Two new books now raise the question of whether Richard Feynman is rising to the status of superstar. The two books are very different in style and in substance. Lawrence Krauss’s book, Quantum Man, is a narrative of Feynman’s life as a scientist, skipping lightly over the personal adventures that have been emphasized in earlier biographies. Krauss succeeds in explaining in nontechnical language the essential core of Feynman’s thinking. Unlike any previous biographer, he takes the reader inside Feynman’s head and reconstructs the picture of nature as Feynman saw it. This is a new kind of scientific history, and Krauss is well qualified to write it, being an expert physicist and a gifted writer of scientific books for the general public. Quantum Man shows us the side of Feynman’s personality that was least visible to most of his admirers, the silent and persistent calculator working intensely through long days and nights to figure out how nature works.

Free learning from The Open University http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/ --- Dr Stephen Serjeant, senior lecturer in astrophysics at The Open University, uses a pint of stout to explain what dark matter is. (Part 12 of 22) --- Bang Goes The Theory on OpenLearn http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/whats-on/ou-on-the-bbc-bang-goes-the-theory-3 Articles by Dr Stephen Serjeant on OpenLearn http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/profiles/dr-stephen-serjeant ---

“Time” is the most used noun in the English language, yet it remains a mystery. We’ve just completed an amazingly intense and rewarding multidisciplinary conference on the nature of time, and my brain is swimming with ideas and new questions. Rather than trying a summary (the talks will be online soon), here’s my stab at a top ten list partly inspired by our discussions: the things everyone should know about time. [Update: all of these are things I think are true, after quite a bit of deliberation. Not everyone agrees, although of course they should.]

"We etch a tiny periodic table onto a hair belonging to chemistry Professor Martyn Poliakoff. "

From Brain Pickings Weekly: an elegant and eloquent read about the most important clash in theoretical physics, which shaped the course of quantum research.

This is a web site (still under construction) for young students - and anyone else - who are (like me) thrilled by the challenges posed by real science, and who are - like me - determined to use their brains to discover new things about the physical world that we are living in. In short, it is for all those who decided to study theoretical physics, in their own time.

ONE STARRY NIGHT 35 years ago, I drove the physicist Freeman Dyson through the British Columbia rain forest toward a reunion with his estranged son, George. The son, then 22, was a long-haired, sun-darkened, barefoot dropout with an uncanny resemblance to Thoreau. He had emigrated to Canada during the Vietnam War, and he lived 95 feet up a Douglas fir outside Vancouver. His passion was the aboriginal North American skin boat. In a workshop near his tree house, he had resurrected the baidarka, the kayak of the Aleutian Islands—a watertight second skin, lightweight and nimble, in which the Aleut hunter originally, and young George himself eventually, became a kind of sea centaur, half man and half canoe. The father, Freeman, was then and continues to be a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, employed there, as Einstein was before him, to think about whatever he finds interesting.

How could bees of little brain come up with anything as complex as a dance language? The answer could lie not in biology but in six-dimensional math and the bizarre world of quantum mechanics.

Impossible colors are hues that can only be perceived under specific conditions. Examples of impossible colors are bluish-yellow and reddish-green[citation needed]. This does not mean the muddy brown color created when mixing red and green paints, or the green color from yellow and blue, but completely unique "new" colors.

On the evening of June 20th, several hundred physicists, including a Nobel laureate, assembled in an auditorium at the Friendship Hotel in Beijing for a lecture by the Chinese mathematician Shing-Tung Yau. In the late nineteen-seventies, when Yau was in his twenties, he had made a series of breakthroughs that helped launch the string-theory revolution in physics and earned him, in addition to a Fields Medal—the most coveted award in mathematics—a reputation in both disciplines as a thinker of unrivalled technical power.

Graham Farmelo said that he’d never met anyone – even in Bristol where Paul Dirac grew up and lived – who’d ever heard of him: the greatest English physicist since Newton! Instead they’d lionised Archie Leach, who was in the same class at school. Archie had gone to America and changed his name to Cary Grant.

The Princeton physics professor says the trouble with heavy ion collisions is that they are complicated affairs. They’re like an enormous car crash where everything breaks, there’s tremendous confusion, and then you try to sort out afterwards what happened. He chooses five books on string theory.

To write a book to explain in simple, non-mathematical terms what superstring theory is in not a simple task. In The Elegant Universe Brian Greene, a physicist who works in the area, does a very good job. Superstrings are a theory of particle physics that lays claim to being the ultimate "Theory of Everything", merging Einstein's relativity and quantum mechanics into an understanding of the physics of the very small and very large in the Universe. Hence to understand superstrings, relativity and quantum mechanics have to be explained as well. In this Brian Greene does a very good job, giving one of the best explainations of relativity I have read in the process. Superstring theory is still very much in its infancy and The Elegant Universe does not claim that all the problems have been solved; in fact a point is made of pointing out all the present deficiencies of the theory.