![]() ![]() Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. ![]() Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A clear and comprehensive popular treatment of the cutting edge of physics.Ī Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence. Perhaps in ten years’ time the key questions will be answered-always assuming that some new discovery doesn’t send everyone back to the starting line again. Gribbin gives the reader a good overview of the progress to date of this research, describing its key experiments and noting the contributions of various scientists, and making the theory itself as clear as possible for readers not prepared to tackle serious math. This takes us into the rarefied territory of supersymmetry, superstrings, and gauge theory in a ten-dimensional matrix. But even this “standard model” fails to unite the various forces and particles into a coherent structure thus the search for a Grand Unified Theory, the holy grail of modern physics. The number of subatomic particles also underwent a population explosion, leading to quantum chromodynamics, in which the ultimate divisions of matter are invisible quarks and gluons, from which other particles are built. But this easily understood model was rapidly modified, as quantum theory began to blur the intuitive divisions between matter and energy. Ernest Rutherford’s “classical” picture of the atom as a small but solid nucleus surrounded by a whirling cloud of electrons, had taken shape by the 1920s. The discovery of radioactivity opened up a window to peer inside atoms, revealing some of the structural units (electrons, the nucleus) of which these “indivisible” atoms are made. Our modern conception of matter dates from the realization roughly a century ago that the atom, in theory the tiniest particle of matter, was itself a compound entity. ![]() The focus in this book (a spinoff from the author’s earlier The Search for Black Holes) is the nature of matter. ![]() It's never been easier to create a great lyric video.Physics changes so rapidly that a new survey of its landmarks is necessary every few years here’s an update from a popular British science writer. Superstring is a Mac & Windows application that lets you create stunning lyric videos in minutes. ![]()
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