Posted in reading on May 13th, 2005 No Comments »
Each night, I read a few pages of Lynch and Livingstone’s compendium of natural optical phenomena. Although the writing is a little wooden, and they assume more of a background in physics than I possess, Color and Light in Nature is a wonderful book.
So far, my favourite technical term from the book is “glitter [...]
Posted in reading on January 27th, 2005 No Comments »
I’m trying to slog through Jaynes’s Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. It’s a refreshing change to read a book where I spend a good portion of the time clutching my head, feeling hopelessly stupid.
This is no fault of the book itself; it’s wonderfully written, and would probably make perfect sense to any reasonably [...]
Posted in reading on January 22nd, 2005 No Comments »
I have just finished reading John Gribbin’s The Scientists, which is a wonderful book on the history of Western science, from the era of Copernicus to the present. The style of the book is biographical, avoiding deep treatment of discoveries in favour of talking about the contributions of individuals. Gribbin enlivens his story [...]