Mark Reynolds > Recent Status Updates

On the difficulty of starting new research programs: "Take whatever topic you like and you will nearly always find that much has already been done, both theoretically and experimentally, and that you have to make a thorough study before you can hope to do something new."

Looks good so far:

"Leaving the Roman Catholic faith of my childhood was not hard.
...
It was the Buddhist explanation of life, the universe and everything that drew me, rather than the ritual or the theology."

Casimir had this to say about the conditions in post war Eindhoven:

Maximum power for each household was 50 W and total daily consumption was limited to 0.15 kWh.

Casimir was not an experimentalist, but was a very good theorist. And the interplay between the two was crucial in the 1930s, the golden years of nuclear physics.

In 1932 Cockcroft and Walton "showed that the lithium nucleus is split when bombarded by fast protons. This was the first time a nuclear transformation was brought about by artificial means, and it was the beginning of a new era of nuclear physics in which 'string and ceiling wax' were rapidly being replaced by powerful and technologically refined apparatus."

Lots of wonderful - and wonderfully funny - personal stories. They all knit together in a beautiful fabric. Like his photos.

Excellent so far. He’s a good written as well as a photographer. And apparently could have been a professional pianist.

“Education without either meaning or excitement is impossible.”

“You think you’ve neatly stored your past away and then you find … it isn’t really past at all.”
Malory Hollander

As Hodgson says, "The past, eh? It remembers you better than you remember it."

He quotes the memorable Wolfgang Pauli:

"Our friend Dirac has a religion; and the main tenet of that religion is: 'There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.' "

Starting out as a cliched spy story. But the narrator, Derek Perkins, is good.

Very funny. It’s definitely a “black comedy.”

Funny. But a “black” comedy.

The authors make the physics community of the 1920s sound very spiteful and intolerant. In fact the opposite was true: they worked together very well, often exchanging letters and visits in search of the secrets of the universe.

They also impugn the skill of Davisson and Germer, Nobel prize winners, calling them “sloppy experimentalists.”

The authors continue to cover interesting concepts, but in a way that is too clever. Sometimes their attempts at erudition and cleverness make their writing hard to follow, even for an expert such as myself.

I’ve always liked Baggott’s writing, but in this book the prologue is rather convoluted and slightly pretentious. I hope that the rest of the book is more straightforward.

Ok so far. But it’s best at getting the reader interested to learn the *real* physics behind interesting phenomena. It’s hard to really teach physics in this manner.

The Chinese names are very confusing, and he visits many temples and mountains and hermits and walks many paths. It’s very hard to keep them all straight. But there’s some very good Buddhist advice from the monks that he interviews.