We Need to Talk About Kelvin: What everyday things tell us about the universe

by Marcus Chown

fact

Not a fact.

to

from

runnels

capricious

Since the Greek for ‘uncuttable’ was a-tomos, Democritus’s ultimate grains of matter have come to be known as ‘atoms’.

‘wavelengths’,

The use of 'inverted commas' in this way, throughout this book, is really annoying.

and so is likely to stay spinning for a long time.

William Prout

It is this tendency of carbon atoms to enter into same-sex relationships

What on earth? This entire section is flawed, as it mixes up classical theory - shells and orbitalsz atf different distances - with quantum mechanics and its 3D probability maps.

‘proton’ and ‘neutron’.

Why the inverted commas?

preciseness,

precision

two?

C, K or F?

a cornflake magnate,

THE

Fritz Zwicky.4

think of

into which the

Zwicky classified people he did not like as bastards or spherical bastards, who were bastards whatever way you looked at them.

I

only a tiny fraction

About 1/60th is hardly tiny.

FFS

‘heat’.

Inverted commas not needed... again. This book really needs editing.

abhorrence for

abhorrence of

a myriad of

‘This quantum randomness is the reason my The Feynman Lectures in Physics is next to A Brief History of Time.’

This feels like a faulty analogy. I would file them alphabetically, by author, because it seems more logical to me and because I have control over the filing system, so I can make it fit into a system: my system.

Buckminster Fuller

Richard Buckminster Fuller

He will be surprised, he says, if SETI does not meet with success by that date.

He’ll still be surprised, then :-)

as saying

Once again, Arthur C. Clarke’s remark is apt: a sufficiently advanced civilisation will be indistinguishable from magic.

envisage

Fred Saberhagen envisioned just such a race of doomsday machines, which he called ‘Berserkers’.

Of course, absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.

it does appear to be the logical conclusion to draw from what American science-fiction writer David Brin calls ‘The Great Silence’.

‘Mars ain’t no place to raise your kids.’

It’s “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids”. If the author is going to quote people, at least he should bother to get the words right.