English
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Understanding Nature’s Secrets: Insights and Reflections
‘There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.‘― Robert Oppenheimer
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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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Exploring Vulcan: From Star Trek to Mercury’s Orbit
In Star Trek 3 : The Search for Spock, the resurrected Spock is found on the Genisis planet. But where can we find the planet Vulcan ? Vulcan is the god of fire and in the 19th century peculiarities were observed in the orbit of the planet Mercury. This anomaly in Mercury’s orbit could was…
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Understanding Gell-Mann: Giants versus Dwarfs
‘If I have seen further than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs.‘― Murray Gell-Mann
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Remembering Solar System Planets: Easy Mnemonics
Also have trouble remembering the planets of our solar system and their sequence according to distance from the sun ? Fortunately some good mnenomics have been invented for this. Like this one : My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nachos. Or if you are from the old guard when Pluto was still a planet…
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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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Birthday of Ray Dolby
Ray Milton Dolby was born on January 18 1933. He was an American engineer and inventor of the Dolby NR noise reduction system and founded Dolby Laboratories. Today Dolby is everywhere with Dolby Surround, Dolby Atmos, Dolby HD and so on. The world of entertainment certainly sounds differently with Dolby.
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A Tour of the Calculus, David Berlinski (ISBN 978-0-679-74788-8, Vintage Books)
A Tour of the Calculus is a strange and unique book. According to text on the back it is likely to become a classic as Gödel, Escher, Bach. But I doubt that very much. The book was written in 1995 and so far I haven’t come across it in any list of classics. I also…
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