History
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Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age, Patricia Rife (ISBN 978-0817637323, Birkhäuser)
A very nice biography about one of the ‘forgotten’ women of science. I came across a reference to this book somewhere and decided to read it as part of my ‘atomic’ theme. It also fits nicely into a series of books I am reading about women scientists. I had read the excellent ‘The making of…
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Vienna ahead of the curve
‘By the end of the century, Vienna had given birth to Viktor Adler’s socialism and Theodor Herzl’s Zionism. It was the home Sigmund Freud loved to hate and the political base for Karl Lueger, the city’s longtime mayor, whose heady mix of pupulism and anti-Semitism drew the rapt attention of the young Adolf Hitler. If…
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Turning point. The bomb and the Cold War
I recently was tipped about this Netflix series about the atomic bomb and the Cold War so I decided to give it a try. It fitted with much of my recent reading about Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb by Richard Rhodes and Leslie Groves. The series has 9 episodes of roughly 70…
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Beginnings of war
‘Since wars begin in the minds of men it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.‘― Clement Attlee & Archibald MacLeish
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The Story of Numbers, John McLeish (ISBN 978-0-449-90938-6, Fawcett Columbine)
The Story of Numbers explores the history of mathematics to trace the rise of various number systems in cultures from Mesopotamia to the modern Computer Era. It is not a traditional history of mathematics or a history of mathematicians. Instead it focuses on the different number systems and calculation methods that evolved in time in…
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Center of knowledge
‘Surely you mistake Cambridge. Wee are situated in as dark a corner of ye land (in terms of knowledge of world affairs) as can be well desired.‘― Roger Cotes
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Einstein on Israel
‘The attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people.‘― Albert Einstein
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America
‘God’s own country becomes stranger and stranger, but somehow they manage to return to normality. Everything, even lunacy, is mass produced here. But everything goes out of fashion very quickly.‘― Albert Einstein
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