Science and Inquiry discussion

For January 2020, we will be reading One, Two, Three...Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science by George Gamow. Please use this thread to post questions, comments, and reviews, at any time.

Have you read it yet? I haven't but I will keep as to read. It seems fascinating.

Yeah!

This is a classic. Looking forward to reading it. I just picked up a copy of it used for a good price.

Hi, Is anyone aware of an audio version of this book?

Started this. So far, I can follow everything. His style is entertaining too. It's also interesting to read stuff like this from the 40s. Surprisingly, it's aged pretty well.

I'm up to chapter 4, and enjoying it so far. Most of the material is widely covered in many other books, but this one is older (1947) and has the "classical" feel.

He covers exponential notation and geometric progressions, Cantor's infinities, imaginary numbers, topology, Euler's formula and the four-color theorem, topologies of higher dimensional spaces, Mobius strips and orientability, higher dimensions, and much more. It's all very standard stuff, but he does a good job explaining these concepts in an entertaining way.

I can see why people who are intimidated by math might find this book a challenge (especially if they expected him to stick more to the science), but these are all very fundamental concepts necessary to understand the science of relativity, cosmology, physics, and astronomy, and I can't think of many books that cover these topics in a way that is as easy and entertaining.

Ok, this is really cool. At the end of Chapter 4, he explains Minkowski spacetime, and it actually makes a lot of sense. Walter Isaacson mentions in his book on Einstein: His Life and Universe that Minkowski provided a mathematical basis to Einstein's Relativity. Isaacson doesn't give you the math, but after reading Gamow's presentation of it, it's actually very simple and elegant, and all you really need to know to understand it is imaginary numbers. That sort of explains why Gamow covers imaginary numbers in the way he does in the earlier chapter, where he emphasises the imaginary axis as a coordinate system.

So far, I'm really liking this book. It's not terribly advanced, but he does cover physics in a way that doesn't lose sight of the mathematics. So many other authors do that because they're afraid that as soon as you bring up anything mathematical, you immediately lose your audience (I think it was Stephen Hawking who in an introduction said something about his publisher telling him that for every additional formula contained in his book sales would halve), but Gamow doesn't worry about that - he keeps it engaging through humour and a fun tone.

This book is a perfect companion to the book we read a year ago: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Chapter VII of this book explains the science behind many of the technical discoveries discussed in Rhodes's book.