian geometry to more dimensions by Riemann and Gauss. Then the link is made…
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The Tesseract: Origin, Meaning, and Its Marvel Connection
I first heard of the term Tesseract in the movie Captain America: The First Avenger. The Tesseract is also called the cube in the movie and it contains the space stone, one of the six infinity stones. In the movie The Avengers it is used to create a wormhole to allow the Chitauri to invade…
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Book Review : De ontdekkers van de hemel, David Baneke (ISBN 9789035136885, Prometheus)
Bought this book after reading about it in the magazine of the Nederlandse Natuurkunde Vereniging. It is written by a Dutch historian specialised in the history of science. The title of the book refers to the famous book of Harry Mulish, de ontdekking van de hemel. It describes astronomy in The Netherlands in the nineteenth…
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Cheljabinsk-65. A nuclear accident waiting to happen again
Cheljabinsk-65 is nowadays known as Mayak, one of the biggest nuclear complexes in the world. In 1957 a tank with nuclear waste exploded at Mayak, spreading nuclear materials for miles around. The Soviet government hushed up the accident. They also didn’t inform people living there that the facility was dumping radioactive waste water in the…
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The Book of Gutsy Women, Hilary & Chelsea Clinton (ISBN 9781471172175, Simon & Schuster)
I came across this book a long time ago, not long after it was first published in 2020. This was near the end of Trump’s first presidency and after the debacle of Hilary’s election campaign in 2016. The book is basically a collection of short articles about women that inspired Hilary and Chelsea Clinton. The…
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