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Culture, history and society

Culture, history and society

Shelf life: Peter Woit

01 Sep 2006

Peter Woit is in the department of mathematics at Columbia University in New York

Peter Woit

What are the three best popular-science books?

The Second Creation by Robert Crease and Charles Mann is the best popular book about the history of how the Standard Model of particle physics came to be, and Abraham Pais’ Inward Bound is another great account of the birth of modern physics. The End of Science by John Horgan is a very provocative, if extreme, thesis. He was perhaps the first popular-science writer to get the story of string theory right.

What science books are you currently reading?

I’m having one of my periodic attempts to keep up with the “loop quantum gravity” approach to the problem of quantizing gravity with Carlo Rovelli’s very readable Quantum Gravity. I’ve also started Out of the Crystal Maze by Lillian Hoddeson and co-authors. It is a history of solid-state physics, which is a field I would like to know more about, especially the theory of superconductivity.

What else are you reading?

The Baltic by Alan Palmer; my father was born in Riga and I’d like to learn some more about the history of this part of the world. I’ve just begun Henry Adams and the Making of America by Garry Wills; Adams was a historian and one of the more fascinating characters of 19th-century America.

Which popular-science book have you never read, but feel you ought to have tackled, and why?

The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology by Horace Freeland Judson – one really should know something about molecular biology these days, and all I’ve ever done is read James Watson’s The Double Helix, which is not enough.

• Woit’s book Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics was published recently by Jonathan Cape (see “String theory gets knotted”)

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