ScienceWeek

SCIENCEWEEK

New Books & Miscellany in the Sciences

August 29, 2003

Vol. 7 - Number 35C

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Contents:

1. Science Policy: On Benefits, Risks, and Science
2. On the Development of Science
3. Human vs. Animal Societies
4. On the Beginning of the Universe
5. Honey-Bees, Bumble-Bees, and Solitary Bees
6. On the End of Science
7. New Books and Books Noted

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1. SCIENCE POLICY: ON BENEFITS, RISKS, AND SCIENCE

With the determination of benefits and risk and the development
of techniques which improve the balance between them, the
applicability of scientific procedure to the problems of
environmental contamination comes to an abrupt end. What then
remains is a judgment which balances the stated risks against the
corresponding benefits. A scientific analysis can perhaps tell us
that every nuclear test will probably cause a given number of
congenitally deformed births, but no scientific procedures can
choose the balance point and tell us how many defective births we
ought to tolerate for the sake of a new nuclear weapon.

What is the "importance" of fallout, determined scientifically?
Some scientists have stated, with the full dignity of their
professional preeminence, that the fallout hazard, while not
zero, is "trivial". Nevertheless I have seen a minister, upon
learning for the first time that acts deliberately performed by
his own nation were possibly endangering a few lives in distant
lands and a future time, become so incensed at this violation of
the biblical injunction against the poisoning of wells as to make
an immediate determination to oppose nuclear testing. No science
can gauge the relative validity of these conflicting responses to
the same facts.

Scientific method cannot determine whether the proponents of
urban superhighways or those who complain about the resultant
smog are in the right, or whether the benefits of nuclear tests
to the national interest outweigh the hazards of fallout. No
scientific principle can tell us how to make the choice, which
may sometimes be forced upon us by the insecticide problem,
between the shade of the elm tree and the song of the robin.

Certainly science can validly describe what is known about the
information to be gained from a nuclear experiment, the economic
value of a highway, or the hazard of radioactive contamination or
of smog. The statement will usually be hedged with uncertainty,
and the proper answer may sometimes be "we don't know", but in
any case these separate questions do belong within the realm of
science. However, the choice of the balance point between benefit
and hazard is a value judgment; it is based on ideas of social
good, on morality or religion -- not on science.

The scientist can justly claim to be "informed," but he can make
no valid claim for a special competence in "judgment". Once the
scientific evidence has been stated, or its absence made clear,
the establishment of a level of tolerance for a modern pollutant
is a social problem and must be resolved by social processes.
Thus the logic of the scientific problems which are raised by
environmental pollution forces the resolution of these issues
into the arena of public policy.

If resolutions of the problems created by the recent failures in
large-scale technology require social judgments, who is to make
these judgments? Obviously scientists must be involved in some
way, if only because they have in a sense created the problems.
But if these issues require social, political, and moral
judgments, then they must also somehow reflect the demands,
opinions, and ethics of citizens generally. Because new
experiments and technological processes are so costly that the
government must often pay for them, and because government
officials mediate many social decisions, the government and its
administrators are also involved. What are the proper roles of
scientist, citizen, and administrator?

Adapted from: Barry Commoner: Science & Survival. Viking Press
1963, p.100. More information at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345220846/scienceweek

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2. ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE

We need to see scientific thought and practice as a developing
body of ideas and techniques. These ideas and methods, and even
the controlling aims of science itself, are continually evolving,
in a changing intellectual and social environment. To study in an
effective and lifelike manner either the history of scientific
ideas or the logic and methods of science, we must take this
evolutionary process seriously. Otherwise, we shall be in danger,
as historians, of concerning ourselves too much with particular
discoveries or doctrines or persons, with anticipations and
anecdotes. And, as philosophers, we may end by replacing the
living science which is our object of study by a formal and
frozen abstraction, forgetting to show how the results of these
formal inquiries bear on the intellectual and practical business
in which working scientists are engaged. A purely chronological
history of science and a purely formal philosophy of science thus
have the same deficiency: each of them neglects to place the
scientific ideas which are in question into their intellectual
environment, so as to show what, in that particular context, gave
these ideas and investigations their merit.

The ideas of science represent a living and critical tradition.
They are passed on from generation to generation, but are
modified in the course of transmission. In 1850 (say) Professor
Jones teaches physics to his bright young student Smith; and the
ideas so transmitted are recognizable ancestors of those which,
in 1880, Professor Smith teaches in turn to young Robinson. In
each generation, some intellectual variations are perpetuated,
and become themselves incorporated into the tradition: this, for
the historian, is what constitutes "progress" in science.
Likewise for the philosopher of science: some novel theories
deserve to survive at the expense of their rivals and
predecessors; and the philosopher must analyse the standards by
which such scientific variants are judged and found worthy or
wanting. There is no single, simple test of merit, and it is not
for the philosopher to impose one on science; nor can a historian
justly criticize earlier scientists for not jumping straight to
the views of 1960. For progress can be made in science only if
men apply their intellects critically to the problems which arise
in their own times, in the light of the evidence and the ideas
which are then open to consideration.

The common task which accordingly faces historians and
philosophers of science has parallels elsewhere -- in Darwinian
biology. In the evolution of scientific ideas, as in the
evolution of species, change results from the selective
perpetuation of variants. Between the physics lectures of
Professor Jones in 1850 and those of Professor Smith in 1880 lie
thirty years, in which a dozen tentative speculations were
considered for every one which survived as a change in the
established tradition. For every variant which finds favor and
displaces its predecessors, many more are rejected as
unsatisfactory. So the question "What gives scientific ideas
merit, and how do they score over their rivals?" can be stated
briefly in the Darwinian formula: "What gives them survival-
value?"

Adapted from: Stephen Toulmin: Foresight and Understanding: An
Enquiry into the Aims of Science. Harper & Row 1961, p.109. More
information at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061305642/scienceweek

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3. HUMAN VS. ANIMAL SOCIETIES

Judged by any reasonable criteria, man represents the highest,
most progressive, and most successful product of organic
evolution. The really strange thing is that so obvious an
appraisal has been over and over again challenged by some
biologists. Suppose, it has been argued, that evolution is
studied not by man but by a fish. Would not the highest form of
animal then have to be a fish? To which the evolutionary
biologist George Gaylord Simpson (1902-1984) has replied: "I
suspect that the fish's reaction would be, instead, to marvel
that there are men who question that man is the highest animal.
It is not beside the point to add that the "fish" that made such
judgments would have to be a man!"

The evidence of the success of man as a biological species is
ample and overwhelming. No one can tell how numerous was the
prehuman species from which man has evolved, but it is certain
that the human population has increased greatly following the
invention of agriculture. The world population at the time of the
Roman Empire is estimated to have been some 150 to 200 millions;
around A.D. 1650 it was between 500 and 550 millions. The
estimate for 1947 is about 2,330 millions. The increase in number
is, of course, not the only form of biological success, and it
may be a disaster if it leads to uncontrolled overpopulation.
However, man has become one of the few truly cosmopolitan
species. He has penetrated into all parts of the Earth's surface,
and has established permanent habitation on all continents and
major islands, except in Antarctica (and even there he manages to
live for short periods of time). He has, accordingly, become
exposed to every variety of geographic environment which the
world has to offer, and he has become adapted to these
environments. But, while animals and plants become adapted to
their environments by modifying their bodies and their genes, man
has remained the same and has to a considerable extent modified
environments to suit his purposes and his preferences, and has
created completely new environments.

Furthermore, man has himself become an evolutionary agent. He has
been able to destroy many species of animals and plants, some of
them deliberately and many thoughtlessly. He has learned to
control, and in some cases to eradicate, other species which had
preyed on him or on the products of his labors as parasites or
pests. He became able to modify the biological evolution of those
species which he domesticated in a direction which suited his
interests or fancies. Most remarkable of all, he is now in the
process of acquiring knowledge which may permit him, if he so
chooses, to control his own evolution. He may yet become
"business manager for the cosmic process of evolution", a role
which Julian Huxley (1887-1975) has ascribed to him, perhaps
prematurely.

Man is a social animal who lives in organized groups with other
men, and who cannot live otherwise for more than a generation --
and rarely that long. Man is also the biological species which
possesses the capacity to create and to transmit to succeeding
generations "the social legacy the individual acquires from his
group", i.e., the ability to create and to transmit culture. He
is the only species which has developed culture, and the
emergence of such a species has been a unique event in the
history of all life on this Earth, and perhaps also in the
history of the Cosmos. He is, however, by no means the only
social animal, and his society is by no means the only one known
among animals. Being a social animal does not mean that one is
necessarily a cultural animal, although the development of the
capacity to have a culture is possible presumably only in a
social animal. The genetic basis of culture is, then, different
from that of social habits, and so is the adaptive function of
culture different from that of society. A comparison of human and
animal societies may throw light on the nature of both.

Adapted from: Theodosius Dobzjansky: The Biological Basis of
Human Freedom. Columbia University Press 1956, p.86. More
information at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0231085109/scienceweek

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4. ON THE BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE

It is well known that the special theory of relativity owes its
existence to the fact that there is an upper limit to velocities
of motion and signalling in nature, viz. the velocity of light.
This fact has also very important consequences for the subject of
cosmology, since it makes it impossible to investigate vast
spaces without also contemplating enormous lengths of time. In
particular, any knowledge that we may possess about very distant
objects must be due to processes (signals) originating on those
objects a very long time ago. Although the very definitions of
distances and times become ambiguous in this context it is clear
that the great intervals occurring raise new questions. If (as is
widely held to be true) the Universe is in a state of evolution,
then light from distant parts of space must also convey
information about the early history of the Universe. If, on the
other hand, there is no such evolution, then the light must
contain information about its absence. Therefore the entire
question of the origin and the evolution of the Universe becomes
part of the general cosmological problem. In particular, the
nature of the very beginning (if there was one) or,
alternatively, the origin of all matter and radiation has formed
a specially controversial subject generally termed the problem of
"creation".

In this context, too, we encounter the habit of the human mind to
imagine that complexity is only ephemeral, that the further we
dip into the past the simpler the state we shall find. How far
this process can be continued is a question to which no agreed
answer is in sight. What type of "last answer" is found most
satisfactory depends on individual taste. Hence here less sure
guidance is given than elsewhere in science by how satisfying or
otherwise a theory is. Broadly speaking three types of answer as
to the nature of the "beginning" have been given, and opinions
differ widely as to the relative merits of these:

(i) The "beginning" is a singular point on the border of the
realm of physical science. Any question which refers to
antecedents of the beginning or its nature can no longer be
answered by physics, and is not a proper question for it.

(ii) The "beginning" was a particularly simple state, the
simplest, most harmonious and most permanent we can imagine. It
contained within itself, though, the seeds of growth and
evolution, which at some indefinite moment started off a chain of
complicated processes which by now have changed this to our
present Universe.

(iii) There was no "beginning". The Universe on the large scale
is either unchanging or possibly going through cyclical changes,
but is of infinite age.

A cosmological theory must at least lead up to this, the problem
of "creation", and opinions differ as to what constitutes a
satisfactory answer.

Adapted from H. Bondi: Cosmology. 2nd Edition. Cambridge
University Press 1960, p.8.

More information at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/052104281X/scienceweek

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COSMOLOGY: THE 20TH CENTURY REVOLUTION

The following points are made by William G. Unruh (Science 2002
295:1649):

1) In the early years of the 20th century, Ernest Rutherford
(1871-1937), the great experimental physicist at Cambridge, was
reputed to have thundered, "If anyone in my laboratory begins to
speak of the Universe, I tell him it is time to leave." Since its
beginnings, cosmology, the study of the Universe as a whole, has
been characterized by a mixture of seemingly outrageous
speculation and subsequent verification.

2) Einstein founded his 1915 theory of gravity on one unexplained
experimental fact --- that all objects fall in exactly the same
way in a gravitational field --- and a demand for consistency
with his theory of special relativity. Through an unparalleled
intellectual tour de force, he created a theory in which the flow
of time from place to place and the creation and destruction of
space depend on matter. Shortly thereafter, Alexandr Friedman and
Georges Lemaitre each pointed out that this theory implied that
the Universe is dynamic and had a beginning. Einstein found this
conclusion sufficiently repugnant to try to change his theory.
Only a few years later, Edwin Hubble demonstrated that faint
smudges of light in the telescope were distant galaxies whose
distance from us increases faster the further they are from us,
just as had been predicted. Space really does grow, and time has
a beginning.

3) The second half of the 20th century witnessed a dazzling
increase in the ability of astronomers to make observations of
the remotest regions of the Universe. The new technologies were
manifold. Radio communications gave us radio astronomy and the
detection of the cosmic background radiation from the earliest
days of the Universe. Consumer electronics provided the charge-
coupled device camera, which enabled the imaging of galaxies
hundreds of times dimmer than the night sky itself. High
precision spectroscopy allowed the detection of the small changes
in the motion of distant stars due to planets orbiting those
stars. Cosmology has thus changed from a field dominated by
speculation and unconstrained theoretical extrapolation to an
observational science, in which theories can be abandoned because
of disagreement with observation rather than merely because of
the death of their proponents.

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COSMOLOGY: OPEN, CLOSED, OR FLAT UNIVERSE?

The following points are made by Marc Kamionkowski (Science 1998
280:1397):

1) Determination of the geometry of the universe has been a
central goal of cosmology ever since Hubble discovered its
expansion 75 years ago.

2) The central question is whether the universe is a multi-
dimensional equivalent of a 2-dimensional surface ("flat"), a
sphere ("closed"), or a saddle ("open"). The geometry, in the
context of current theory and observations, determines whether
the universe will expand forever or eventually collapse.

3) Until now, most astronomers have pursued the geometry by
attempting to measure the mass density of the universe. According
to general relativity, if the density is equal to, larger than,
or smaller than a critical density fixed by the expansion rate,
then the universe is flat, open, or closed, respectively.

4) Another possibility is to look directly at the predicted
observational effects of a curved (open or closed) universe
versus a flat universe, and in particular at the angular power
spectrum of the cosmic microwave background. The authors suggest
that in the near future a new generation of experiments will
provide substantial advances in these observations, enabling more
definitive statements about the geometry of the universe, and
that these results will in turn provide clues to the new particle
physics required to understand the inflation phase following the
Big Bang origin of the universe.

ScienceWeek http://www.scienceweek.com

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5. HONEY-BEES, BUMBLE-BEES, AND SOLITARY BEES

The idea that all forms of life on earth today were created
together at the beginning of the world was abandoned some time
ago, when scientists found out that animals of comparatively
simple structure have, in gradual transition, developed into more
and more highly organized forms. What is more, even within the
short span of our own life, we can watch this process gradually
taking place.

Like other existing animals and insects, the community of bees
must have reached its present high degree of organization at some
definite period in the past. But we have no idea how things
happened; nor do we know anything about the ancestors of our
present-day bees; they no longer exist and our curiosity about
their earthly appearance will probably never be satisfied.
However, it is interesting to consider how a community like that
of the bumble-bee, which shows a much simpler organization than
that of the honey-bee, in spite of the close relation between the
two species, may actually represent a stage in its development.
For example, the bumble-bees already make some use of their wax
secretions in building nests, but they have not reached the stage
of building pure wax combs like the honey-bees. Again, although
they have learned how to build cells for accommodating their
grubs, they have not yet discovered the most economical way of
doing so. Consequently, their building material is quickly
exhausted and, as a result, numbers of grubs have to be herded
together in each of the narrow cells, a state of affairs which
leads to the production of those females with stunted ovaries
generally known as workers. Though possessing the feminine
instinct for tending and nursing their brood, they have lost all
capacity for egg laying. We may well imagine that the first
workers ever to appear inside an insect community owed their
existence to very similar circumstances.

Furthermore, like the honey-bee, the bumble-bees instinctively
collect honey and pollen for storage, but their stores do not
last them through the winter, so that a female that survives
until the following spring will then have to lay and tend her
eggs entirely on her own.

Among the members of the bee tribe proper, we encounter forms
that show the first signs of social life, alongside with others
that are completely lacking in social instinct. It will surprise
most readers to learn that the community life seems to be the
exception rather than the rule even within the bee family: as
many as several thousands of species are known to lead a solitary
life. They, also, collect honey and pollen for their brood, and
can build cells to house their own grubs; but each female toils
for herself and her own particular brood alone with no worker-
bees to help her. Each one of these insects strictly obeys a law
of nature, but the law which governs the way it has to tend its
brood varies greatly from species to species. It is this variety
in the behavior of the solitary bee that makes its history so
fascinating.

Adapted from: Karl von Frisch: The Dancing Bees: An Account of
the Life and Senses of the Honey-Bee. Harcourt Brace & World
1953, p.173. More information at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156238071/scienceweek

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ON HONEYBEE SOCIAL BEHAVIOR, GENES, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

The so-called social insects live in societies that rival human
societies in complexity and internal cohesion. Honey bees, for
example, apparently always follow 3 rules: a) they live in
colonies with overlapping generations; b) they care cooperatively
for offspring other than their own; and, c) they maintain a
reproductive division of labor.

The following points are made by Gene E. Robinson (American
Scientist 1998 86:456):

1) Genes do not play an exclusive role in regulating behavior:
biologists have long realized that behavior is influenced by
genes, the environment, and interactions between the two.

2) Genes never act alone. They must operate in an environment
where they code for proteins that participate in many systems in
an organism, with these systems in turn influencing the
expression of genes. Consequently, biologists must take a broad
approach in assessing the impact of any gene.

3) The research group of the author uses the Western honey bee,
Apis mellifera. Honey bees pass through different life stages as
they age, and their behavioral responses to environmental and
social stimuli change in predictable ways. Although worker bees
go through a consistent path of behavioral development, this path
is not rigidly determined. Bees can accelerate, retard, or even
reverse their behavioral development in response to changing
environmental and colony conditions.

4) Experimental evidence indicates that juvenile hormone, one of
the most important hormones influencing insect development, helps
time the pace of behavioral maturation in honey bees. The rate of
endocrine-mediated behavioral development is influenced by
inhibitory social interactions. Older bees inhibit the behavioral
development of younger bees: the rate of behavioral development
is negatively correlated with the proportion of older bees in a
colony. Inhibitory social interactions that influence the rate of
behavioral development involve chemical communication between
colony members.

5) Evidence from the laboratory of the author in 1993 indicated
the so-called mushroom bodies in the bee brain are involved in
the behavioral changes occurring during maturation, the volume of
the bodies increasing, and the volume increase associated with an
increase in synapses with neurons from brain regions devoted to
sensory input. The author suggests this was the first report of
brain plasticity in an invertebrate.

6) The author suggests that, in general, two-way interactions
between the nervous system and the genome contribute
fundamentally to the control of social behavior. Information
about social conditions that is acquired by the nervous system is
likely to induce changes in genomic function that in turn produce
adaptive modifications of the structure and function of the
nervous system.

7) The author proposes a new research initiative called
"sociogenomics", defined as a "wide-ranging approach to identify
genes that influence social behavior, determining the influence
of these genes on underlying neural and endocrine mechanisms, and
exploring the effects of the environment -- particularly the
social environment --  on gene action."

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6. ON THE END OF SCIENCE

Will science continue to surge forward, bringing new insights,
and perhaps further threats as well? Or will the science of the
coming century be an anticlimax after the triumphs already
achieved?

The journalist John Horgan has claimed the latter: he argues that
we have already uncovered all the really big ideas. All that
remains, according to Horgan, is to fill in the details, or else
to indulge in what he terms "ironic science" -- flaky, ill-
disciplined conjectures about topics that will never come within
the scope of serious empirical study. I believe that this thesis
is fundamentally mistaken, and that ideas as revolutionary as any
that were discovered in the twentieth century remain to be
disclosed. I prefer Isaac Asimov's viewpoint. He likened
science's frontier to a fractal -- a pattern with layer upon
layer of structure, so that a tiny bit, when magnified, is a
simulacrum of the whole: "No matter how much we learn, whatever
is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex
as the whole was to start with."

Twentieth-century advances in understanding atoms, life, and the
Cosmos rank as humankind's greatest collective intellectual
achievement. The proviso "collective" is crucial. Modern science
is a cumulative enterprise; discoveries are made when the time is
ripe, when the key ideas are "in the air", or when some novel
technique is exploited. Scientists aren't quite as
interchangeable as light bulbs, but there are nonetheless few
cases in which an individual has made much difference to the
long-run development of the subject: if "A" hadn't done the work
or made the discovery, "B" would before long have done something
similar. This is the way science normally develops. A scientist's
work loses its individuality, but it lasts. Einstein has a
specially honored place in the scientific pantheon because he was
one of the few exceptions: had he not existed, his deepest
insights would have emerged much later, perhaps by a different
route and through the efforts of several people rather than just
one. But the insights would eventually have been achieved: not
even Einstein left a distinctive personal imprint to match that
of the greatest writers or composers.

Ever since the classical Greek era when earth, air, fire, and
water were believed to be the substances of the world, scientists
have sought a "unified" picture of all the basic forces of
nature, and to understand the mystery of space itself.
Cosmologists are sometimes berated for being "often in error but
never in doubt". They have indeed often embraced poorly grounded
speculations with irrational fervor, and been led by wishful
thinking to read too much into vague and tentative evidence. But
even the more cautious among us are confident that we have now
grasped at least the outlines of our entire Cosmos, and learnt
what it is made of. We can trace the evolutionary story back
before our Solar System formed, indeed, back to an epoch long
before there were any stars, when everything sprouted from an
intensely hot "genesis event", the so-called Big Bang, about
fourteen billion years ago. The first microsecond is shrouded in
mystery, but everything that happened since then -- the emergence
of our complex Cosmos from simple beginnings -- is the outcome of
laws that we can understand, even though the details still elude
us. Just as geophysicists have come to understand the processes
that made the oceans and sculpted the continents, so
astrophysicists can understand our Sun and its planets, and
indeed, the other planets that may orbit distant stars.

In earlier centuries, navigators mapped the outlines of the
continents and took the measure of Earth. Within just the last
few years our map of the Cosmos, in time and in space, has
likewise firmed up. A challenge for the twenty-first century is
to refine our present picture, filling in ever more detail, just
as generations of surveyors did for Earth, and especially to
probe the mysterious domains where earlier cartographers wrote
"here be dragons".

Adapted from: Martin Rees: Our Final Hour. Basic Books 2003,
p.141. More information at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465068626/scienceweek

ScienceWeek http://www.scienceweek.com

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7. NEW BOOKS AND BOOKS NOTED

Inventing Modern: Growing Up with X-Rays, Skyscrapers, and Tail
Fins. John H. Lienhard. Oxford University Press 2003 (September),
283pp. An engineer's view of the first half of the 20th century
in America. A personal account of the era before nuclear weapons
and toxic spills. The author is Emeritus Professor of Mechanical
Engineering and History at the University of Houston (US). More
information at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195106320/scienceweek

Senor Marconi's Magic Box: The Most Remarkable Invention of the
19th Century and the Amateur Inventor Whose Genius Sparked a
Revolution. Gavin Weightman. De Capo Press 2003 (September),
312pp. A story of science, scientists, business, and businessmen.
A journalistic account of Marconi and his time. More information
at: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0306812754/scienceweek

A Brand-New Bird: How Two Amateur Scientists Created the First
Genetically Engineered Animal. Tim Birkhead. Basic Books 2003,
268pp. A merging of biology, social history, and biography. The
story of the hunt for the red canary. The author is Professor of
Evolutionary Biology at the University of Sheffield (UK). More
information at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465006655/scienceweek

Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science. Peter Atkins.
Oxford University Press 2003, 380pp. Evolution, DNA, energy,
entropy, atoms, symmetry, quanta, cosmology, spacetime,
arithmetic. Aimed at the general reader. The author is Professor
of Chemistry at the University of Oxford (UK). More information
at: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0198606648/scienceweek

Brownian Agents and Active Particles: Collective Dynamics in the
Natural and Social Sciences. E. Schweitzer. Springer 2003, 420pp.
Combines concepts from informatics with approaches from
statistical many-particle physics to develop a method for
computer simulations of complex systems. The author is a
researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Autonomous Intelligent
Systems, Saint Augustine, DE. More information at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/3540439382/scienceweek

A Primer in Density Functional Theory. C. Fiohais et al (eds.).
Springer 2003, 256pp. Vol. 620 of the series "Lecture Notes in
Physics." The editors are at the University of Coimbra, PT, and
at the Physics Center at Sebastian, ES. More information at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/3540030832/scienceweek

Selectivity and Discord: Two Problems of Experiment. Allan
Franklin. University of Pittsburgh Press 2002, 290pp. A study of
conflict and controversy in experimental physics. A study of how
measurements are made and how they relate to theory. Nine case
studies. The author is a noted researcher in the field of
epistemology of science measurement. More information at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0822941910/scienceweek

Quantum Physics: A Text for Graduate Students. Roger G. Newton.
Springer-Verlag 2002, 411pp. A comprehensive text that will be
tough-going for first-year graduate students. The author is a
noted physicist with contributions to scattering theory and high-
energy physics. More information at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0387954732/scienceweek

From Nuclear Transmutation to Nuclear Fission 1932-1939. Per. E.
Dahl. Institute of Physics 2002, 304pp. An account of the
researchers and discoveries that culminated in nuclear fission. A
history of nuclear physics in the early 20th century. The author
is a former researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory (US) and contributor to the development of
superconducting accelerating magnets. He has published four
previous books in the history of physics. More information at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0750308656/scienceweek

The X in Sex: How the X Chromosome Controls Our Lives. David
Bainbridge. Harvard University Press 2003, 215pp. An historical
account of research on the X chromosome. "Clear and interesting
descriptions of complex concepts." -- Science. The author is an
anatomist at the University of Cambridge (UK). More information
at: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674010280/scienceweek

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