The Science of  Human Obsession

The book won a number of awards when it came out in 2006, and has been incorporated into some college classes. It relates what is (or was then) known about the neuroscience of musical perception. 
I really enjoyed the earlier parts of the book that focused very tightly on the perception of sound and music, probably because it bridged the physics of sounds and music (that I know to some degree) with the neuroscience. Like, you may know that a plucked string or an organ pipe has many resonant frequencies other than the fundamental -- the one we think of as 'the' note it's playing. But we don't experience it as a group of separate frequencies, but as a unified note. And if a guitar and an oboe are playing the same note simultaneously, we don't experience it as a guiboe, but we hear the two instruments more or less distinctly.
As the book goes on, it moves from tones and notes to chords and songs and harmony and genres and musical tastes, and at each step along the way, it seems the connection neuroscience gets more diffuse. I can't fault the science for being what it is, but for me it was less compelling and interesting.

I really like Sobel's book on Galileo's Daughter, so I was definitely curious to read this one. It tells the history of the female calculators at Harvard University. How their role changed from the late 19th century into the mid-20th. First as (very modestly paid) numerical calculators, and then examiners of photographic plates, and on into become some of the main organizers of early stellar spectroscopic data, and early studies of variable stars to the first Ph.D. students and dissertations, and on into everything from Oh Be A Fine Girl to spectroscopic binaries, to the discovery that stars are mostly hydrogen and helium, to the law between variable star periods and their intrinsic brightness, one of our first and best rulers for measuring the distance to distant stars.

Just some other details that caught my eye:

The story focuses on the women, but also goes into other activities of the broader Harvard Observatory, including setting up a telescope in Peru near Arequipa, which got involved in some civil unrest "[Bailey] recorded daily events, the din of nearby rifle fire, and his relief that the battle coincided with the cloudy season, 'as otherwise it would sadly interfere with our night work.'" Or Shapley's work on globular clusters showing that we are not in the center of the galaxy. In Shapley's words, "the solar system is off center and consequently man is too, which is a rather nice idea because it means that man is not such a big chicken."

Just after WWII, Cecilia Payne and her husband Sergei Gaposchkin took in the family of Reverend Casper Horikoshi -- a Japanese born missionary whose family had recently been interned at one Heart Mountain camp before now coming to Massachusetts for Divinity school. He and his wife probably had some stories of their own to tell.

Published in English as The Three-Body Problem (<---spoiler-laden wiki entry), translated by Ken Liu, not to be confused with the author, Liu Cixin.

The book opens with some pretty brutal scenes from the Cultural Revolution, such as a physicist undergoing a fatal struggle session for teaching 'imperialist' physics. The historical milieu was interesting in its own right, especially from a writer inside China. But obviously, there's more to it than historical fiction. It's a novel of First Contact, and it's hard to talk about it in much detail without getting too spoilery. There are a lot of really inventive ideas in here, but also some things that stretched my disbelief suspenders past their breaking point, on both science-y stuff and character motivation. But I confess to being a little curious to see how things turn out (alas, the remaining books in the trilogy have not yet been published in English).

The Three-Body Problem of the title refers to the problem of characterizing the motion of three bodies interacting via gravity. Turns out it's incredibly complex. But Cixin mentions something I hadn't heard of. A funky figure eight pattern was discovered a while back, and even more recently (after the publication of this book) 13 more families of repeating solutions were discovered.

New Bookchallenge categories:
✓with a number in the title
✓'based entirely on its cover' (On a rare visit to a real live dead tree bookstore, it caught my eye. More because #1 the title caught my physics brain, and #2 on closer inspection it was a Chinese author, rather than 'the cover' but still.)
✓originally written in another language

Very sad to hear the news that Victor Stenger passed away. I came to know Vic from Taner Edis' Skeptic email list way back when, so though not a close friend, he was certainly an e-friend, and with his background in physics and skepticism, we had a lot in common.

A Mathematician's Apology is an interesting insight into the mind of a mathematician, an investigation of what mathematics 'really' is, and why one would want to mess about with it. It's a relatively brief work, written in 1940 when Hardy was in his 60s and, he sadly concluded, was quite finished as a mathematician. Probably the most famous quote from the work is Hardy's dictum that mathematics is a "young man's game." The edition I have on the Kindle also includes an introduction by CP Snow that is nearly as long as the work itself, and provides a lot more biographical detail, including details of his student life:

Hardy had decided-I think before he left Winchester-that he did not believe in God. With him, this was a black-and-white decision, as sharp and clear as all other concepts in his mind. Chapel at Trinity was compulsory. Hardy told the Dean, no doubt with his own kind of shy certainty, that he could not conscientiously attend. The Dean, who must have been a jack-in-office, insisted that Hardy should write to his parents and tell them so. They were orthodox religious people, and the Dean knew, and Hardy knew much more, that the news would give them pain-pain such as we, seventy years later, cannot easily imagine.
Hardy struggled with his conscience. He wasn't worldly enough to slip the issue. He wasn't even worldly enough-he told me one afternoon at Fenner's, for the wound still rankled-to take the advice of more sophisticated friends, such as George Trevelyan and Desmond MacCarthy, who would have known how to handle the matter. In the end he wrote the letter. Partly because of that incident, his religious disbelief remained open and active ever after. He refused to go into any college chapel even for formal business, like electing a master. He had clerical friends, but God was his personal enemy.

One of Hardy's claims to fame is having discovered the self-taught & idiosyncratic Indian mathematician Ramanujan, who had sent some of his bizarre discoveries to him. "[Hardy] was accustomed to receiving manuscripts from strangers, proving the prophetic wisdom of the Great Pyramid, the revelations of the Elders of Zion, or the cryptograms that Bacon had inserted in the plays of the so-called Shakespeare.
So Hardy felt, more than anything, bored. He glanced at the letter, written in halting English, signed by an unknown Indian, asking him to give an opinion of these mathematical discoveries."

Hardy was soon intrigued, and took the time to puzzle some of out. An interesting detail of which I was unaware is that...

"But I mentioned that there were two persons who do not come out of the story with credit. Out of chivalry Hardy concealed this in all that he said or wrote about Ramanujan. The two people concerned have now been dead, however, for many years, and it is time to tell the truth. It is simple. Hardy was not the first eminent mathematician to be sent the Ramanujan manuscripts. There had been two before him, both English, both of the highest professional standard. They had each returned the manuscripts without comment. I don't think history relates what they said, if anything, when Ramanujan became famous."

Snow also talks of Hardy's abiding love of cricket, and how he (Snow) would have to study up on the latest scores before visiting Hardy, in order to help cheer Hardy up in his later years of illness.

But to finally get to the man himself in his own words, Hardy more or less rejected the idea that the pursuit of mathematics is justified by its technological fruits:

"The mass of mathematical truth is obvious and imposing; its practical applications, the bridges and steam-engines and dynamos, obtrude themselves on the dullest imagination. The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.
All this is in its way very comforting to mathematicians, but it is hardly possible for a genuine mathematician to be content with it. Any genuine mathematician must feel that it is not on these crude achievements that the real case for mathematics rests, that the popular reputation of mathematics is based largely on ignorance and confusion, and that there is room for a more rational defence."

He also considered that, even if mathematics was unimportant, it might well be right for those with an aptitude to pursue it. "Poetry is more valuable than cricket, but Bradman would be a fool if he sacrificed his cricket in order to write second-rate minor poetry."

There is virtually no mathematics in the work, but there are occasional allusions to things that were unfamiliar to me: "Farey is immortal because he failed to understand a theorem which Haros had proved perfectly fourteen years before; the names of five worthy Norwegians still stand in Abel's Life, just for one act of conscientious imbecility, dutifully performed at the expense of their country's greatest man." [I haven't the faintest idea what that refers to.]

Getting back to heart of the matter: "THERE are then two mathematics. There is the real mathematics of the real mathematicians, and there is what I will call the `trivial' mathematics, for want of a better word. The trivial mathematics may be justified by arguments which would appeal to Hogben, or other writers of his school, but there is no such defence for the real mathematics, which must be justified as art if it can be justified at all."

And here's one last awkwardly timed prediction: "There is one comforting conclusion which is easy for a real mathematician. Real mathematics has no effects on war. No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems very unlikely that anyone will do so for many years."

I'm a little way into Keith Jeffery's ploddingly densely well-researched Secret History of MI6, and there are quite a few interesting nuggets here and there. One is that physicist Thomas Merton became perhaps the first scientist in the secret service.

"Merton, having been rejected for active service on grounds of health, was commissioned in 1916 as a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in the secret service, the first scientist to be so appointed. His success in identifying the secret ink carried by German spies in their clothing, and inventing a new means of secret writing, won a mention in dispatches."

The book also notes that, being personally wealthy, Merton served "without pay". The secret writing involved writing with a silver 'pen' on glass. The writing could then be 'developed' chemically to become visible. As for the discovery of the German secret ink, the agency managed to find a Belgian woman with a hatred of Germans, and convince her to screw her way into the confidences of a German spymaster. He ultimately used the woman to transport secret messages, via her underwear, into France. But she took her panties to Merton, and the spy ring was unmasked and destroyed. In related news, the service also discovered that semen was a good invisible ink, since it passed one of the common tests for invisible writing, though they "had to remove the discoverer from the office immediately as his colleagues were making life intolerable by accusations of masturbation." There were other problems: "'We thought', wrote Stagg, 'we had solved a great problem.' But 'our man in Copenhagen ... evidently stocked it in a bottle -- for his letters stank to high heaven, and we had to tell him that a fresh operation was necessary for each letter.'"

The other interesting story part of the history is the bureaucratic fight over control of the secret service. Founded in 1909 as a new separate agency, it had hardly got off the ground before WWI broke out. The War Office and the Admiralty immediately wanted to grab it back under their wings; somewhat ironic since part of the reason to have a separate secret service was to have a Chinese Wall of sorts between nasty spies (at this point, generally foreign nationals spilling info for money -- on the one hand not entirely trustworthy, and on the other, having a legitimate need for their own identities to remain secret) and the military chain of command.

The Map of Physics (1939)

Spotted at Strange Maps

UCLA Physics prof Zvi Bern cowrote the cover article of Scientific American, detailing the use of unitarity (sort of a conservation of probability) to do an end-run around Feynman diagram calculations.

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UCLA has long had an imbalance in its Nobel/Ig Nobel ratio on the faculty. This is being rectified in a small way by the addition of psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer, who has been stolen away from Princeton. Oppenheimer's Ig Nobel Prize was for his discovery that "people who use longer words actually appear less intelligent than those who don’t."