A decade of DTLR

The Diffusion Tensor Literary Review celebrates ten years of operation this month.  DTLR's first post is dated July 21, 2013.  In the decade since, the world has changed considerably, as have science, engineering, and medicine.  When I started this blog, I did not foresee it continuing for as long as a decade.  

Looking over the record of previous posts, there were some lean years from 2017-2019, when output was less than ten posts per year. The most productive year was its first, 2013, technically barely a half-year, and the second most productive was, more recently, 2021, measured by number of posts.  It seems the most popular topics have included fluid mechanics, reproducible research, and scientific publishing.  There have also been book reviews, and salutes to departed scientists Jerry Gollub, Edward N. Lorenz, Steven Weinberg, and Gordon Moore.  Two of my favorite posts are memoirs of conferences, the Joint Mathematics Meeting (2017) in San Diego, and the American Physical Society March Meeting (2023) in Las Vegas.  There has been plenty of criticism and opinion on this blog.  All together, an eclectic mixture.  Let's see what our second decade will bring.

Prometheus' Great Minds series on physics

Continuing the theme of my last post, the publisher Prometheus (which is now owned by Roman & Littlefield) has perhaps a more extensive catalog of "classics" in physics and astronomy than the others mentioned in my previous post.  As far as I can tell, their Great Minds series includes:

• Moritz Schlick's Space and Time in Contemporary Physics:  An Introduction to the Theory of Relativity and Gravitation.
• Fred Holye's Of Men and Galaxies.
• James Clerk Maxwell's Matter and Motion.
• William Thomson and Peter Guthrie Tait's The Elements of Natural Philosophy.
• Marie Curie's Radioactive Substances.
• Michael Faraday's The Forces of Matter.
• Johannes Kepler's Epitome of Copernican Astronomy and Harmonies of the World.  (Selections of both works are published together in a single volume.)
• Nicholaus Copernicus' On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres.
• Galileo Galilei's Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences.
• Isaac Newton's Principia.
• Albert Einstein's Relativity.

Some of the above volumes consist only in selections, rather than the entire work.

This series is perhaps second only to Dover Publications in its effort to keep in print some of the classic works in the history of physics and astronomy.

Oxford World Classics volumes on physics

Continuing a theme from my post last year on the Norton Critical Editions in natural science, today I'd like to take a look at another series, the Oxford World Classics.  This is a series of classic works, mostly in literature, though other subjects are included, including natural science.  There are two volumes of Charles Darwin's works, two of Sigmund Freud's, and a few works in medicine and natural history.  I'm going to focus here on works in physics.  As far as I can tell, there are only three:

• Aristotle's Physics.
• Galileo's Selected Writings.
• Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Greatest World Systems.

I see then that this series does not overlap with Norton's, whose only physics contribution I know of are selected works of Newton.  The other, and most famous, competing series is, of course, the Penguin Classics, of which there are well over a thousand volumes.  Theirs is a catalog so vast that I have not attempted to mine it to see what volumes of physics interest there may be.  However, according to Wikipedia, one is Albert Einstein's Relativity:  The Special and General Theory.  I see that separately, Penguin also publishes The Essential Einstein, edited by Stephen Hawking, a collection of selected works.