Scientists and the Cambridge Companions

Today we veer a little from our usual terrain.  The Cambridge Companions book series consists of anthologies of articles meant to introduce and provide context for major writers and thinkers, topics, and historical periods.  The subjects covered are primarily in the humanities.  The major areas listed include American Studies, Ancient Worlds, Culture, Classical Literature, Law, Linguistics, Literature and Drama, Management, Music, Philosophy, and Religion.  The list of subtopics is quite detailed, with Philosophy of Science being the only one remotely related to science, engineering, and medicine.  Yet, I've noticed a few scientists end up having volumes dedicated to them.  It is interesting to dwell on those scientists whose work has had ripple effects on the humanities.

First, to dispose of the obvious, what crops up under "Philosophy of Science"?  Four volumes, on the following subjects:  Einstein, Piaget, Darwin's Origin of Species, and Philosophy of Biology.  Not mentioned there is that there is also a Cambridge Companion to Darwin, now in its second edition, as well as volumes for Bacon and Carnap.  When you click on the subject "General Science", the volumes for Darwin and Newton (also in second edition) join Philosophy of Biology.   As far as I know, Darwin is the only biologist with a volume dedicated to him, and I can't think of a single chemist who has one.

Let's turn to mathematics.  Clicking on this subject yields two volumes, Einstein and Frege.  However, we know that others to whom volumes are dedicated have done important work in mathematics:  Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and Bertrand Russell, for instance.  It is safe to say their mathematical work is probably not the principle reason they have volumes dedicated to them, however.

Let's sidestep a little and consider economics.  Two volumes pop up when you click on that subject:  Keynes and Hayek.  However, we know that there are also volumes on Adam Smith and Karl Marx.  There are also volumes dedicated to other thinkers who wrote about economics, but who might not primarily be considered "economists", such as John Locke, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill.

What I mainly wanted to write about here though is physics.  There are 3 volumes dedicated to physicists:  Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.  Obviously, some of the individuals mentioned above (Descartes, Pascal) and others (Thomas Hobbes) with Companions of their own, did work in physics as well, but Galileo, Newton, and Einstein are the ones that can be considered primarily physicists.  It is true that these three are revolutionary figures in the history of physics, and that their work did ripple out and influence philosophy and culture more broadly.  Each of them also worked in multiple areas of physics.

So, this raises an amusing question:  what other physicists might deserve a Cambridge Companion?  One hint is a set of books, not formally part of a series, published by Oxford University Press with a very similar format.  Three 19th century British physicists have such volumes dedicated to them:  Maxwell, Kelvin, and Stokes.  They are certainly deserving and were pivotal figures in the history of physics; however it might be argued that their impact on the humanities has not been as large as Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.  (Two obvious missing physicists from that 19th-century British set include Michael Faraday and Lord Rayleigh.)  Perhaps Niels Bohr might come closer to a good candidate.  At the more popular culture level, Nikola Tesla and Richard Feynman are obvious candidates (and such volumes would probably sell well), and Steven Weinberg certainly wrote prolifically for a general audience.  I will have to say though, the selection of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein are the most obvious choices to start with, and thus the series chose wisely.

The same parlor game could be played for biology, chemistry, and mathematics.  I don't know the history of these fields well enough to suggest candidates.  However, in logic (a field that overlaps with philosophy) an obvious and deserving figure would be Kurt Godel.  In economics, perhaps Herbert Simon or James M. Buchanan might be considered.  Among the geosciences, perhaps Alfred Wegener (of continental drift) and Edward N. Lorenz (of the butterfly effect) might be considered.

Of course, with Philosophy of Biology in the series, one could easily add volumes on the other major scientific disciplines, though these are frequently well served by other publishers (like the much more expensive Oxford Handbooks series, which generally has wider coverage than the Cambridge Companions). 

A tribute to Academic Press' Mathematics in Science and Engineering series

Almost a year ago, I wrote about Academic Press' acclaimed International Geophysics book series, which published a total of 104 volumes, the last one in 2014.  Though many volumes remain in print, it is unclear if any new volumes are anticipated.

Today I'd like to pay tribute to another Academic Press book series, Mathematics in Science and Engineering.  Academic Press is now part of Elsevier, and the latter's website shows that this series, apparently launched in 1961, is still going strong, with the latest volume published earlier this year.  Volume 1 was titled Concepts from Tensor Analysis and Differential Geometry, by Tracy Y. Thomas.  Sixty years later, the series published Luigi Berselli's Three-Dimensional Navier-Stokes Equations for Turbulence.  The website seems to suggest that the last numbered volume was #213, published in 2010, and at least 7 volumes have been published since then.  The longevity of a 60-year old series is truly impressive.

Scanning the list of titles and authors, there are indeed some impressive contributions.  Remarkably, I only own one of these volumes, Morton Gurtin's An Introduction to Continuum Mechanics (1981), volume 158 of the series.

Partisan Science in America

Last Tuesday's edition of the Wall Street Journal featured an op-ed by Gary Saul Morson titled "Partisan Science in America".  Among the topics discussed are the origins of COVID-19, Dr. Fauci's pronouncements about masks and "attacks...on science", and climate change.  While DTLR does not take a position on the "lab leak" theory, which is discussed at the center of Morson's piece, in my view the rest of the article is on point.  Though Morson is a professor of Slavic languages and literature, according to Wikipedia he is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and had a youthful interest in physics.  Much of what he writes here is accurate, though sadly not well understood even by scientists themselves.

Here are some of the best lines of the piece:

If science is treated as a solid block, each part of which is as indubitable as all the others, then science has been misunderstood.  Science always contains some propositions less firmly grounded than others:  on the frontier, newly discovered, based on experiments not readily replicated.

and,

Some scientific statements prove false:  that's how science works.  Those who claim that to doubt any part of the consensus is to be "antiscience" or "a denier" are themselves being antiscientific.

and,

To doubt a scientist is not to doubt science.  Quite the contrary, personal authority is precisely what science dispenses with, as much as possible....To be sure, nonscientists often have to trust scientists to inform them what the science has discovered.  But that is all the more reason that scientists bear the responsibility of not letting political or other nonscientific criteria affect their explication.

and finally,

If scientists expect their statements to be trusted, they must themselves be trustworthy in making them.  One had better be scrupulously honest before asking people to surrender their own judgment and simply believe what they are told.  Scientists should be especially careful not to misrepresent political or policy judgments as being scientific.  And they must protest vigorously and loudly when other influential people claim to speak in the name of science while misrepresenting it.

I've heard multiple politicians say "I believe in science".  Anyone who makes such a statement has no understanding of the scientific process, as the first quote above alludes to.  This kind of talk pollutes our collective ability to think critically about science and science policy.  

 

That famous painting of Lavoisier

Any scientist who visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is brought to a halt by Jacque-Louis David's portrait of Antoine and Marie-Anne Lavoisier.  Chemistryworld has a post by Philip Ball this month about the discovery of what had been originally painted (and covered up).  Antoine Lavoisier was arguably the most pivotal figure in the history of chemistry.  Ball speculates that the painting was altered due to worries about Lavoisier's portrayal in light of the forthcoming French Revolution.  If so, the alterations were not sufficient to save Lavoisier's life--he was executed during the Revolution--though his wife did survive.  Check out Philip Ball's account.

An update on supersymmetry and competitors to string theory

About 12 years ago, I read Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics:  The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (Houghton Mifflin, 2007).  Like a few other physicists, Smolin was not pleased with the lack of evidential basis for string and M-theory, and the desire of some physicists to abandon the need for such empirical support.  Part III of the book looks at alternatives to string theory.  Though I am a physicist, I am as good as a layperson in this particular arena, and Smolin's book gave me a nontechnical discussion of string theory's competitors.

At the time Smolin wrote, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was still under construction.  Smolin predicted that the LHC would find the Higgs boson (it did) and that its biggest task would be to find evidence for supersymmetry.  Last month, The Economist featured an article that essentially gives an update on all this ("Bye, bye, little Susy", Aug. 28, 2021).  It's a refreshing look at the situation as it stands today.

First, hopes of finding evidence for supersymmetry ("SUSY") are slipping quickly.  While SUSY hasn't been ruled out entirely, evidence has been lacking so far.  Without SUSY, string theory is also near a dead end.  Meanwhile, experimental anomalies with the standard model are beginning to accumulate.  

The article describes a number of competing "theories of everything" to string theory.  In some, the very notions of space, time, and causality are emergent phenomena.  I find it exhilarating to read that statistical physics and information theory may play a fundamental role in the standard model's successor. When I audited an undergraduate thermal physics class while in grad school, the professor introduced the topic by saying that thermodynamics was more general than either mechanics or electromagnetism.  From the Economist article, perhaps thermodynamics may be more general than we ever had a right to expect!

Experimental physicists discovered the Top Quark not long after I began studying physics; the discovery of the Higgs boson and gravitational waves have been more recent experimental breakthroughs.  However I remember in grad school seeing the high energy theory professors publishing about SUSY.  Theoretical physics may have indeed been in a rut, as Smolin would have you believe, during much of my professional lifetime.  The competitors to string theory discussed in the Economist article may be the first steps to a renaissance of theoretical physics.  If so, theoretical physics might get exciting again!

A tribute to McGraw-Hill's fluid mechanics books

Let's wrap up the current round of book publisher tributes with this look at McGraw-Hill's books on fluid mechanics.  Like Wiley discussed in the last post, McGraw-Hill published two widely used introductory fluid mechanics texts, the venerable one by Victor L. Streeter and coauthors, which seems to now be finally retired, and the more recent one by Frank M. White, just out in its 9th edition.  I have neither book, but their authors are represented in the following photo.

Some McGraw-Hill fluid mechanics books.

Streeter's Handbook of Fluid Dynamics was part of the publisher's Handbook series, which was quite prolific in its day.  It was joined in the series by McGraw-Hill's more recent Fluid Flow Handbook, edited by Jamal Saleh (2002), now also out of print.  White's Viscous Fluid Flow (2d edition above; the 4th edition came out this year) was part of McGraw-Hill's Series in Mechanical Engineering, as were the 7th edition of Schlichting (shown above), John D. Anderson's Modern Compressible Flow, Frank S. Sherman's Viscous Flow, and J. O. Hinze's Turbulence.  Also seen above is Katz & Plotkin's Low-Speed Aerodynamics, part of McGraw-Hill's Series in Aeronautical and Aerospace Engineering, which itself was once edited by Anderson.  Evidently a number of books in that series were cross-listed with the Mechanical Engineering Series.

The Brodkey & Hershey text seen on the right in the photo is a representative of McGraw-Hill's Chemical Engineering Series.  It must have been a flagship for the publisher, as the pre-title pages explain its history dating back to 1925.  It brags that the series "stands as a unique historical record of the development of chemical engineering education and practice.  In the series one finds the milestones of the subject's evolution:  industrial chemistry, stoichiometry, unit operations and processes, thermodynamics, kinetics, and transfer operations."  A few books in the series are still available from the publisher today.

The three books on the right illustrate the handsome livery of these engineering series, though Brodkey & Hershey's is hidden by the dust jacket.

A tribute to Wiley's fluid mechanics books

Let's now consider the fluid mechanics books published by John Wiley & Sons.  They are particularly strong in the markets for widely used engineering textbooks.  For instance, they publish the successors to both the Fox & McDonald and Munson, Young, & Okiishi introductory fluid mechanics texts, each on their 9th editions at the time of writing.  They also publish multiple texts in heat & mass transfer, including the classic Bird, Stewart, and Lightfoot, pictured below.

Representative Wiley fluid mechanics books in my personal collection.

The Handbook of Fluid Dynamics and Fluid Machinery seen on the left was published in 1996.  It seems unlikely such a behemoth will ever be published again, by any publisher.  Gulf's Encyclopedia of Fluid Mechanics was published between the mid 1980s and mid 1990s, for a total of 13 volumes, probably setting the record for largest fluid mechanics reference work.  The most recent such reference work I know of is CRC Press's Handbook of Fluid Dynamics (2016), which appears in a single volume.

Ronald Panton's Incompressible Flow is a favorite upper-level textbook, now in its fourth edition.  The red and white livery of the second edition, seen above, reminds me of the similar livery of its Wiley sibling, Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics 2/e, which you can see in this earlier post.  Also seen above is Lex Smits' introductory textbook, and the first of Hunter Rouse's 2-volume series of hydraulics texts.

Wiley keeps in print two classic monographs on waves:  J. J. Stoker's 1957 Water Waves:  The Mathematical Theory with Applications (currently available as a Wiley Classics Edition, but also in a much less expensive Dover reprint), and G. B. Whitham's 1974 Linear and Nonlinear Waves, published as part of Pure and Applied Mathematics: A Wiley Series of Texts, Monographs and Tracts.  Similarly, Wiley has several key books on gas dynamics, including Zucrow & Hoffman's two volume Gas Dynamics (1976), and the more modern Zucker & Biblarz, Fundamentals of Gas Dynamics, now in its 3d edition (2019).  Marcello Lappa has published two monographs with Wiley:  Thermal Convection (2010) and Rotating Thermal Flows in Natural and Industrial Processes (2012).