Profile of physicist Jun Ye, who built the world’s most accurate atomic clock
Category Archives: General Information
My book, Gravity’s Century, named one of 2020’s best summer science books!
Thrilled and honored to announce that Ira Flatow of NPR’s Science Friday just named my book, Gravity’s Century, one of the best summer science books of 2020!
Eddington Profile, with my book Gravity’s Century reference
Great review of Gravity’s Century in Wall Street Journal!
Friday’s Wall Street Journal featured a great review of my book:
In “Gravity’s Century” (Harvard, 181 pages, $26.95), science journalist Ron Cowen takes the long view. His brisk, engaging narrative leads us from Einstein’s famous “thought experiments” through theorists’ many (so far unsuccessful) attempts to marry quantum mechanics with general relativity, and up to recent (more successful) efforts to observe gravitational waves and black holes.
Explanations of key concepts in physics are interspersed with breezy biographical sketches of key figures in their development. Some tales—like the story of Einstein imagining what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam—are familiar. But Mr. Cowen’s book also introduces us to the prehistory of general relativity, featuring less-known characters like János Bolyai and Nikolai Lobachevsky, whose insights transformed geometry and set the stage for Einstein. A “deeper dive” accompanies each chapter, providing technical and historical asides for more earnest readers.
“Gravity’s Century,” like the other two books but more succinctly, recounts earlier eclipse expeditions aimed at testing the light-bending prediction. These included the misadventure that befell German astronomer Erwin Finlay-Freundlich and his colleagues. Encouraged by Einstein himself, they had traveled to Crimea to observe a 1914 eclipse, but when the war broke out were arrested as enemy aliens and had their telescopes confiscated. The researchers were released in a prisoner exchange, but the Russians held on to their equipment for much longer. As Mr. Cowen explains, the foiled excursion “proved lucky for Einstein. Late in 1915 he realized that the correct deflection of starlight was actually twice what he had calculated in 1911, before he had fully developed his new theory of gravity.” Finlay-Freundlich’s observations, had he been able to make them, would have seemed to contradict Einstein’s theory.
Ultimately, Einstein forged “a new way of thinking not just about gravity but about the universe,” as Mr. Cowen puts it. He refuted “long-held notions of space and time as featureless, silent spectators to the comings and goings in the universe.” A century later we continue to marvel at the awesome ramifications of Einstein’s radical notion.
My first book, Gravity’s Century, out in bookstores!
2016 American Institute of Physics Science Writing/Articles Award
I’m honored to have received the 2016 AIP Science Writing Award for excellence in science writing on physics and astronomy for my news feature for Nature on how the weirdest property of quantum theory may give birth to geometry, and therefore gravity.
My universe-as-a-hologram story is most read Nature article in 2013
My news story for Nature on new simulations indicating that higher dimensional universes may be holograms of lower dimensional ones, with the same physics, was cited as the most read online news story by Nature readers in 2013, with more than 1.2 million hits so far.
Dilbert creator just cited my hologram news story
Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, just cited my hologram story!
Scientist are coming closer to proving gravity is an illusion and the world is a hologram.
http://www.nature.com/news/simulations-back-up-theory-that-universe-is-a-hologram-1.14328
They could have just asked me.
I’m finishing my book tour in NYC today. Only one major embarrassment so far. The host of Bloomberg News, Pimm Fox, randomly opened my book and asked me to elaborate on a fairly unimportant page I wrote over a year ago. I had to confess on live TV that I didn’t remember part of my own book. Ouch.
Q&A with a string theorist about black holes as garbage cans of the universe
Q&A with a string theorist about black holes as garbage cans of the universe
Solving the mystery of Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts
Solving the mystery of Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts.