Physicist: Over the past year I’ve been putting together a collection of some (fifty-four) of my favorite and most elucidating articles from the past decade, revised, updated, and in book form. You can get your very own copy here!
I wrote a book! It’s good. You should buy it. The cover is a false-color x-ray of a chameleon, which is hilarious.
In an effort to plug, I’ll be a guest on Story Collider, which will be recording at the Tipsy Crow in San Diego on Thursday at 7:00. It’s free and should be fun, so if you’d like to show up, you can learn more about the whole thing and register here.
And for those of you attending the Joint Mathematics Meeting (Comic Con for nerds) in San Diego this year, I’ll be at Springer’s booth on Friday.
This is Springer’s first foray into “popular science”. It’s divided into four chapters: “big things”, “small things”, “in between things”, and “not things” (math).
I aimed it at my younger self, who was unimpressed by the vagueness of pop sci and frustrated by the technicalness of actual sci. The articles in “Do Colors Exist?” cover the important ideas intuitively and without dumbing down, but also assume that you don’t know a bunch of fancy terminology. Even if physics isn’t your thing, this is exactly the sort of gift you could give a nerd/science friend without embarrassment. It provides satisfying answers for the man-on-the-street, while including details for the “advanced” reader.
The blurb from the back of the book (which I didn’t write) reads:
Why do polished stones look wet? How does the Twin Paradox work? How can we be sure that pi never repeats? How does a quantum computer break encryption? Discover the answers to these, and other profound physics questions!
This fascinating book presents a collection of articles based on conversations and correspondences between the author and complete strangers about physics and math. The author, a researcher in mathematical physics, responds to dozens of questions posed by inquiring minds from all over the world, ranging from the everyday to the profound.
Rather than unnecessarily complex explanations mired in mysterious terminology and symbols, the reader is presented with the reasoning, experiments, and mathematics in a casual, conversational, and often comical style. Neither over-simplified nor over- technical, the lucid and entertaining writing will guide the reader from each innocent question to a better understanding of the weird and beautiful universe around us.
Advance praise for Do Colors Exist?: “Every high school science teacher should have a copy of this book. The individual articles offer enrichment to those students who wish to go beyond a typical ‘dry curriculum’. The articles are very fun. I probably laughed out loud every 2-3 minutes. This is not easy to do. In fact, my children are interested in the book because they heard me laughing so much.” -Ken Ono, Emory University
Keeping this website ad-free and cost-free is important, so this will be the last time you’ll have to hear about this.