Get the letters right

I'm still enjoying my Kindle, (and Quantum is very good by the way), but I do wish they had taken more trouble over converting the text. All Greek letters seem to have been scanned as images and come out the wrong size. In a book concerning wavelengths (λ) and wave functions (ψ) this is annoying.

Death Ray

I was pleased today to see my childhood vision of the future coming one step closer today. A laser system for shooting down aircraft has been demonstrated. A lot of my reading as a teenager was of books where people were torn apart by ravening death rays, so this is way overdue. Death rays existed before the laser, of course (the Martians in War of the Worlds had them), but that invention did give a focus to hopes of futuristic death. A pity then that the main uses of the laser turned out to be stuff like survey equipment and playing CDs.

I notice that the artist's representation can't resist the cliche of a brightly coloured beam linking the laser to its target. To be fair though, the conscientious BBC journalist did note that this is rubbish.

I bet the range is, and will remain, rather short. You just can't get round that inverse square law.

Stalin and the bomb

In Our Time continues to be excellent. Lysenko this week, who I knew nothing about, but I really should have. A small gem from the programme concerns the development of the Soviet nuclear bomb. Stalin forbade the use of Einsteinian physics (since he knew it was wrong). Beria later reported back to him that they were getting nowhere and wanted to use more productive methods. Stalin relented, reflecting that "we can always shoot them later". What a wag!

Oppie and the bomb

I've been enjoying watching Oppenheimer over the last few evenings. This series was produced by the BBC in 1980, which means that I have a dim memory of it, but was too young to really appreciate what was laid before me. What has made them release it on DVD now I don't know, but I'm glad that they have. It's a real period piece in a way, up there with Tinker, Tailor in its almost insolent slowness and care in building up its subject. Can you imaging anybody now making 7 hours of television that principally featured lots of people in suits sitting round committee tables and smoking a lot? (Admittedly, with one good explosion.) Jack Bauer would save the world several times in that span.

I particularly liked the Groves-Oppenheimer relationship, which could have been just cliche, but instead was subtly portrayed, and left you with respect for both of these very different men.

It's just a pity that the budget for this release didn't stretch to some extras on the DVD (I know these are often rubbish, but this was a case where you could have done something good), or to improving the colour quality of the video sections, which can't possibly have been that bad on broadcast. A missed opportunity also that the original production didn't try to explain more of the physics of what was going on. I looked up my copy of Clive James on Television, and he thought so too.

2 billion dollar's worth

I recently finished Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and never has an 880 page hardback seemed so compulsive. It was an impulse lift from the popular science section of Edinburgh's Central Library. However, rather than putting it down again because it was (in every sense) too heavy, I recognised it as a work Roger had pressed on me some time ago, and thought it was worth a punt. It was.

Richard Rhodes has done vast amounts of research, and takes a long run-up to the subject. We are eased in shortly after 1900, and given a deft introduction to a rapidly changing field, peopled, it seems, by a cast of brilliance. I'm familiar with a lot of the physics and the characters though my degree, but I still learned a lot about this era. It's well written too. The better sections read like a novel, and as in a good novel, some well-placed anecdotes enliven the book and stick in the mind. What about Fermi running along the corridor of his lab so that he can measure some short lived isotope? Or Otto Frisch coming close to a critical assembly by leaning over his workbench, thereby reflecting the neutrons with his body? Or a younger Frisch working out fission with his aunt (Lise Meitner) on a Christmas skiing trip?

And it all cost 2 billion dollars.