I'm a fan of biographies of scientists and this one had been on my TBR since it was published. For obvious reasons it finally got off my TBR. And it iI'm a fan of biographies of scientists and this one had been on my TBR since it was published. For obvious reasons it finally got off my TBR. And it is an amazing piece of writing but is not really a scientific biography. Which might be fair because if all Robert Oppenheimer did was science I probably would not be reading a biography of him (when I still have not gotten around to The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, among others). But still I really wished the authors explained Oppenheimer's early scientific papers and their consequences. And discussed more of the science and engineering of the bomb and the role that Oppenheimer played in resolving them. I am left feeling that I'm soon going to need to take another book off my TBR shelf, one that has been there even longer, The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
The book does have everything a standard biography would have: A little about Oppenheimer's parents, his early life at the Ethical Culture School, college, grad school, early science, all the way through his last years and death. But the overwhelming focus is on his "trial" over revoking his security clearance. It is the not that the trial section itself is quite long (but riveting, like all courtroom dramas, even when you know how it will end). It is that much of what came earlier in the book was planting seeds that the authors come back to in the trial scene. Seeds like Oppenheimer's relationships to communists, his wife's communist first husband, and especially the "Chevalier incident" where someone asked him to spy which is told in gory detail multiple times throughout the book in a way that makes sense for a courtroom drama but in some sense does not for a biography, and certainly not for a scientific biography.
The biography is strong on nuance (for Oppenheimer, not for his tormentor Lewis Strauss who probably does not deserve any nuance). The ways in which Oppenheimer changed. The ways in which he was not the simple hero that the left subsequently wanted to make him (e.g., when he was opposing the H bomb he was supporting tactical nuclear weapons which he thought could actually be used in wars). A number of his political views at all stages were clearly naive and wrong in retrospect. Ultimately, however, he is a great character--fewer flashy anecdotes (and brilliant scientific contributions) than Richard Feynman but a complex and tragic tale that makes for great reading....more
A young adult graphic novel about the first female astronauts is by the team that wrote the excellent Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, A young adult graphic novel about the first female astronauts is by the team that wrote the excellent Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas and the author of numerous other young adult graphic scientific biographies, most notably Feynman. Primates was a much more unique and interesting book, weaving primatology together with the lives and using it to better appreciate the psychology and behavior of the human subjects of the book. This was a little closer to standard fare, astronaut training, launches, and the like, only focusing on the first women--including the obstacles they overcame, the ways NASA did and did not understand them, and a vivid recounting of what it was like to be on the first set of Shuttle flights. Relatively quick reading and passes the test of being worth the time....more
A short graphic, group biography of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas by the author of the excellent Feynman. Conveys the sense of exciteA short graphic, group biography of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas by the author of the excellent Feynman. Conveys the sense of excitement and the commonalities and differences in the experience of these three women who were all sent by Richard Leakey to study different primates in order to both advance inherent knowledge but also learn more about humanity. Like Feynman, Primates also does not appear to whitewash his human subjects in an effort to pander to children, instead portraying (some) of what seems to be the philandering of Leakey, the complicated marriage of Galidikas, the tragedy of Fossey, and the like.
I'm a big fan of the Jim Ottaviani's graphic biographies, having read Feynman and Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and BirI'm a big fan of the Jim Ottaviani's graphic biographies, having read Feynman and Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas before and planning to read The Imitation Game. Although pitched to children, they are reasonably sophisticated in the science they convey and show a lot of the rough edges and more problematic parts of thee lives. This biography of Hawking was a cradle-to-grave story that attempted to convey his major scientific discoveries, his life/illness, and his role as a popularizer of science. The excitement around the rapidly evolving research on black holes and their role in cosmology in the late 1960s and early 1970s is conveyed well. I found the way that the Soviet Union was and was not engaged on these scientific matters particularly interesting. I also had not appreciated how much time and effort he put into A Brief History of Time....more
I have been captivated by Alan Turing’s story ever since I saw Derek Jacobi perform it in Breaking the Code. The Imitation Game movie almost ruined itI have been captivated by Alan Turing’s story ever since I saw Derek Jacobi perform it in Breaking the Code. The Imitation Game movie almost ruined it. But this book does not share much more than a subject and a title, it is much better.
I really like the Jim Ottaviani scientific biographies in graphic novel format ostensibly aimed at YA readers (Feynman, Hawking, and Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas) and this one was no exception. This was probably a higher ratio of life to works than the others with Jim Ottaviani making less effort to explain Alan Turing’s major contributions and doing more to showcase his life. But it is quite a life.
I say ostensibly YA because all of the biographies are relatively sophisticated in a variety of ways: flashbacks, imaginary scenes, someone narrating interspersed with the stories, somewhat complicated themes that do not whitewash some of the more sordid personal details, and most importantly a lot of attempt to explain the science....more
A well done graphic biography of Richard Feynman, sort of aimed at children (and published by the excellent children's graphic novel house :01 First SA well done graphic biography of Richard Feynman, sort of aimed at children (and published by the excellent children's graphic novel house :01 First Second). The cradle-to-grave story is told from Feynman's perspective, in some cases with flashbacks from the second Nobel lecture he gave to his high school in Far Rockaway. The book does a very good job of capturing Feynman's voice and perspective, or at least the persona he created for himself, something that is aided by the vast amount Feynman already did in that respect. In the course of that it shows his boundle"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Characterss curiosity, refusal to follow real rules, and ways in which what seemed like tangents turned out to be important for his research, teaching and explanation. The book dwells a lot on work that went into the original QED, the development/delivery/writing of his famous The Feynman Lectures on Physics, and the New Zealand lectures that turned into his popular(ish) book on QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter published in 1986. It repeats a lot of Feynman's explanation's of QED from that book, but it is not clear if that authors are really trying to explain the theory (something that is effectively impossible in the space they have) or trying to give a flavor of the distinction between Feynman was trying to create between solving equations and truly understanding.
In telling the story from Feynman's perspective the book is reasonably frank of his consistent objectification of women, from hints of affairs with students when he taught at Cornell, to daily visits to strip clubs later in life, drawing nude models and the like. When I first read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character as a teenager that all seemed part of his charm. From a different age, both my own and the 21st century, it is, at best, considerably more complex. Regardless, I think the author's should be credited for leaving at least some of the rough edges of their subject showing--but showing through his eyes.
I don't regret being baited and switched into reading this book. And I have only myself to blame for being baited and switched. I expected the book t I don't regret being baited and switched into reading this book. And I have only myself to blame for being baited and switched. I expected the book to be more about Ramanujan but instead it was mostly a memoir of a mathematician named Ken Ono. But the fulcrum of the book is Ramanujan. Ono was brought up by Japanese immigrant "tiger parents" who pressured him into being a mathematician. He rebelled to the point of dropping out of high school. But then he found a letter that Ramanujan's widow sent to his father thanking her for a donation to build a statue of him and that set his mind off--with a lag--so that he found himself constantly coming back to Ramanujan, both his life and his specific, unproved ideas. The book includes a 50 page mini-biography of Ramanujan and an appendix that attempts to explain some of his specific ideas. What makes the memoir so interesting is that it is not about a top mathematician but instead about someone struggling to join the profession and contribute and about the struggles, semi-failures, and semi-successes that go with it. My disappointment was that, other than the appendix, it attempts to cover very little of the substance of Ono or Ramanujan.
And if you are looking for a biography of Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity is one of the best scientific biographies ever written about an amazing and glorious and tragic life and mind....more
This Kindle single biography of the mathematician/philosopher/economist Frank Ramsey is about 60 book pages long. Which is 10 pages for each of RamseyThis Kindle single biography of the mathematician/philosopher/economist Frank Ramsey is about 60 book pages long. Which is 10 pages for each of Ramsey's adult years--he tragically died at age 26 having translated Wittgenstein's Tractatus at age 19 and impressed some of the biggest giants in Cambridge thought like Wittgenstein, Keynes and Russell, in many cases disproving these venerable masters. The Kindle Single is nearly 4 pages for each of his 16 published papers, many of which blazed completely new and original avenues of thought in a variety of subjects. In any case, the proportions of the Kindle Single are not well short of a more traditional-length biography for a more traditional length of time. Which is to say it could have been the perfect length but for the fact that Karl Sabbagh spends much more time and energy on Ramsey's (rather ordinary) sexual hangups that he does not do anything close to justice to Ramsey's contributions to economics, philosophy, and mathematics--let alone even attempting to figure out where his thoughts came from, what he was motivated to do, and where he was going with all of it.
Sabbagh clearly did real work for the biography, drawing on diaries, letters, and even tracking down the one living person who knew Ramsey--a 102 year old woman. But when it comes to Ramsey's contributions, he quotes liberally from experts in the different fields (e.g., Partha Dasgupta for the economics papers) and does not do nearly enough to situate them in the periods and fields they came out of. The book is strong on Cambridge atmosphere in the 1920s, bits of the Bloomsbury Group, and the emergency of psychoanalysis, all of which make for interesting reading.
As for Ramsey's contributions, in economics they are to a normative model meant to determine how much a society should save that turned into a positive model with an infinitely lived representative agent. Also, the Ramsey rule for optimal taxation of different commodities which continues to be the departure point for work on optimal taxation, even if its restrictive assumptions like separability have long since been superseded. I have a harder time understanding Ramsey's contributions to philosophy and the philosophy of mathematics, but they seem to relate to shortcomings in the Russel-Whitehead view of the world which, as we know, was subsequently exploded by Gödel, although I could not tell how much Ramsey's work related to that or how much was still relevant....more
A first rate biography of Isaac Newton. The biography is a relatively short, standard cradle-to-grave account, with significant discussions of Newton'A first rate biography of Isaac Newton. The biography is a relatively short, standard cradle-to-grave account, with significant discussions of Newton's scientific thinking and discoveries, starting with mathematics, then optics, and finally physics -- not counting alchemy, biblical studies, and his role as master of the mint.
James Gleick puts you directly into Newton's life and world through extensive quotations from letters and other documents, all with the original spellings. In some cases, like Newton's playing with infinite sums, Gleick reproduces a facsimile of the document itself.
No scientific life I know is as full of bitter rivalries, secrecy, and a continuum from the ultra-rational to the completely irrational. Towards the end of the book Gleick quotes Keynes' apt description of Newton: "Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago."...more
I cannot believe that I had not read this before. I had been carrying around my father's copy for twenty-five years but only just read it. It is a fasI cannot believe that I had not read this before. I had been carrying around my father's copy for twenty-five years but only just read it. It is a fascinating, exciting and sometimes even funny account of the race to unravel the structure of DNA. It is unflinchingly honest in describing not only the thrill of scientific discovery but also the more ordinary impulses including scientific rivlaries and everything from the desire to win the Nobel Prize to the desire to win over girls. It is also a great account of collaboration, not only with Francis Crick but also with Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, and Linus Pauling -- in the case of the later three the collaboration was mixed with a fervent desire that they not beat Watson and Crick to the discovery of the strucure of DNA. Finally, it is also an excellent detective story as Watson and Crick follow fragmenatory and contradictory evidence along several false leads but eventually stumble on the extremely elegant answer.
The Double Helix is at the opposite extreme of Einstein's book Relativity which presents the pure science, derived from first principles, and explained to the lay reader. Instead in The Double Helix, the extensive descriptions of the science are all subsurvient to moving the story of the discovery forward. None of these scientific discsussions are derived from first principles or includes any explanation for the reader (and I, for one, started the book with no knowledge of x-ray crystallography or stereoscopic chemistry and only pieced together a dim understanding of them over the course of the book). And there is virtually no discussion of the implications of the discovery, what followed, or really much in the way of context. But it is hard to hold any of that against The Double Helix, especially when many, many other books have handled all of those topics, while this book uniquely and superlatively describes the process of discovery itself....more
An inspired choice to do a paired biography of George Gamow and Max Max Delbrück. They were both born at the turn of the century, one in Russia and onAn inspired choice to do a paired biography of George Gamow and Max Max Delbrück. They were both born at the turn of the century, one in Russia and one in Germany, both started in quantum mechanics and then branched out -- Gamow to nuclear physics and cosmology and Delbrück much further afield to biology. And hovering over both of them from the beginning to nearly the end of the book is Niels Bohr and the "spirit of Copenhagen".
One of the things this book conveys most beautifully is how Gamow and Delbrück in their different ways created new circles of scientists in their adopted country of the United States, bringing together different disciplines that rarely worked together and pushing them forward onto new questions that had never been asked before. The results were breakthroughs in the nuclear physics of the creation of atoms in the big bang (in Gamow's case) and the forerunners of DNA theory (in Delbrück's case).
What is particularly interesting about focusing on Gamow and Delbrück, as opposed to say Einstein or Heisenberg or Watson, is how much they got wrong. But they got it wrong in interesting ways that led to new discoveries and theories that were right.
Gino Segre does a good job of shifting between the two and shifting between biography, historical context, and science. Highly recommended -- although not as good as Segre's earlier book Faust in Copenhagen, which also portrays the way scientists think and work together, in that case in producing the ensemble production we know as quantum mechanics....more
A workmanlike biography of a workmanlike figure. This biography focuses on William Herschel and his sister Caroline. Their major accomplishment was thA workmanlike biography of a workmanlike figure. This biography focuses on William Herschel and his sister Caroline. Their major accomplishment was the discovery of Uranus, the first new planet to be discovered since around the time of the Babylonians. Although I was somewhat disappointed to learn that Herschel was neither the first to see it and that even after months of detailed observations he thought it was a small, near-by comet -- and only after others decided it was a planet did he go along. In addition to being a keen observer, Herschel was also a top-notch instrument maker and a theoretician.
It's not entirely obvious that it is the fault of the biographer (Michael Lemonick), but somehow the book is not as interesting as one might have hoped. It spends too much time on Herschel's early life as a court musician, which is not really informative about his future scientific pursuits nor is it a topic that is intrinsically interesting enough to justify spending much time reading. Lemonick is good on the science and context, but somehow that too ends up not being overly exciting or revealing.
But none of these are obvious faults or flaws, just not the highest priority book I would recommend reading....more
Wasn't the best biography, a bit matter-of-fact, and way, way too hagiographic about its subject.Wasn't the best biography, a bit matter-of-fact, and way, way too hagiographic about its subject....more
A really fantastic book. I appreciated a biography that had a lot of equations. But even without the equations not only was Ramanujan a wonderfully drA really fantastic book. I appreciated a biography that had a lot of equations. But even without the equations not only was Ramanujan a wonderfully drawn portrait but it also really conveyed collaboration and the very interesting story of Hardy as well....more
If you read just one biography of Michael Faraday make it this one.
Actually I haven't read any others and probably won't. But this was one well worth If you read just one biography of Michael Faraday make it this one.
Actually I haven't read any others and probably won't. But this was one well worth it. As Dickensian as the Wire, but more David Copperfield than Little Dorrit. Faraday picked up science by browsing books in the store that he worked in. And then worked his way up from essentially an errand boy to one of the world's premier experimentalist in electricity and magnetism.
Hirshfeld does a nice job mixing the life of Faraday with his science....more
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