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Climbing the cosmic distance ladder: Terence Tao book announcement
- mturmon 6y agoWild, I had no idea Terrence Tao was an astronomy buff. The concept for the book sounds great.
- rahulporuri 6y agoBased on the slides linked in the blogpost, the talk sounds awesome.
- DavidSJ 6y agoAnd so it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ne0GArfeMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ne0GArfeMs
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoThis is awesome - show me the pre order button now and you can have my cash :-) This ties in so well with my thinking on getting kids to perform the big important experiments of the past (measuring size of earth to extracting lime). How we got here technologically matters, probably more than who was King or which battle was won or lost.
- jqgatsby 6y agoTrying to compile exactly that list! What would be your top N experiments for kids to perform?
- s5300 6y agoThis is a little bit away from the topic at hand - but a useful experiment I think kids should see... Once a kid is at the age where he general has an idea of what metals are, and has the slightest knowledge of what iron metal is Take some cereal, like bran flakes or something else with iron in it, put a serving or two in some water, blend it pretty well, then take a magnet to the blender cup to show him the non-negligible amount of iron that can be seen attracted to the magnet. Then kinda be like... yeah - that metal you know about? Totally part of what makes your body work day to day, kid. Literally in your food and such.
- geertj 6y ago> with the tentative format being non-technical chapters interspersed with some more mathematical sections to give some technical details Looking forward to trying out this format. I like popular science books but it usually leaves me unsatisfied because I feel the actual story was hidden from me. Are there examples of other books that follow this format?
- naveen99 6y agoThe cosmos is so big, anything is possible somewhere in it, and we are somewhere in it...
- emerged 6y agoSo cool, I just read through the entire sample chapter from bed this Sunday morning. Great way to start the day, looking forward to the full book!
- croissants 6y agoLink to the sample chapter: https://terrytao.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/sample_chapter.pdf https://terrytao.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/sample_chapter.... It's a fun read. There are some surprisingly lively parts, like the unattributed chestnut analogy from Grothendieck , which Tao seems to have taken to heart, or this bit on Kepler calculating Mars' sidereal period: > Kepler likely did not say “Bingo!” because that word hadn’t been coined yet, but this was precisely what Kepler needed. Bingo! The Brahe-Kepler brouhaha also provides good evidence that the (much-derided on HN) territoriality of modern academia is not at all a new thing or limited to unimportant minds.