History
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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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Eleanor Roosevelt: A Guide to Inner Strength
‘Do what you feel in your heart to. be right – for you’ll be critisised anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.‘― Eleanor Roosevelt
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The Importance of Universal Human Rights at Home
‘Where, after all, do universal human rights begin ? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person, the neighbourhood he lives in, the school or college he attends, the factory, farm,…
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Ain’t I a woman ?
‘That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman ? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and…
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Lise Meitner. A Life in Physics, Ruth Lewin Sime (ISBN 978-0-520-20860-5, University of California Press)
This is the second biography of Lise Meitner I read. After reading the biography by Patricia Rife I was at first hesitant to also go and read this book by Ruth Lewin Sime. But after finishing the book I have to say it was well worth every minute. Where the biography of Patricia Rife focused…
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