Summer Reading

Last year was "Fifty shades of Grey". This summer --no matter if you are sunbathing, hiking or enjoying desolated cities-- if you start pondering about black holes, superradiance, and related subjects, we got you covered:

The book will be soon available on the Springer webpage and on Amazon. Hurry up to buy a copy containing the typo in Vitor's name before they fix it. Those copies will be priceless hundred years from now :)

The book will be available in August but can be already pre-ordered. It costs $60 in the U.S. and about 45 Euros in Europe and the authors get about the 10% of the profit. This means that each of the authors (Richard, "Victor" and I) will get about 3 Euros for each sold copy. Taking "50 shades of Grey" as a reference, a back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests we might become rich in ~10^9 years.

Recommended by us: "The role of fashion in physical theory"

From the book "The road to Reality" by Roger Penrose: 

“

[...] String theory is also a subject that is studied by a good many physicists, but does that make it physics? This raises the issue of fashion in fundamenta physical research. Let me begin by quoting a survey carried out by Carlo Rovelli, and reported in his address to the International Congress on General Relativity and Gravitation, held in Pune, India, in December 1997. Rovelli is one of the originators of the loop-variable approach to quantum gravity, and he claimed no professionalism in the conducting of his survey. Yet the results he found certainly reflect what my own (unsubstantiated) expectations would have been. He made a count of articles on the subject of quantum gravity published over the previous year, as recorded in the Los Angeles Archives. The rough average of papers per month, in the various approaches to the subject, came out as follows:

                      String theory: 69

                       Loop quantum gravity: 25

                    QFT in curved spaces: 8

                    Lattice approaches: 7

                    Euclidean quantum gravity: 3

                   Non-commutative geometry: 3

                                                                           Quantum cosmology: 1

                                                                           Twistors: 1

                                                                           Others: 6

Book Review: “The Geek Manifesto” [Via BackReaction]

“ Book Review “The Geek Manifesto” by Mark Henderson The Geek Manifesto: Why Science Matters By Mark Henderson Bantam Press (10 May 2012) Henderson’s book is a well-structured and timely summary of why science, both scientific knowledge and the scientific method, matters for the well-being of our societies. Henderson covers seven different areas: why science matters to politics, the government, the media, the economy, education, in court, in healthcare and to the environment. In each case, he has examples of current problems, mostly from  (Continue to read on BackReaction)

                 ”

Un must sotto l'ombrellone per tutti i fisici in vacanza (e non)

Visto che il periodo non aiuta argomenti piu' seri (sto tenendo qualche post piu' interessante per il post vacanze) sfrutto questi 5 minuti di connessione dalla pineta di Santa Margherita di Pula per pubblicizzare un libro che tutti i fisici apprezzeranno.

Alessandra Arachi - Coriandoli nel deserto -
Link ad Amazon

Si tratta di "Coriandoli nel deserto", un libro di Alessandra Arachi, giornalista del Corriere della Sera gia' nota per il bellissimo "Lunatica" [il suo migliore, dal punto di vista narrativo].