Anlässe zur Skepsis
Vom Sceptical Inquirer bis zum paranormalen Fahrrad – der Schockwellenreiter hat es auf die Leichtgläubigen abgesehen und bringt jede Menge Links. Sehr lesenswert! (Auch wenn es Jörgs längstes Posting bisher ist… 
)
Mein paranormales Fahrrad von Gero v. Randow (Herausgeber) habe ich auch gelesen. Noch eine wärmste Buchempfehlung von mir!
Web pals
Happy Birthday to Hal!
Hal considers Feynman to be “a minor deity in my personal panthaeon“.
By the way, I like the way he uses the weblog icons all over his site. Looks nice and is helpful because you see about which weblogs he’s talking today.
Susan says she read and enjoyed Genius by James Gleick, a biography of Feynman. André owns the book, too, and we both liked it a lot!
Susan: “The description of Los Alamos is one of the things that’s stayed with me, and has fed the interest that eventually led to a plan to have a Glowing Man trip later this year.”
Finally the search engine for BookNotes works!
Yum! Pan-cooked peaches over at Al’s. (It seems he is a fan of Feynman, too.)
Hurray, Oliver is still alive! And he went to the Expo, too.
Books
Craig asks: “I’m addicted to paper and books, are you?”
Yes, I am! Of all the media people have at home, I can do without TV/VCR (André and I don’t own one), I could do without Radio (if I had to; but I just love SWR 3), maybe I could even live without a computer and internet connection (although it would be very difficult), but I could not live without my books and a good library nearby!
(Craig pointed to Books, paper and the e-world.)
Quote of the day
“Science is like sex – sometimes something useful comes out of it, but that’s not what we are doing it for.” – Richard Feyman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988)
Richard Feynman was one of the most fascinating physicists (and personality!) of the 20th century, and I found quite a bit of information on him on the web.
- A biography from which I took the photo of him
- The biography on the Nobel site
- Feynman on teaching (excerpt from Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman)
- A man, a genius (a memorial)
- There’s plenty of room at the bottom (I haven’t finished reading that one yet.)
- Cargo Cult, ai site on sceptical thinking
- An obituary from the Boston Globe
Update: Thanks, Garret, for posting the following link to another Feynman page: http://www.crunchygods.com/weirdo/feynman/
Which, in turn, pointed me to Feynman Online, which pointed to the Tuva Trader, etc., etc. …
I can warmly recommend Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman! and What do you care what other people think?, two books in which he tells some of his adventures. (Die deutschen Ausgaben sind erschienen als Sie belieben wohl zu scherzen, Mr. Feynman! und Kümmert Sie, was andere Leute denken?.)
By the way, the Nobel e-Museum is a pretty interesting site as well!
Hey, Richard Feynman hat ja am gleichen Tag Geburtstag wie ich.
Nicht im gleichen Jahr – sooo alt bin ich ja nun doch nicht, aber am gleichen Tag und im gleichen Monat. Find ich cool. Schade, daß ich nicht an Sternzeichen glaube.
Ich bin Stier, und Stiere glauben nun einmal nicht an Sternzeichen. (Raymond Smullyan)
BTW: Ich sitze gerade an einem Beitrag über den Sceptical Inquirer. Wird noch heute abend auf meinem Weblog erscheinen. Ist vielleicht auch etwas für Dich.
Sieht so aus, als hätte ich mit meinen Links einen Feynman-Fanclub aufgedeckt… Susan, Al, Hal…
… und eben kommt auch noch ein Link von Garret ‘rein…
Ich gucke dann mal nach dem Sceptical Inquirer!
Andrea
I bought this as an electronic book (one of the first) back in the early 90’s. It looked so bad on the screen that I never finished it. I probably still have the disk (floppy) around somewhere…
I have read Six Easy Pieces (paperback). Feynman was an incredible teacher.
Thanks for all the great links!
Wow, an electronic book in the early nineties?! I didn’t even have a computer before 1995. But I was living with my parents then, and my father bought his first computer (a Commodore PC 20-III) in 1987.
I don’t think I would want to read a book on a desktop computer screen, especially if it is one of those old, green-and-black or amber-and-black monitors. Even now, I think I would want one of those e-book things instead.
Genius is a great book; maybe you should buy a paperback edition and try it again?!
Six easy pieces is one of the few books by Feynman I have not read. Yet.
I think the first I read was QED – The strange theory of light and matter when I started studying physics. I reread it after a few semesters, and I think it is the only book that describes quantum electrodynamics in a way normal people like me can understand it.
Update:
I just saw Six easy pieces (and Six not so easy pieces) in the bookstore today. It says that they are excerpts from the famous “Red Books”, the Feynman Lectures on Physics, which we own, of course. I have to admit that I didn’t read them cover to cover, though…
Andrea