Galileo's Assayer and Torricelli's barometer

A couple months ago, Science magazine had a retrospective by Alex Gomez-Marin on Galileo's The Assayer, which was published 400 years ago this year.  Part of a series of scientific disputes regarding the nature of comets, this particular piece lays out Galileo's methodological perspective on how science should be done.  I've only read selected excerpts in translation, but I do know that others (e.g., Flemish contemporary Simon Stevin) held similar views.

Meanwhile the December issue of Physics Today features a Backscatter item on Torricelli's barometer, by Karina Cooper.  Torricelli was Galileo's last "student", and his work with the barometer was an important step in the understanding of hydrostatic pressure.  Together with Torricelli's efflux law, this achievement ranks him as a major founder of 17th century fluid mechanics, along with Stevin and Galileo's older student, Benedetto Castelli.

My interest in these matters, and the history of classical physics more generaly, has grown noticeably in the last year or so, particularly in the arena of fluid mechanics, which is an interdisciplinary field involving physics, mathematics, and engineering.  Seeing these items in Science and Physics Today is a great way to wind down the year of 2023.  

 As a bonus I praise Physics Today for featuring a cover story in November on research in contemporary fluid mechanics, namely the piece by Detlef Lohse and Olga Shishkina on "Ultimate turbulent thermal convection".  However, the authors' insistence on the relevance of the reported work for real world situations, such as atmospheric and photospheric convection, seems to me insincere when they focus on results for "classical regime" aspect ratios between 0.5 and 1.0.  The atmospheric and photospheric examples involve large aspect ratios.

Nonetheless, the cover is worth reproducing here.  We don't get to see fluid mechanics featured on the front cover of Physics Today all that often!

If I don't write again this year, may you all have a wonderful holiday season and a blessed new year.  See you in 2024!

Scientist Biography Series, some notes

Almost two years ago, I had a post on some scientist biography series published by various university presses.  I'd like to provide a few miscellaneous notes on that post.  

First, the Cambridge University Press series, Cambridge Science Biographies, was originally published by Blackwell and called the Blackwell Science Biographies.  I recently acquired used copies of the volumes on Galileo and Newton, two of the three in the series devoted to physicists (I am missing the volume for Ampere).  My copy of the Galileo volume (by the late Father Michael Sharratt) is from the Blackwell era, while my copy of the Newton volume (by the late A. Rupert Hall) is from the Cambridge era.

Turning to their rival, Oxford University Press, I discovered a more general biography series of theirs called Lives and Legacies.  I see that there are ten volumes in the series, only two of which are dedicated to scientists.  One is Isaac Newton, and the other is Ben Franklin.  To the extent that Franklin was a scientist, he was a physicist, so it is notable that the only 2 scientists in the series are physicists.

The 2023 Nobel Prizes

Following the announcements of the Nobel Prizes this past week has been quite thrilling.  While I won't comment on the literature and economics prizes, one surprise (to me) is that this year's Peace Prize laureate, Narges Mohammadi, currently imprisoned, was a physics major in college, and onetime professional engineer.  She has previously been awarded the Sakharov Prize by the American Physical Society.  Physics World notes that she is the third physicist to win the Nobel Peace Prize, after Andrei Sakharov himself, and Joseph Rotblat.

The physiology or medicine prize to K. Kariko and D. Weissman for "nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19" was particularly delightful.  Reading of Kariko's professional struggles and marginalization, while managing to raise an Olympic Gold-Medalist daughter, provides yet another critique of conventional academic culture, groupthink, and incentive structures.  Both laureates labeled in the scientific wilderness for many, many years, before seeing one fruition of their work take on global significance, arguably changing the course of history.

The prize for physics to P. Agostini, F. Krausz, and A. L'Huillier "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter" is for an accomplishment less familiar to me, and learning of its details has been very instructive.  As I started reading about this work, I immediately thought of 1999 Chemistry laureate Ahmed Zewail, who I found is indeed mentioned in the scientific information packet released by the Nobel Foundation.  It was interesting to see AMO (atomic, molecular, and optical) physics honored again after the 2018 prize; indeed both the 2018 and 2023 prizes have done much to address the historical imbalance against female laureates.  There are now three living female Nobel laureates in physics at the same time, something unprecedented.  (And if you include this year's Peace laureate, there are four living women physicist Nobel laureates!)

Finally I am always pleased when a chemistry prize is awarded (as in Zewail's case) for a physics-related achievement - in this year's case, quantum dots.  Like many, I'd heard of quantum dots without knowing the names of the scientists who pioneered them, including those honored this year:  M. G. Bawendi, L. E. Brus, and A. I. Ekimov.

This has been a good batch of laureates to honor industrial scientists, as Katalin Kariko was, for some time, primarily employed by BioNTech, while Alexei Ekimov was still affiliated with a company called Nanocrystals Technology, Inc., at the time of receiving the award. 

The Nobel Prizes are justly criticized in many quarters, and should not be the only mark of high prestige that scientists and the general public focus on.  Having said that, the Nobel Committee did a fine job with this year's selections, doing much to maintain credibility for their efforts.

Some good stuff in Quanta magazine

I'd like to highlight a couple of excellent physics articles that appeared in Quanta magazine last month.

First, Thomas Lewton profiles Jonathan Oppenheim's work on hybrid classical-quantum theories of quantum gravity.  The idea seems to be that instead of attempting to quantize the gravitational field, let it remain classical.  To reconcile quantum uncertainty with a classical spacetime, gravity must be stochastic; it must be noisy.  

Second, Katie McCormick discusses a topological insulator analogy that has been used to explain atmospheric motions such as Kelvin waves in the Earth's atmosphere.  Taruh Matsuno's successful prediction of equatorial Kelvin waves in the 1960s was, evidently, one of the only times theoretical work in geophysical fluid dynamics was predictive of phenomena later discovered in nature.  The article focuses on Brad Marston and collaborators' theoretical and observational work demonstrating that Matsuno's waves can be understood using a topological insulator analogy (think quantum Hall effect).  Once again, a theoretical prediction (Poincare gravity waves in the stratosphere) was subsequently confirmed observationally.  Finally the article discusses David Tong's quantum field theoretical framing of coastal Kelvin waves.

I had attended a talk by Marston at the APS March Meeting earlier this year (see my earlier post), but did not quite follow it.  I am grateful to Quanta magazine for distilling the story into a form that can be consumed by a wider public (including me).

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.