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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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