Literate Scientist

Just finished reading the book about the emergence of forensic science in 19th and 20th centuries:

The Science of Sherlock Holmes: From Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear, the Real Forensics Behind the Great Detective’s Greatest Cases

I have never thought about how dependent the life of a suspected person was on superstitions, logic and scientific fallacies and just plain bad luck if certain personality types were testifying in a court or collecting and analyzing forensic evidence. And this was up to the middle of 20th century in developed countries like Great Britain! Realizing that we must know about forensic science and its methods in order to protect ourselves and partially considering my expertise in memory dump analysis as the part of computer forensics I ordered another book about modern forensic science and will review it later as soon as I read it.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

I was always interested in the history of Nazi Germany and I bought this book almost 8 years ago. This was one of my first history books written in English. However, only this month I began reading it when commuting to work in the morning. In two weeks I already finished more than 200 pages and I would say this is very interesting read about mass and party politics in general. Some people say in their reviews that this book has too may adjectives because it was written in 50s-60s just after the war but I would say that adjectives make this book a non-stop reading experience.

Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich

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Being born and lived in Russia during Communist era I inherited the sense of heroic achievements of the Soviet Army during the battle for Berlin. One of my co-workers recommended me this book and I read it last summer. It really shows the other side of the this battle like disorganization and chaos on the Soviet front and horrors committed by them on German civilians. Since then I buy and read revisionist history books to see different or not officially approved views on the same historical and political events.

The Fall of Berlin 1945

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

This is the very important book that warns about synergy between different chemicals that enter our bodies. It also shows the failure of reductionism in pharmacology and mainstream medicine and the danger of the so called synthetic paradigm. The book depicts various food and drug related fallacies. Highly recommended for reading and not to be paranoid but at least to be informed. At the time of this writing I’ve have finished 183 pages out of 257 pages of the main text. This is my lunch time reading these days

The Hundred-Year Lie: How to Protect Yourself from the Chemicals That Are Destroying Your Health

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Reading general science books especially those bordering on philosophy requires understanding basic principles of philosophy and its logic as well as possessing critical thinking skills. The following short book which I’m half way through seems to be good:

The Philosophers Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

I’ve just finished reading this book and despite some bad reviews on Amazon I wasn’t disappointed. The author’s writing style is a bit unusual with some unknown words that you need a dictionary but after a chapter I became used to it and it wasn’t a problem anymore. If you heard about Gödel theorems before but cannot repeat precisely what they are about then this book is for you and you will find detail-free sketch of the proof very clear. I really liked the author’s attack on positivism and postmodernism especially in the light of previously read Fashionable Nonsense. I also liked the conclusion at the end of the book that the life of Gödel was “incomplete” too. The book discusses Vienna Circle and Wittgenstein, relationship between Einstein and Gödel and even some political issues in the Institute for Advanced Study related to Gödel’s life (this is why I included this book under Politics category too). One remark about bad review from the professor who participated in publishing edited works of Kurt Gödel: I can publish works of Aristotle nowadays without much efforts. Will it give me the right to judge other works and proclaim without sound justification that they don’t know philosophy?

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel (Great Discoveries)

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If you ask me to recommend the only one semi-popular book about modern physics that has everything in it and explaining all necessary mathematics too I would not hesitate to point to Roger Penrose’s book:

The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe

It is not a light read and requires some mathematical maturity. It has more than 1,100 pages and my first attempt to read it in 2005 when I bought a hardcover edition lasted until the page 160. Since then I read many other popular and semi-popular physics and math books and now feel more confident. I started reading it again last week from the first page before tackling with The Anthropic Cosmological Principle book which is heavy on general relativity and it reads very well now. Therefore I would recommend not to give up reading this book and even read it couple of times to thoroughly understand various mathematical ideas and their connection with physics. It is well worth it if you are keen to understand modern science. There is no other science book with the same breadth and depth covering both physics and mathematics. It looks like it springed various smaller books like The Comprehensible Cosmos I read earlier.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

If you want to learn about standard model of particle physics and understand associated concepts including QED and QCD, Lie groups and gauge theory this popular book is down to the facts and non-speculative: it even barely mentions string theory.

Deep Down Things: The Breathtaking Beauty of Particle Physics

I read it in succession to another similar great popular book that uses a bit more math but in addition lucidly explains special relativity that was only briefly touched in Deep Down Things book:

The Great Design: Particles, Fields, and Creation

I read both books last year and now I’m reading Roger Penrose’s book The Road to Reality and review it as soon as I finish.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

When mapping one science domain to another and borrowing terminology even metaphorically one rule to follow is to provide justification. This is very important otherwise people will laugh once they recognize that terminology was just thrown without any explanation or connection. For me this book was very important reading because I also mapped some computer science and engineering technology terminology to the domain of project management. However I provided some sort of justification to my relief.

Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science

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This one I discovered last year and just finished reading. Interesting collection of articles written in the late 70’s and early 80’s about application of mathematics. My favourite were two articles about statistics and two articles about Husserl. The article about Kant biography was nice as well.

Discrete Thoughts

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