The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss
Yes, there is such a book and as you would have guessed, it was written by a physicist who is a Star Trek fan. If you have interest in either topic this book would be a good and short read. The foreword is written by no less an eminent physicist than Stephen Hawking and starts appropriately enough at the time when along with Newton and Einstein he was invited to a game of poker on the Starship Enterprise by the android Data. While the book certainly provides plenty of explanation and speculation about the technologies used on the various Star Trek series, it is particularly interesting because of the excellent explanations of physics that are woven into it. On balance, the writers of the series do come out looking respectable. For the most part.
Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Physics, Genius, Books on
Sep 21, 2008
Richard Feynman was one of the pre-eminent physicists of the 20th century. The leader of the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer, had described him as the most brilliant young physicist, even among the elite group that came together to work on the bomb. While his primary contribution was to help physicists understand and think about physics in a new way, he also had several other noteworthy contributions such as pioneering the thinking on superconductivity and nanotechnology. Ultimately what made him famous to people outside physics were exploits in a wide range of fields and a quirkily unconventional personality. Considering the other things he has dabbled in, contributed to or mastered, it is very hard to imagine that he was also a Nobel prize-winning physicist for whom the word genius was considered acceptable even in the rarified air of particle physics. Two very different books provide insight into the personality and science of Richard Feynman. If you want an easy, funny read, go with "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!" that he himself wrote. For a much more comprehensive immersion into the Feynman biography it's hard to beat James Gleick's account Genius - The Life and Science of Richard Feynman.
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