Literate Scientist

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

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

I was always fascinated with String Theory without knowing what it was all about except the fact that in early 90s one physics professor told me that there exists the so called String Theory where a mathematical apparatus changes every 6 months… Since then I always wanted to read about that theory and in 2002 I bought and started reading The Elegant Universe book and then bought the book suitable for undergraduates called A First Course in String Theory. This learning adventure was suddenly interrupted with the arrival of two books which I finished reading last year and which opened my eyes and reminded me again that science is full of politics, influence and power games:

Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory And the Search for Unity in Physical Law

The next one is offered with great discount that I think was given the let many people to know about troubles in fundamental physical sciences:

The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next

Since then I read other books about modern physics and science in general and I think I would re-read these two books because I have better background now in order to judge what authors say or complain about.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

Just finished reading it. In summary: Everything is Nothing as their complexity measure is the same. Interesting short and small book to read if you have never heard of computationalism, many world interpretation of quantum mechanics, anthropic principle, self sampling assumption and quantum immortality. Discusses everything briefly and provides bibliography. However I think I should have read David Deutsch’s “The Fabric of Reality” book first which I bought recently and put on my reading list. The number of new concepts introduced was too overwhelming so I consider to read “Theory of Nothing” second time after finishing some other related books. 

Theory of Nothing

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

If you want to understand mainstream modeling in physics I would recommend the following book The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? written by Victor J. Stenger which I finished reading a couple of months ago. It shows how the so called physical laws (the author calls them models) can be derived from various symmetries including gauge invariance. This short book (300 pages) covers topics from classical mechanics and relativity including Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations to statistical and vacuum physics.

The nice feature of this book is its clear separation between textual description and mathematics. The first 190 pages don’t have any mathematical formulas and the next 130 pages repeat the same discussion using undergraduate level of mathematics.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

After reading Rosen’s book “Life Itself” I became very interested in non-reductionist thinking and found the book from Alwyn C. Scott. It is an excellent overview and the last 30 page chapter “Reductionism in Life” is worth the whole book:

• Newton’s Legacy
  • The Reductive Program
  • Supervenience and Physicalism
  • Practical Considerations
• Objections to Reductionism
  • Googols of Possibilities
  • Convoluted Causality
  • Nonlinear Causality
  • Time’s Arrow
  • Downward Causation
  • Open Systems
  • Closed Causal Loops and Open Networks
• Theories of Life
  • Artificial Life vs. Autopoiesis
  • Relational Biology
  • Mechanisms
  • Complex Systems and Chaotic Emergence
  • What Is Life?

The Nonlinear Universe: Chaos, Emergence, Life (The Frontiers Collection)

Highly recommended especially if you were trained as a physicist or a chemist like myself.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -