Science
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Charles Lauritsen on Oppenheimer
‘This man was unbelievable. He always gave you the answer before you had time to formulate the question.‘― Charles Lauritsen
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Return of the Stone Age
‘The Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of science.‘― Winston Churchill
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Einstein. His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson (ISBN 9780743264747, Simon & Schuster)
A ‘new’ biography of Einstein by Walter Isaacson came out in 2007. The first biography I read from Isaacson was the one of Steve Jobs which actually came out later, in 2011. I enjoyed the Steve Jobs biography and by looking for other books by Isaacson I came across this Einstein biography. I bought the…
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Schrödinger’s kittens and the search for reality, John Gribbin (ISBN 9781857994025, Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
After reading In Search of Schrödinger’s cat by John Gribbin I decided to also read this sequel not really knowing what to expect. His first book is a more or less traditional explanation of quantum mechanics and its bizarre description of reality. Ever since its conception physicists and philosophers have been struggling with the interpretation…
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Piet Vroon: From Bestselling Author to Tragic Story
I read this book a little while ago in October mainly because it was short and I was behind on my reading target for 2025. It is barely 50 pages thick and I read a couple of other books by Piet Vroon long ago that I liked very much. Unfortunately, the quality of the book…
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The Five Ages of the Universe, Fred Adams, Greg Laughlin (ISBN 978-0-684-86576-8, Simon & Schuster)
I read this book a while ago. It came out in 1999 but I came across a reference to it in another book. This book is a ‘biography’ of the universe from the beginning with the big bang until its speculatvie end after 10150 years. It is based on our current understanding of the laws…
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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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Richard Feynman. A Life in Science, John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin (ISBN 978-1-78578-372-2, Iconbooks)
During my physics studies at university I became a fan of Feynman. His path integral formulation of quantum mechanics was a revelation after years of plodding through the standard formalisms by Heisenberg and Schrödinger and the mists surrounding the question what it all meant physically. Especially the fact that this approach was also applicable to…
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Exercised. Why something we never evolved to do is healthy and rewarding, Daniel E. Lieberman (ISBN 978-0-525-43478-8, Vintage Books)
I heard about this book in a podcast about running. 2 journalists discussed their own running habits and struggles and one of them mentioned this book as a good one to read. I definitely found it interesting as it gives insights from an evolutionary perspective to why so many people struggle to exercise even though…
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