Although diagrams abound, cosmic microwave polarization is a difficult subject, and readers who have forgotten their college...
An astrophysicist provides “an insider’s glimpse into the power of the [Nobel] prize to refract reality, as it did for me, an astronomer who was once seemingly about to read the very prologue of the cosmos.”
In his first book, Keating (Physics/Univ. of California, San Diego) delivers a sometimes-confusing but always entertaining mixture of autobiography, denunciation of the Nobel Prize, and account of a complex experiment designed to discover evidence of cosmic inflation, an event predicted to follow the beginning of our universe, the Big Bang. In many ways, the Nobel Prize proceedings resemble the World Series. It certainly takes talent to get there, but winning requires many other factors, especially luck. In the case of the Nobel, it usually includes the necessities of being alive, male, skilled at public relations, not young, and—in the sciences—a member of a brilliant team. Keating concludes with suggestions for making the prize more equitable, which the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, having already changed Alfred Nobel’s original rules, could accept if it chose. The author also delivers an intriguing account of a major ongoing research project. As a postdoctoral researcher, Keating conceived of a telescope to detect polarization of microwaves in the cosmic microwave background, which, if found, would provide the first evidence of cosmic inflation. He alternates between an explanation of the science with the technical and political problems that plagued the experiment. Worldwide headlines followed the announcement of success in 2014, but Keating was barely mentioned because he had been squeezed out. That the announcement was soon retracted does not assuage his resentment, and he blames his exclusion partly on cutthroat competition for a Nobel Prize.
Although diagrams abound, cosmic microwave polarization is a difficult subject, and readers who have forgotten their college physics may struggle. Still, most will enjoy this behind-the-scenes view of the dog-eat-dog world of big science and agree that the Nobel Prize needs fixing.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-324-00091-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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