Science
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The Grand Aim of Science
‘The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms.’― Albert Einstein
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The Nature of Science
‘Science is not about finding any kind of ultimate truth, it is about building hypotheses or models that we use to make useful predictions.’― JohnJoe McFadden
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The Hot Zone, Richard Preston (ISBN 978-0552171649, Transworld Publishers)
A true story about an outbreak of an Ebola ‘variant’ in the US, Reston virus near Washington DC. The book has been criticised for sensationalizing the physical effects of Ebola and Marburg with people bleeding out and decomposing and turning into a bag of liquid. That is the graphical image you get from the cases…
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Discovering The Expanding Universe, Harry Nussbaumer and Lydia Bieri (ISBN 978-0-521-51484-2, CUP)
This book from Cambridge University Press was first published in 2009. As the title suggests this is a history of how the expanding universe was discovered. Although all mathematics are banned to an appendix you should not expect a typical popular science book. The 187 pages spread over 18 short chapters deal with the most…
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Men of Mathematics, Eric Temple Bell (ISBN 978-0-6716-2818-5, Simon & Schuster)
A ‘classic’ from 1937. The subtitle is ‘The Lives and Achievements of the Great Mathematicians from Zeno to Poincaré’. This is not completely correct as the last chapter is dedicated to Cantor and not to Poincaré. The penultimate chapter is for Poincaré. The first chapter is as usual an introduction and Zeno is tackled in…
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The Poet Mathematician
‘It is true that a mathematician who is not also something of a poet will never be a perfect mathematician.’― Karl Wilhelm Theodor Weierstrass
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Hamiltonian words
“I have very long admired Ptolemy’s description of his great astronomical master, Hipparchus, as a labor-loving and truth-loving man. Be such my epitath.” ― William Rowan Hamilton
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The Universal Test of Citizenship
The Americans have had their civics test for many decades. Certain politicians around here (in Europe) have been proposing a similar test for new immigrants as a way to share our common values and culture and to integrate the newcomers in our society. The proposal has been problematic from the start for various reasons I…
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De architecten van ASML, René Raaijmakers (ISBN 978-9082579826, Techwatch Books)
Ik kwam een verwijzing naar dit boek tegen op het LinkedIn kanaal van ASML. Aanleiding was de Chinese vertaling van dit boek. Ik had hiervoor al met veel plezier Natlab gelezen dus was de beslissing om dit boek te kopen en te lezen snel genomen. En ik heb er zeker geen spijt van gehad. De…
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