Physics made easy this is not. Physics for the sophisticated but nontechnical, maybe. Krauss is a theoretical physicist who teaches one of those physics-for-poets courses at Yale. This volume, though, is a lofty view of certain unifying themes with particular reference to particle physics and quantum mechanics. The first section deals with process, describing how physicists work by excluding the irrelevant. Thus a cow can be reduced to a sphere or maybe a sphere attached by a pipe to a smaller sphere. By a simple application of scaling laws relating to area and volume, one can show that a huge ``supercow'' is not possible without radically altering the dimensions or the materials involved. Galileo excluded the effects of the medium to demonstrate that all objects fall at the same rate, and so on. Process also depends on mathematics, so Krauss enlarges on the use of orders-of- magnitude notation in science. In the second section, he explains how scientific revolutions (pace Thomas Kuhn) do not throw out the past so much as extend and revise theory to suit new scales of observation. So we go from Galileo and Newton to Einstein and special relativity to Hawking and black holes, with emphasis on how fundamental laws of force and motion hold at one scale but are revised at the quantum level. The last parts of the book are really very elegant discussions of unifying principles and symmetries, such as the equivalence of mass and energy and electricity and magnetism. Krauss introduces gauge theory, argues for the superconducting supercollider to seek the Higgs particle, discusses the possible ``end'' of physics, and—new to books of this type- -describes condensed matter physics, by which one can demonstrate that water and iron behave the same way at certain critical points. Less a guide for the perplexed than a theoretical introduction to the weirdness and beauty of the universe.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-465-05745-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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