The Story of Physics - Anne Rooney

From Natural Philosophy to the Enigma of Dark Matter
Physics is the science which ties together all others,aiming to explain the nature of the universe from the smallest subatomic particles to vast galaxies and the very nature of space-time. 
It represents human intellectual endeavor at its most ambitious.

The Story of Physics traces the development of physics from the natural philosophies of the ancient world to cutting-edge experiments in quantum mechanics.

Topics include:

• The nature of mattter, which was first theorized as atoms 2,500 years ago
• Light and optics - from simple lenses to the wave-particle duality of light 
• Masses and forces - harnessing energy and mass to work for us
• The bizarre subatomic world of quantum mechanics
• Our fascination with the stars, which prompted the earliest scientific thought
• The universe around us, from the Big Bang to distant galaxies

The Story of Physics also features the giants of science history, from Archimedes through Newton and Galileo to Curie, Einstein and Hawking. 
[Book Description Source: Book Cover Notes] 


From the Ancient Greeks, who first suggested that matter might be made of indivisible atoms, through the great explorations of Arab, the Renaissance and then Enlightenment scientists, the story of physics has been written through trial and error, sheer persistence, and intermittent flashes of pure genius, despite many periods of persecution, hardship, and danger. 
Author Anne Rooney follows its narrative from the earliest societies to the current day, discovering the entrancing appeal of the secrets that rule the universe. 
On the way from prehistory to the twenty-first century, we encounter Newton poking a needle into his own eye, Einstein paving the way for nuclear weapons, and the ultimate puzzle of dark matter. The book is beautifully illustrated throughout in full color.

[Book Description Source: www.amazon.com ] 

Ratings
Goodreads Rating - 3.81 out of 5 (21 Ratings, 2 Reviews)

My Rating:  4 out of 5.  


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The Intelligent Web by Gautam Shroff

 Synopsis  

• Describes cutting edge developments in the power and possibilities of the Web
• Explains how Google and other leading companies have developed ever smarter searching and advert placement
• Shows how 'Web intelligence' is emerging from increasingly smart algorithms that can sift, select, aggregate, and weigh up relevant information
• Explains the principles of logic and computer science behind these apparently intelligent procedures
• Considers possible similarities with how the human brain handles data
• Looks at new applications such as self-driving cars

As we use the Web for social networking, shopping, and news, we leave a personal trail. 
These days, linger over a Web page selling lamps, and they will turn up at the advertising margins as you move around the Internet, reminding you, tempting you to make that purchase. Search engines such as Google can now look deep into the data on the Web to pull out instances of the words you are looking for.
And there are pages that collect and assess information to give you a snapshot of changing political opinion. 
These are just basic examples of the growth of "Web intelligence", as increasingly sophisticated algorithms operate on the vast and growing amount of data on the Web, sifting, selecting, comparing, aggregating, correcting; following simple but powerful rules to decide what matters. 
While original optimism for Artificial Intelligence declined, this new kind of machine intelligence is emerging as the Web grows ever larger and more interconnected.
Gautam Shroff takes us on a journey through the computer science of search, natural language, text mining, machine learning, swarm computing, and semantic reasoning, from Watson to self-driving cars. 
This machine intelligence may even mimic at a basic level what happens in the brain.

Readership: Popular science and mathematics readers interested in computer science and artificial intelligence, as well as students of these courses.
[Source: Oxford University Press website.]
 My Comments: 
I completed an online course "Web Intelligence and Big Data" taught by the author a few months back. This book was released towards the ending of the course and I bought a Kindle edition to understand the topics better.
Gautam Shroff has taken a very logical and systematic approach to explain the fascinating area of Web Intelligence.
While the topics in this book are really interesting, the verbose explanations given by the author on many of the concepts were quite confusing. More illustrations would have helped. The book has just about half-a-dozen pictures, which for a content of 300 odd pages on technical topics is quite less.
It will take another reading of the book for me to fully grasp the explanations.
But overall this book is quite a good introduction to Web Intelligence, though not a very light read.

Links:

• Read Chapter 1

Goodreads Rating - 4.2 out of 5 ( 5 Ratings)

 

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Mathematics of Life: Unlocking the Secrets of Existence

Author:       Ian Stewart
Published:  2011
Publisher:  Profile Books Ltd.
Hardcover: 368 pages


 I remember my high school days in late seventies, when the students who wanted to join the science stream but were not confident about their mathematical abilities would choose PCB (Physics, Chemistry, Biology) instead of PCM (Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics)  as their subjects. 
Seems like this escape from mathematics is no longer an option in twenty-first century !

Many of the important questions opened up by modern discoveries in biology cannot be answered without significantly drawing upon the knowledge of mathematics.
Therefore in the present times biologists and mathematicians are collaborating on finding solutions to such questions especially those related to nature and origins of life itself.
The former pose the biological questions or describe a set of experiments, while the later develop a mathematical models to simulate them.

Welcome to the field of Mathematical Biology ! This book is a layman's primer on this subject.

It explores several connections between mathematics and biology, viz; -  the Human Genome Project; the structure and function of the complex molecules that coordinate the complex process of life; the shape of viruses; the organization of cells; the form and behavior of entire organisms and their interaction in the global ecosystem; evolutionary games that led to huge diversity of life in earth; the workings of the nervous system and the brain; nature of life; possibility of alien life forms.
The theory behind these connections encompass a wide range of mathematical concepts - probability, dynamics, chaos theory, symmetry, networks, mechanics, elasticity, knot theory.

While I don't claim to have understood each and every topic discussed in this book, I found it a really interesting read and would recommend it to anyone who is a keen reader of  popular science genre.
 Pythagoras the renowned mathematician of ancient Greece once said,"All things are numbers".  Ian Stewart, the author of this book and a mathematician of the modern era  has shown that this statement is true to a great extent in life forms.

Links:

• Goodreads Rating - 3.46 out of  5   (112 ratings)
• Review in The Guardian
•  "What is Mathematical Biology and How Useful Is It ?", Avner Friedman, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, August 2010, Volume 57, Number 7 - A technical paper (lots of differential equations !) that discusses application of mathematics in studying wounds, spread of cancer cells, reconstructive microsurgery, lung infection.

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Einstein and the Special Theory of Relativity

Author :    Ajoy Ghatak
Published: 2010
Publisher: Viva Books
Paperback: 170 Pages


Modern physics especially the Theory of Relativity  had  fascinated me in my high school, though I did not really understand it very well. And for quite some time I had been on  a lookout for an interesting and well written  book which could help me understand it without trivializing the subject too much . And this book by Prof. Ajoy Ghatak, of IIT Delhi, perfectly fitted my need.
Interestingly this book starts with a  summary chapter which explains in 10 pages the  concept of  Special Theory of Relativity (completely equation free !) with simple examples. For a layperson this is more than enough. And if one cannot grasp what is said in this chapter, one need not proceed further ! But having a Ph.D in Engineering which  made me capable to stomach a reasonable dose of mathematical equations  I dared to venture forward.
The main book consists of four chapters.
In the first chapter author has given a brief life sketch of Einstein and briefly discussed his numerous contributions. This is quite an interesting chapter which also gives some insights into the personal life of Einstein , how he collaborated with other scientists, the story and controversies surrounding his Nobel Prize.
Chapter two discusses the first principles of  relativity - Constant Speed of Light, Time Dilation and Length Contraction , supported by interesting narrations of Mu-Meson experiment, Michelson Morely experiment.
and the the Twin Paradox .
In chapter three the author derives Einstein's world famous equation E = mc**2 in a fairly easy to understand manner.
Derivations of Lorentz transformation equations are provided in chapter four.  In my opinion this chapter though dealing with a very important topic was rather unnecessary in the book of this kind. It sort of breaks the whole flow of the book and conveys a sense of abrupt ending to the book. Besides there is nothing in this chapter which adds to the understanding of the concepts so well explained in the previous chapter.
The book has lots of examples, illustrations, problems and references which will vet one's appetite to know more about the subject of Relativity.
A very interesting book for those interested in Physics and comfortable with moderate amount of Mathematics. It is somewhere between an academic tome and a popular science book.