Another note on scientist biography series

Previously I blogged about some biography book series featuring scientists, notably here and here.  The latter post mentioned the Blackwell Science Biographies series that migrated to Cambridge University Press, as well as a more general biography series at Oxford University Press (OUP) called Lives and Legacies, that has featured two physicists, Isaac Newton and Ben Franklin. 

Somehow I neglected to mention in my post on the Cambridge Companions series, that Oxford University Press has an Oxford Handbook of Newton currently in development.  Some of the chapters have been published online, and they look quite promising.

I recently learned of another Blackwell series, Blackwell Great Minds, that currently resides at the publisher Wiley.  Like OUP's Lives and Legacies, it is a very general series not focused on scientists.  However, I know of two scientists who have volumes dedicated to them:  Darwin and Newton.  (There is also a volume on Descartes.)  So it seems among the larger intellectual history culture, Darwin and Newton may be the most consequential scientists.  Both of them are represented in the following series:

• Cambridge Companions.
• Very Short Introductions (OUP).
• Cambridge Science Biographies.
• Oxford Portraits in Science.
• Blackwell Science Biographies (Wiley).

In addition, Newton is represented in the Oxford Handbooks series and the OUP's Lives and Legacies series.  He is even represented in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series!  (So are Robert Boyle and Margaret Cavendish.)  However the Bloomsbury Handbooks series features only one scientist I know of, Emilie du Chatelet (forthcoming later this month).

Congratulations to the ASME Fluids Engineering Division on their 100th anniversary

Earlier this month, I learned that the Fluids Engineering Division (FED) of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) is celebrating its 100th anniversary this summer at their annual summer meeting (FEDSM2026).  They may be the oldest fluid mechanics-specific professional society in the United States...let's take a look at the evidence for this claim.

First, ASME was founded in 1880, and its Hydraulics Division (HYD) was formed in 1926, with Prof. Lewis F. Moody as a prime mover in its creation.  Its first separate division conference was held in 1961.  Prof. Robert C. Dean led the effort to change its name to the Fluids Engineering Division (FED) which succeeded in 1963.  A restructuring occurred in 1989-1990, but the name remained.  There was also a Committee on General Hydraulics which existed between 1938-1940, led by Murrough P. O'Brien, and later a Fluid Mechanics Committee, formed in 1957 by Dean, now called the Fluid Mechanics Technical Committee (FMTC).  The Journal of Fluids Engineering was founded in 1973, also under Dean, its first editor.  I've pulled this information from the article by Cooper et al. (2016).

We must turn now to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), founded much earlier (1852).  Its Hydraulics Division was formed in 1938, the 12th such division formed.  Fred C. Scobey of USDA was the prime mover of that effort.  Its first specialty conference was held in 1950, and its Journal of the Hydraulics Division began in 1956.  In 1982, the journal was renamed the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering.  A 50th anniversary book for the division was published in 1990, but I have not been able to see a copy.  My information is drawn mainly from Petersen (2002).  It is unclear to me from the society's website whether the Hydraulics Division, or its specialty conference, still exist, but the journal definitely does.

The American Physical Society (APS, founded in 1899) created its Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD) in 1947, its fourth division.  Raymond J. Seeger was the prime mover of this effort.  The first annual meeting was held in 1949, though sessions were sponsored at the 1948 APS annual meeting, including a joint meeting with the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences (a predecessor to the AIAA, about which more later).  However the APS did not start a special fluid mechanics journal until 2015, Physical Review Fluids.  Prior to that, the DFD collaborated with the American Institute of Physics (AIP) in the publication of Physics of Fluids, founded in 1959 under Francois Frenkiel.  Some historical information on the DFD can be found in this piece by Russell Donnelly.

For the remainder of this post, information is drawn from Wikipedia and/or the websites of the professional societies themselves.

The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) was formed in 1963 from the merger of the Institute of the Aerospace Sciences (founded in 1932 under the name Institute of Aeronautical Sciences, mentioned above), and the American Rocket Society, founded in 1930.  At one time the AIAA sponsored a Fluid Dynamics Conference, but it does not seem to exist anymore.  They do have a Fluid Dynamics Technical Committee, within their Aerospace Sciences Group.  I do not know when it was formed, but it can't be older than AIAA itself.  AIAA does not seem to have a specialty journal for fluids; rather fluids papers appear across the constellation of their journals on other subjects.

The same about the journals can be said about the American Institute for Chemical Engineering (AIChE), founded in 1908.  They don't seem to have a specialty journal, conference, or division or forum dedicated to fluids, as the topic basically pervades much of the discipline, as it does for AIAA.

Indeed, many professional societies in science, mathematics, engineering, and the Earth, environmental, and planetary sciences make use of fluid mechanics, and many of their practitioners carry out fundamental research in fluids.  Fundamental and applied topics in fluids research pervade across multiple technical areas within these professions, so often they do not have a fluids-specific unit, journal, or conference.  Examples include the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the American Geophysical Union (AGU), and the American Meteorological Society (AMS).  However, the AMS does host an annual Atmospheric and Oceanic Fluid Dynamics (AOFD) conference.  It has not always been annual (the most recent, just held earlier this week, was called the 25th, but I coauthored a presentation given at the 13th in 2001), so I'm not sure when it began.  I have seen an announcement for the 2d AMS Atmospheric and Oceanic Waves and Stability conference in 1978, so perhaps this is the same conference under a different historical name?

So to conclude, the major U.S. professional society units that specialize in fluid mechanics appear to be the ASME's FED and the APS's DFD, both of which sponsor annual conferences and journals (JFE and PR Fluids).  The AIAA has a technical committee but no special conference or journal.  The AMS also has their AOFD annual conference, and the ASCE maintains the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering. To these we can add the AIP's Physics of Fluids journal.

The surviving units, ASME FED and APS DFD, were created in 1926 and 1947 respectively, so indeed FED is the oldest that I know of in the United States.  The ASCE has the oldest journal discussed here, however, since JHE dates to 1956, with PoF following in 1959, JFE in 1973, and PR Fluids in 2015.  Finally the oldest surviving conference discussed here is DFD's, starting in 1949, followed by FEDSM in 1961, and AOFD possibly dating to sometime in the 1970s.

References

P. Cooper, C. S. Martin, and T. J. O'Hearn, 2016:  History of the Fluids Engineering Division.  Journal of Fluids Engineering, 138:  100801.

M. S. Petersen, 2002:  Summary of the Hydraulics Division- ASCE (1938-1988).  Environmental and Water Resources History, ed. by J. R. Rogers and A. J. Fredrich, Sessions at ASCE Civil Engineering Conference and Exposition, Nov. 3-7, 2002, Washington, DC., pp. 193-194.

Robert L. Devaney (1948-2025)

Today I learned that the Boston University mathematician and educator, Robert L. Devaney, died in November of last year.  He was especially known for his upper level textbook, An Introduction to Dynamical Systems, first published in 1986, back in the heyday of chaos theory, and whose third edition came out in 2022.  My first course in nonlinear dynamical systems was in 1994, where we used the first edition of his 1992 (much gentler) textbook, A First Course in Chaotic Dynamical Systems:  Theory and Experiment.  I believe it was the only math textbook (other than my first-year calculus textbook) with color illustrations.  The book also featured very brief biographical profiles of some of the pioneers of chaos theory, nearly all of whom were still alive at the time.  One of them was Devaney's Ph.D. advisor, Steven Smale, who outlives him.  A second edition was published in 2020.

At the time I took the course, I was preparing for a summer physics project in nonlinear dynamics, and I probably read James Gleick's Chaos around this time as well.  So the course was very timely, and in retrospect, the book I think was successful in at least introducing me to the field.  The book was probably a bit more mathematical and less "physical" than other books I encountered then and later, so I'm not sure I would use it today to teach a class on the subject, but I would certainly refer to it in developing my lectures, and possibly cite it as supplementary reading.

I'm not positive, but I believe I did see Devaney speak once, at a New Jersey section meeting of the Mathematical Association of America, sometime in the 2000s.  Unfortunately I failed to get a chance to ask him to sign my copy of his textbook, either because I forgot to bring it to the meeting, or I didn't get chance to have a one-on-one conversation.  I can't remember anymore.  I certainly regret the missed opportunity, but am grateful for his contributions to dynamical systems education over a distinguished career.

 

 

 

Another refresh of Physics Today

DTLR has been a regular reader of Physics Today, published by the American Institute of Physics, since the early 1990s.  Since then, PT has also gained an online presence with its website, of which I am an occasional (though not regular) user.  The January 2026 issue has a piece from the editor about the magazine's latest refreshed design.  One of its stated goals is to move to "cleaner layouts, fewer distractions, larger and more readable fonts..."  In this, I am very pleased with the results.  For some reason, the subjective experience of browsing through the print edition of this issue was very enjoyable, and the design changes seem to have enticed me to read more of the content than I usually do.  Another positive change is that it appears that much of PT's content is no longer paywalled.  All moving in the right direction!  So let's take a closer look at Physics Today past and present:  I will share with you what I think are the hits and misses with the current PT compared to its former glories.  For comparison, I have in front of me the May 2007 print issue, one I decided to keep almost 20 years ago, as it has two very interesting articles (one on the physics of groundwater, and the other on Millikan's famous oil drop experiment).

Here are some elements that seem to have been maintained across almost two decades:

• Feature stories.
• Search and discovery (short reports about research advances).
• Issues and events (news articles, including FYI "science policy briefs").
• Quick study.
• Back scatter.

I've always considered the first three of these to be the heart of PT, serving the core purpose of the magazine, along with letters/opinion (more on that later).   I read two of the three features in the January issue, and I found Johanna Miller's piece on superconducting quantum circuits (subject of last year's Nobel Prize in Physics) to be superb.  I really enjoy articles like this:  an article that takes the reader by the hand into a field they are not an expert in, and in this case relying on just our memory of undergraduate quantum physics, and gives us a gentle explanation of the research, connecting it to broader trends in physics.  The article was enjoyable and instructive, and the writing was of excellent quality.  I would like to see several articles like this per year in Physics Today.  (The groundwater article by Mary Anderson in the May 2007 issue is another in this vein - so good I kept the issue.)  I am also a fan of physics history, and enjoyed several pieces in last year's issues celebrating the international quantum year, such as Ryan Dahn's article on women in the early history of quantum physics.  That piece inspired me to acquire the book from which the article is derived.

I remember when Quick study and Back scatter were first introduced years earlier.  I thought both of those were excellent additions to the magazine's departments.  They're generally easy to consume, and the topics are very diverse.  They make PT a more well rounded product.

Two new departments are "What can physicists do?" (which started last year) and the Crossword.  I glanced at the Crossword and realized I had to stop myself from starting to mentally pencil in the entries, as I was really too busy to commit to it at the time.  So much for getting rid of distractions LOL!  

"What can physicists do?" is, I think, a long overdue addition to PT.  Years ago the British magazine Physics World used to have a similar department, then more recently APS News did too, though I haven't seen it recently there.  The physics profession is going to have a recruitment crisis unless it broadens awareness of what physicists do, outside of traditional physics jobs.  The much-appreciated annual careers issue just isn't sufficient to address the constantly challenging topic of physicist employment.  I hope this new department never goes away.

How about the new logo?  I dislike that the words "Physics Today" are deemphasized on the cover, next to the initials PT, which I think appear on the cover for the first time ever.  I used to enjoy the puzzled looks from innocent members of the public when they see me flipping through a magazine with PHYSICS TODAY emblazoned across the cover.  It is no longer obvious from the cover that this is a physics magazine!

It's unclear whether the Opinion and Letters departments are continuing.  Both appeared in issues as late as the fall of last year.  I think these departments are essential as they give voice to members of the community.  Yes, the back page of APS News is another venue for such discussions, but social media, the blogosphere, podcasts, youtube, and the like have fragmented the media consumption of physicists.  Physics Today may be one of the few common pieces of curated media that reaches across the physics community (beyond even the individual AIP member societies like APS).  I am also a reader of the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, and its Comment and Discussion department is perhaps the liveliest I've seen across professional society magazines - it is usually the first part of the magazine I want to read!  PT's letters & opinion section has never been quite so vigorous, but I would like PT to preserve its place there, as I think it really is also part of the heart of the magazine.

Related to opinion, the May 2007 issue reminds me of the long-departed Reference Frame column.  Some of the best and most stimulating writing in PT has appeared there.  Authors such as Frank Wilczek (in that particular issue), Leo Kadanoff, Jerry Gollub, David Mermin, and so many others provoked much thought, reflection, and amusement.  This was one of the most fun parts of the Physics Today of the past, and I really miss it!

The obituaries were moved fully online a number of years ago, and I understand the reasons why.  There was just no room in the print edition to accommodate the departures of numerous colleagues who first joined the profession in the post-Sputnik expansion of American science.  At least PT has continued its commitment to the community by keeping community-sourced obituaries on its website.  I would still appreciate an occasional tabulation of recently posted obituaries in the print edition, something that has sadly been dropped, since I am not a regular visitor to the website.  

Another department that went online was the Job Opportunities.  And this too is understandable.  Job searching is now done fully online.  Print media is just too slow a venue for it.

The book reviews have vanished entirely.  I really miss them.  Book reviews are also increasingly rare in the American Journal of Physics. It seems that the journal Contemporary Physics may be one of the last bastions of book reviews covering the breadth of physics.  Perhaps AIP should arrange to provide a subscription to Contemporary Physics for its members?  Even more specialized journals like the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, which used to have book reviews, seem to have lost them. 

Back before 2007, PT used to also feature occasional science policy panel discussions, where a group of prominent physicists would be prompted with questions and the ensuing discussion recorded for readers.  When I was thinking about my post-Ph.D. career in the summer of 1997, I read a number of such panel discussions in back issues of PT as part of my research.  They were quite valuable then, and perhaps continue to be of historical value today.  However PT hasn't hosted one in decades.

Another class of article that PT should increase is interviews.  Last year they did have one with Peter Shor.  We've got to have more such interviews!

Finally I appreciate that Physics Today remains committed, for the moment, to having a print edition.  This is not a given.  The American Meteorological Society ended the print run of its Bulletin, BAMS, at the end of 2025.  I still get EOS in print from the American Geophysical Union, and the less durable print copies of APS News and SIAM News from their respective societies.  I don't always want to be looking into a battery-powered screen, so having these print publications is much appreciated.

It seems that I have no complaints about the new Physics Today except for its logo, and the loss of some of the eliminated departments from the past.  I hope that letters & opinions haven't gone away, and I'd love to bring back Reference Frame and Book Reviews, and a list of obituaries posted online.

The Year of Mathematics

I have just learned that 2026 has been declared "The Year of Mathematics"or YoM2026, by the Conference Board on Mathematical Societies.  Unlike previous celebrations noted on this blog, such as last year being the international quantum year, this YoM2026 designation seems to be restricted to the United States.  At time of writing, they have announced that a bipartisan Congressional resolution has been introduced in the U.S. Senate.

Why 2026?  Apparently this year the International Congress of Mathematicians will be meeting in Philadelphia, in the year of the United States' 250th anniversary. The quadrennial Congress was held in the U.S., according to Wikipedia, on only two previous occasions (1950 and 1986).  Otherwise, I am not aware of any particular anniversary being celebrated in 2026 in connection with mathematics.  In this respect the selection of the year seems as arbitrary as 2020-2021 as the International Year of Sound.  In contrast, I noted several epochal anniversaries being celebrated when 2015 was designated the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies.  (Wikipedia tells us that in addition to the ones I noted in my post at the time, there were also 1865 and 1965, respectively, anniversaries of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory and the Penzias/Wilson cosmic microwave background discovery.)  Of course 2005 was the World Year of Physics to celebrate the centenary of Einstein's annus mirabilis.  Then 2011 was the International Year of Chemistry, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Marie Curie's Nobel Prize in Chemistry (um. she also won a Nobel in Physics in 1903) as well as the centenary of the International Association of Chemical Societies.

So, in contrast with these various physics-related celebration years, there is no specific anniversary being celebrated by YoM2026, nor is the celebration international.  Even the International Year of Statistics (2013) was a global event, though I am not aware of any particular statistics anniversary being celebrated that year.  Last year's quantum year celebrated, of course, the centenary of Heisenberg's matrix mechanics.

Perhaps the granddaddy of them all was the International Geophysical year in 1957-1957, which Wikipedia tells us traces its heritage the International Polar Years of 1882-1883 and 1932-1933.  However, unlike the more recent celebrations I noted above, the geophysical and polar years featured surges of actual research and international collaboration.  In comparison, the more recent celebratory "years" seem to be largely about outreach and propaganda.

 

Hydrodynamic Quantum Analogs and nonlocality

Last month's SIAM News featured a front-page, above-the-fold article by Prof. John Bush of MIT, "Shifting the Classical-Quantum Boundary:  Insights from Pilot-wave Hydrodynamics".  Among other things, the article challenges the conventional wisdom that quantum theory is inherently and demonstrably nonlocal.  It does so by championing Hydrodynamic Quantum Analogs (HQAs), which are classical analogs of quantum phenomena, using fluid mechanics.  The author uses HQAs to lend credence to the de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave formulation of quantum mechanics.

I have a passing interest in HQAs, regardless of whether they supports alternate interpretations of quantum mechanics, or challenge nonlocality.  I keep an open mind about Bush's assertions, but am neither a cheerleader nor dogmatic opponent of these ideas.  More importantly, I know almost nothing about the field, except what I've learned from Bush's article, and glimpses of other papers in the area (including his) that I've seen over the years.

However I do think Bush does his readers a disservice in the following passage.

The notion of nonlocality, or action at a distance, should be anathema to any rational scientist. Nevertheless, most physicists have made peace with it; they either remain agnostic on the subject or believe it to be an essential, inescapable feature of quantum physics. Because standard quantum theory describes probabilities but not particle dynamics, nonlocality is perceived to be everywhere — in wavefunction collapse, single-particle interference, the quantum mirage, and interaction-free measurement. Correlation at a distance is taken as evidence of action at a distance. HQAs have demonstrated that if we adopt de Broglie’s physical picture of quantum dynamics, we need not invoke nonlocality for any such effects. In short, HQAs suggest that quantum nonlocality is a misinference that is rooted in the incompleteness of quantum theory. While nonlocality is a feature of quantum theory, it need not be a feature of quantum physics.

I've quoted the whole paragraph to ensure that context is provided, but the main problem I have is with the very first sentence of this paragraph.  Should "action at a distance" be "anathema to any rational scientist"?  I am reminded of Bohr's response to Einstein, who said "God does not play dice."  Bohr replied, "Don't tell God what to do."

Newton's original formulation of his gravitational law was manifestly an action-at-a-distance phenomenon.  Yes, it has been superseded by a local field theory, Einstein's general relativity. But is it fair to accuse Newton of not being a "rational scientist"?  (Perhaps so given his interest in alchemy and biblical chronology, but surely not because of his gravity theory!)  What about the 19th century action-at-a-distance rivals to Maxwell's theory (such as Weber's electrodynamics).  Note how Coulomb's law resembles Newton's.  Again, the rival theories were essentially cast aside as incomplete or even wrong once Maxwell's local field theory was fully understood and accepted, but does that make Coulomb, the Webers, and others failures as rational scientists?

Bush gives no citation nor even an argument as to why action at a distance is unworthy of a "rational scientist".  This is because it is nothing more than an opinion, a preference of the author.  He is just offended by the notion of nonlocality in nature.  Offended!

It's okay to be offended.  Such attitudes drive research on the foundations of quantum theory, in defiance of the "shut up and calculate" mentality.  Such research has led to quantum information science, quantum computing, etc.  This is all good stuff!

All I'm saying is that Bush's dictum, that nonlocality should be anathema to rational scientists, is the least persuasive sentence in this article.  The sentence is itself irrational, as it is based on neither reason nor evidence - it is a purely emotional expression as it stands.  And yes I am also making an emotional expression when I condemn it.  

Perhaps there is a good reason that nonlocality should not be considered rational science, and I'm sure other physicists and philosophers have advanced such reasons.  But Bush fails to do so in this article, nor did he cite those who do.  It's nothing but a cheap shot.  In this, he has not served his readers well.

Finally, I realize that it's quite funny that I wrote an entire blog post about one pesky sentence in an otherwise intriguing and informative article :-)

 

"The Grand Design" by Hawking and Mlodinow

I have just finished reading The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow (New York:  Random House).  The book was originally published in 2010, and I acquired a glossy-paged edition in 2013, but it sat on my shelf unread, until a few months ago.  I have been meaning to read it for a long time.  Hawking died in 2018, so this book belongs to the final decade of his career, and I regret not getting to it until long after his passing.

Sadly, since the book was published, both authors (as well as many, many top physicists) have been associated with Jeffrey Epstein.  However as far as can be determined at this time, any allegations of improper or illegal conduct by either Hawking or Mlodinow have not been substantiated.  

On to the book itself.  Much of it is science popularization, and though I am conversant in the more familiar parts of physics exposited, the book did clarify a couple things for me, which I appreciated.  For example, I have often been confused by the use of the term "effective theory" in physics, and the book explained it in layman's terms.

The important point made by the book is a strong endorsement of supersymmetry and M-theory.  On the final page, the authors write that "M-theory is the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe"(italics original).  They also advocate the multiverse concept, and the strong anthropic principle.  Along with these, they present a metaphysical principle, "model-dependent realism", which superficially appears to be a hybrid of instrumentalism and realism.  However, I'm not sure if you can really eat your cake and have it too.  The principle appears to be crafted specifically to accommodate M-theory, which is actually an infinite number of theories, each with its own domain of applicability, though where the domains overlap, the theories make the same predictions.  I don't see what is realist about "model-dependent realism"; it appears to me to be a variant of instrumentalism.

A key passage is this (p. 58):

Regarding the laws that govern the universe, what we can say is this:  There seems to be no single mathematical model or theory that can describe every aspect of the universe.  Instead...there seems to be the network of theories called M-theory.  Each theory in the M-theory network is good at describing phenomena within a certain range.  Wherever their ranges overlap, the various theories in the network agree, so they can all be said to be parts of the same theory.  But no single theory within the network can describe every aspect of the universe--all the forces of nature, the particles that feel those forces, and the framework of space and time in which it all plays out.  Though this situation does not fulfill the traditional physicist's dream of a single unified theory, it is acceptable within the framework of model-dependent realism.

Later, they write (p. 143):  "We seem to be at a critical point in the history of science, in which we must alter our conception of goals and of what makes a physical theory acceptable". 

I am glad that I read this book after I read Jim Baggott's Farewell to Reality, which was published in 2013 (by Pegasus Books), and which I acquired less than a year after acquiring The Grand Design.  I read it within a year, and reviewed it on this blog in 2014.  In the decade since, I think it is fair to say that empirical evidence for supersymmetry has not yet been found, though back then, expectations were high that such evidence would be found within a decade.  This has weakened the case for The Grand Design and strengthened the critique given by Baggott.  Indeed, Baggott uses the phrase "Grand Delusion", which sounds like direct mockery of The Grand Design.  

On balance, reading The Grand Design was not a waste of my time.  It was important for me to know the views of one of the greatest physicists of my lifetime, and I did learn a few things.  However I am doubtful about its main conclusions, though I have a benefit of hindsight -- 15 years of physics progress since the book was published -- to reinforce my doubts.  If you're interested, don't let me stop you from reading The Grand Design, but if you do, do yourself the favor of also reading Baggott's Farewell to Reality in conjunction, to get a more balanced perspective.