Light Reading Suggestions (Non-textbooks)

[tolove]

As the topic says!

Anyone read a good books lately that were related to physics/mathematics? I'm thinking history books, or things of that sort.

I've recently finished reading "Black Hole Wars," by Leonard Susskind. I liked it quite a lot. It was a very nice mixture of history, anecdote, and information.

edit: Ah, sorry, I meant to post this in General Physics subsection.

 

[dipole]

The book "Zero" by Charles Seife is good in my opinion. Tells about the history and implications for mathematics of the concept of zero.

 

[QuantumCurt]

I'm currently reading "The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World," by Sean Carroll. I just started it a couple days ago...it's quite good so far.

As far as math based books, I really enjoyed both "The Golden Ratio" and "Is God a Mathematician?" by Mario Livio. Both great books with a lot of insight into mathematical principles, and how math is reflected in, and representative of the world around us.

 

[Theorem.]

Can't ever discount "A Mathematician's Apology" by G.H. Hardy, very good read. I also liked 'The Strangest Man'
- A biography of Paul Dirac.

 

[collinsmark]

Anyone read a good books lately that were related to physics/mathematics? I'm thinking history books, or things of that sort.

I've recently finished reading "Black Hole Wars," by Leonard Susskind. I liked it quite a lot. It was a very nice mixture of history, anecdote, and information.

Yes, "Black Hole Wars," by Susskind was good.

It inspired me to calculate the displacement of an object as a function of time that one, I'll call him "Bob," would measure if Bob was right up next to the event horizon of a large [supermassive, for example] black hole (imagine Bob was suspended from above by a long cable), and and Bob dropped an object (call it "Alice"), allowing the object (Alice) to free-fall into the black hole.

The displacement of the object I came up with is:

$$x' = d \left[ 1 - \mathrm{sech} \left( \frac{c}{d} \tau \right) \right]$$
where
$x'$: displacement of object [Alice] away from stationary observer [Bob] as measured by the observer [Bob].
$c$: speed of light.
$d$: distance of stationary observer [Bob] to the event horizon. (Not the distance to the center of black hole! it is assumed that $d \ll r$).
$\tau$: time, as measured by the stationary observer [Bob].
$\mathrm{sech}()$: hyperbolic secant function.

According to the equation, the object [Alice] will approach the event horizon, but never actually cross it (as measured from the observer's [Bob's] frame of reference).

And note that the stationary observer feels an acceleration (from the cable suspending him) of $g = c^2/d$. With that, it can be shown through series expansion that the displacement reduces to $x' = \frac{1}{2}g \tau^2$ for small $\tau$, agreeing with Newtonian mechanics (at small times, before things get relativistic)!

(This also ignores the mass of Alice and any spacetime curvature caused by Alice's mass; it is assumes Alice has negligible mass. Also, quantum effects are ignored.)

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Anyway, back to the topic. I recommend

"Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics," by John Derbyshire.

and

"The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives," by Leonard Mlodinow.

 

[Digitalism]

The Road to Reality by Penrose. It's a history of mathematics from the Egyptians and Pythagoreans to the modern era. He muses on the nature of the phenomena he explores on occasion which sounds right up your alley.