Passacaglia and Fugue

Book Review: Empires of Light - Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the race to electrify the world, by Jill Jonnes
This had been on the wish list for a while and it was a welcome Christmas present. Jonnes gives some background on electricity, from classical times through Franklin, Galvani, Volta and Faraday, before picking up the main story in late nineteenth century America. Edison was first to challenge gas lighting, with his high-resistance, low voltage, direct current. But it had problems and technical limitations. Tesla left Serbia and Europe for America, working for Edison for a while but unable to persuade him of the benefits of alternating current. Westinghouse, an inventor and general industrialist, saw the potential (pun not intended) and pushed with Tesla for a time the alternating current - the great advantage being the ability to send it over long distance with relatively low losses, which were prohibitive with direct current.

Edison claimed AC wasn't safe. And in some cases it wasn't, where the wiring was poorly maintained or protected. Edison was a great enthusiast for alternating current for one case only - the electric chair. Jonnes describes this gruesome episode in some detail. But one a more positive note, the battle was slowly won by AC for its lower costs and demonstrable reliability. Eventually all three men succumbed to capitalism one way or another; Edison in particular seems to have stormed off to engage in other research. Westinghouse bankrupted his electrical company but carried on in other areas. Tesla, forever the dreamer, built dramatic machines for wireless transmission and reception of energy, only to find that Marconi had built the radio already. Although there are one or two moments of repetition, Jonnes tells the story with the right balance of science and entertainment. A good start to reading in 2023.

Book Review: The Man from the Future - The Visionary Life of John von Neumann, by Ananyo Bhattacharya
Von Neumann is one of those names that crops up over and over again in science of the early to mid twentieth century. Reading Bhattacharya's biography goes some way to explaining why. Born into circles with intellectual access in Budapest, he showed early aptitude for mathematics, although his parents weren't entirely sure this was wise and made him study chemistry at university. But it seemed that anything he found interesting, he would excel at, and so his career encompassed, inter alia, quantum mechanics, logic, computers, game theory and automata. During World War 2 he was a significant figure in the Manhattan project, but consulted on many military matters with scientific, mathematical, or operational research input.

Beyond von Neumann himself, some other interesting things emerge from this biography: for example, the effects of depletion of intellectuals from Germany and central Europe particularly in the 1930s, lasting for decades. There is some speculation over whether von Neumann and Turing met during the war, and what information they might have exchanged with each other on the nascent subject of electronic computation (to be honest the evidence is sketchy, and this is very much left as a what if?). The later chapters on game theory and automata do stray rather beyond the area of biography, discussing von Neumann's ideas and contributions in the context of wider surveys of each subject, from the Cold War and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction - or not - through to 3D printers that can copy themselves, and self-building and assembling robots on the moon. It seems, like Mahler's ninth symphony, von Neumann's ideas will always seem modern.

Book Review: Euclid's Window - The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace, by Leonard Mlodinow
This is a re-read from many years ago. A book on geometry - or a biography of five significant people in the history of geometry - sounds like a very dull read, but Mlodinow really brings his subject alive. The story begins, more or less, with Euclid, although little is known about the real origin of his work. Even Euclid had difficulty with parallel lines, recognising that the parallel postulate didn't have quite the same stature as his other axioms. Descartes combined geometry and arithmetic, in a way that hadn't been apparent to earlier thinkers, even though maps and cartographers had been at work for centuries. Gauss thought the unthinkable, and considered what abstract geometry might be possible if the parallel postulate didn't hold true. Einstein returned the favour, taking the mathematics back into the realm of the physical universe. And Witten - the final figure in Mlodinow's canon, whose reputation is not yet assured - dissembles everything into strings and branes, bizarre nothingness out of which everything is somehow formed. This final chapter would need revision, as efforts to find supersymmetric particles have so far come to nought, and M-theory is not the only present candidate for a "theory of everything".

Mlodinow's writing is clear and relaxed, without being dumbed down. He's more effective than Dawkins in addressing the harm of anti-science theism - because instead of attacking the idea, he provides evidence in the form of results - the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and the fate of Hypatia, although his treatment is, as a part of the story in a short book, no doubt simplified. At the very least it's a warning that progress is not inevitable or irreversible.

Book Review: Planck - Driven by vision, Broken by war, by Brandon R Brown
This was the last of the books I picked up in the Libreria sale in January last year. Planck is one of the figures in the history of science who awkwardly straddles "classical" and modern physics. One of the most fundamental physical constants of nature bears his name, emerging from his work on black-body radiation, but he found quantum theory disturbing and even after encouraging Einstein's early work on relativity he wondered whether it was going too far.

Brown's biography takes an equally awkward chronology. Chapters are titled for events in Planck's life between 1943 and 1945, but they trace back and forth across his entire life. This does not confuse the reader, but at the same time, I'm not sure any benefit really derives from it.

Brown described Planck's ability to keep abreast of new developments across the physical sciences in such a time of transition, and his open-mindedness to new ideas. Solving the black-body radiation problem (the ultraviolet catastrophe is the more exciting name given to earlier failed theories) produced the revolutionary idea in 1900 that energy might exist in discrete quanta, rather than as a continuous quantity. For Planck this was just a mathematical necessity to provide a solution that fitted observations, offered without explanation or justification.

Yet Planck comes over as politically and socially conservative, and is regularly described as "Prussian" although he was born in Kiel. There is quite an amount of family tragedy with losses in childbirth and war, though as Brown notes, quite typical for Germans of this generation, and Planck, living well into his eighties, was something of an exception. Brown gives a sympathetic portrayal to his increasingly out-of-line views in the 1920s and 1930s as "German" science became explicitly anti-Semitic. (The notion that "mathematical" physics was worthless and incorrect, and associated with "Jewish" physics, seems bizarre. Yet, this book was written in 2015, before the rise of "alternative facts" and the dismissal of "experts" in our own time, which now makes these reality-denying ideas more contemporarily relevant and disturbing).

Planck, already of retirement age, chose to remain in Germany after 1933, believing that the Nazi regime would quickly pass and a more normal state of affairs would return. Yet he was also quite compliant with the regime; among the photographs in the book is one of Planck offering a lecture at a Swastika-draped podium. One of his sons was implicated (somewhat distantly) in the 1944 Operation Valkyrie plot to assassinate Hitler, and was later executed. Towards the end of the war, Planck was a refugee in his own land, and was fortunate to be taken into protective custody by an American military unit who snatched him from what was arguably the putative Soviet sector. It's interesting to read about an example of what many politically indifferent Germans must have done in accommodating themselves to their circumstances.

Book Review: The Earth Gazers - On Seeing Ourselves, by Christopher Potter
I picked this up in a work book sale a couple of years ago, timed perhaps by the then upcoming Apollo 11 anniversary, or more particularly the Apollo 8 anniversary and the Earthrise photo.

I expected something along the lines of a continuation from where an earlier book had left off. In fact, about the first half of this book covers much the same ground as that one, though with slightly different perspectives. It was unexpected to begin this book by reading again about Charles Lindbergh, this time the real figure rather than an alternative history. Lindbergh took an interest in the space race, and his inclusion in the book, with its claimed focus on the combination of human exploration and introspection, is probably justified by his pioneering Atlantic flight. Potter sticks to the facts about Lindbergh and Von Braun; the earlier rocketry pioneers Robert Goddard, Hermann Oberth and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky get a good mention but not much in the way of depth.

The second half deals in more detail with the Gemini and Apollo missions, as well as some information on the USSR's Luna missions of the same period. It turns out that misinformation and fear are nothing new: Von Braun and others at NASA used the uncertainty of the Cold War to hint regularly at Soviet supremacy as part of their funding justification; in fact, the Soviet space programme was in most aspects, particularly that of safety and risk, well behind. The book gathers some technical information on the rockets and spacecraft for each mission, but rather less on what was accomplished on the Moon's surface. Instead, attention is paid to the Cinderella activity of the astronauts' photography while travelling around the Earth and to and from the Moon. It's difficult to strike the right balance: in all probability, invisible scientific data gathered from a mission is probably of more raw value to the programme, but relatively frivolous photographs of the Earth from space have the value of capturing the public imagination. However, Potter highlights that the photographs turned out to have real value for various Earth sciences, including geology and meteorology.

Interspersed through the NASA story is that of atheist Madalyn Mays, who fought several cases against the US government in an attempt to enforce the separation of church and state. This adds an interesting dimension to the story, though Potter certainly conveys the impression of her as dogmatic and unable to appreciate any distinction between the astronauts' government-sponsored mission and their own personal activities and beliefs.

Book Review: The Perfectionists - How Precision Engineers created the Modern World, by Simon Winchester
Perhaps seeking out ever more niche areas for writing, Winchester brings the rather dry subject of precision engineering to life in this book. It's not an easy subject to grasp: some things in our everyday experience require relatively little precision, and so the extent of engineering may seem pointless, whilst in other areas we just take it for granted, as it is ubiquitous. Winchester starts history with cannons and the advent of the steam engine, both of which required cylinders bored to previously unattainable accuracy to function reliably and safely. But quickly the tale turns to one of mass production and the requirement for interchangeable parts - a previously unknown concept. There follows a stream of ever more modern technology, through car engines to aeroplanes and the Hubble Space Telescope - for both these latter items Winchester also examines the failures resulting from a lack of expected precision - before concluding with GPS and an examination of how the fundamental units of measurement are now defined.

One thing puzzled me throughout the book: Winchester refers to "high precision", meaning constructed with great predictability, and also to "high tolerance", a term he seems to use as a synonym. To me, being "highly tolerant" would imply not requiring such precision, but being able to "make do" with less precise constructs. But this oddity did not prevent me from enjoying the book.

Book Review: The Invention of Air - An experiment, a journey, a new country and the amazing force of scientific discovery, by Steven Johnson
I'm behind with book reviews again. This is a short but well-written biography of Joseph Priestley; it's not particularly in-depth but chooses to pick out some focal points in his life. There is an early howler, when Johnson places Warrington in Yorkshire, and throughout one has the feeling it's written with an American audience primarily in mind. The journey takes in his friendships with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, his early meetings with leading science researchers in the coffee houses of London, and experiments and writings on electricity, before moving on to his most famous (if flawed) discovery of oxygen, which he continued throughout his lifetime to believe was the absence of something ("dephlogisticated air") rather than the presence of a pure chemical. But there are also darker threads in Priestley's life, as he pursued nonconformist religious and unpopular political views, and the description of rioting in Birmingham that would ultimately drive him, as an old man, from his house and from his country, is a disturbing reminder of the power of the mob. Johnson also offers a genuinely educative interlude, describing how the carboniferous era likely came about, and how we have benefited from it (but at what cost?) in the last few centuries.

Book Review: The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets - A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward, by Benoit B Mandelbrot
This was another work book sale find; of course I'd heard of the author but I don't think I'd actually read any of his books before. To some extent, this covers the same ground as The Black Swan, which I read a couple of years ago, but Mandelbrot is a far less irritating writer. Perhaps the text is more intellectual, more demanding of mathematical understanding (but not requiring prior knowledge; Mandelbrot explains new concepts well, and generally avoids equations - indeed he expresses a preference for graphs and pictures to demonstrate his ideas). He fills in some missing gaps in my knowledge, confirms the recollection I'd had that classical economics is based on classical thermodynamics, and explains the use of the Gaussian distribution by simply identifying that it is mathematically well understood, whether it is appropriate to a given situation or not. He illustrates various ways in which his iterative, fractal approach, produces market and asset price models that appear far more realistic than traditional Gaussian ones.

The book was written in 2005 and therefore predates the financial crisis, but Mandelbrot refers to the Great Depression, Black Monday, the Asian crisis of 1997 and the dotcom bubble, and he highlights that a few significant days in the market can make a great difference. The one possible weak point in the writing is again the insistence on documenting the negative reaction of conventional academics and economists to his ideas: no doubt it's based on his experience, and perhaps something is needed to explain why he writes about an unconventional path, but there is a slippery slope from the unconventional to the maverick, all the way to a conspiracy theorist. Fortunately Mandelbrot doesn't go too far on this aspect.

It's been a while since anything at Reading Film Theatre caught my eye; last night, after dealing with the aftermath of an afternoon snowfall on my car at the station car park, I headed in to see First Man. It was billed as a biopic of Neil Armstrong, but really, whilst he is the central character, there's more to it than that. The film opens with one of Armstrong's NASA X-15 flights, in which he barely controls the aircraft at the edge of space, bouncing around the top of the atmosphere. But the action returns firmly to earth with his family life, and the death of his daughter; seeing the opportunity for a fresh start, he applies to join NASA's Gemini project.

There's a slight air of disbelief as the USSR beats them to one milestone after another in the early years of the space race, but Armstrong and the other recruits plough on with the training program, wondering who will get to do what, and whether they'll get to the ultimate prize. Armstrong's flight, Gemini 8, suffers a critical malfunction after successfully completing its docking test; later, the crew of Apollo 1 die in the spacecraft as a result of a fire during testing, and Armstrong is injured when he ejects from a test lunar lander vehicle. All of this weighs heavily on his family, but he remains dedicated to the mission. Both sides of this aspect of the film seemed a bit wooden, as though unconvincingly trying to make a point about his domestic life. There's also a rising background through this period of political questioning NASA's funding (which has continued to be an ongoing sore over the decades), and also of anti-space program protests (which look like a mixture of civil rights, anti-war and anti-austerity protests) which question the program's value.

Of necessity there's a fair bit of fast-forward in the film, so we jump to the successful Apollo 10 mission and finally, Apollo 11. I was impressed by the effects used to show weightlessness; on a lighter note, also by the importance of having a large allen key or socket to open and close the doors. You don't see that in Star Trek.

Book Review: Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs - The astounding interconnectedness of the Universe, by Lisa Randall
I picked this up in the work book sale due to the clickbait title, but I assumed the subtitle would more accurately reflect somewhat more abstract content. In fact, the title can be taken at face value.

I'm not really sure of the merit of such a speculative book in the popular science arena. Although dark matter is widely accepted by scientists, there are multiple theories for what it is; none has yet been demonstrably successful and some are barely testable. The book quickly surveys the problem of apparently missing mass in the universe from visible observations and explains how dark matter, and dark energy (which is not explored further in the book), may solve this problem. The second part of the book focuses on the solar system, and in particular, bodies that come into close contact with the Earth, including collisions. It also introduces a history of mass extinction events in the fossil record of life and the research that led to the discovery of the Chicxulub crater, caused by the impact that triggered the K-Pg boundary and extinction of the dinosaurs. The final section explores some theories for the possible nature of dark matter, and how it might be detected. The author's own research into one of these theories, "partially interacting dark matter", yields a think dark matter disk in the galactic plane, whose gravitational interactions could produce an approximate periodicity for disrupting objects such as comets in the Oort cloud, thus sometimes causing them to come into closer solar orbits and potentially precipitating terrestrial mass extinction events.

I found the detailed description of the discovery of the Chicxulub crater clear and illuminating, and I also find the author's (brief) discussion of the possibility of different types of dark matter, with different interactions, creditable. But these are exceptions and the overall writing style didn't work well for me. I feel there is some good science in here, but it is very speculative and open to misunderstanding, and the explanations are often very chatty and not always convincing.