high capacity

When the limitations of current battery technology is discussed, super capacitors always come up as an alternative with potential. In my latest feature for Chemistry & Industry I have had a closer look at that potential and the important question whether super capacitors can also be produced super sustainably:

Super-power capacitors

Chemistry & Industry Volume 84, Issue 12 December 2020 Pages 22-26

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled)

SCI - appears to be on open access right now

The same issue (page 35) also contains my review of Paul Halpern's new book, Synchronicity, which is about acausal connections in physics, especially quantum physics, represented by Wolfgang Pauli, and in psychology, represented by Pauli's therapist, a certain C. G. Jung.

access via:

Wiley Online Library

SCI (premium content)

k304

I discovered this sonata via a long rambling path. If I remember correctly, I saw a mention somewhere that Einstein had named his violin "Line" - which resonated as the young musician in the family also assigns names to the ever growing family of string instruments (but not to wind instruments). I asked Paul Halpern, who has written a book about Einstein's friendship with Schroedinger, if he knew what happened to Line, and he referred me to this website about celebrations of Einstein's 125th birthday, where I read:

This lecture was followed by a surprise: a musical event featuring Paul Einstein on violin and Siegfried Räbblen on Piano. Paul, a great grandson of Einstein's is a musician living in the south of France and played on Einstein's violin. The piece was a Mozart Sonata, K304, written in 1778. It is the only instrumental work Mozart wrote in E-minor and its poignancy reflects Mozart's reaction to the news of his mother's death. It was Einstein's favorite.

So I looked it up and found this flute performance of k304 by Ginevra Petrucci and really liked it, and bought the score complete with accompaniment CD. Which turned out to be unnecessary, because as it happened, my flute teacher had just completed her own flute adaptation of the piece. So I worked my way through both movements of her version and am now reasonably happy with my playing, although there are always lots of things left to improve at a later point.

By the way, I don't think it required much virtuosity from Einstein or other amateur violinists to play it - I noticed one could readily play it unchanged on viola i.e. even without the violin's E string, and thus also on cello an octave below. So, if you have a string instrument sitting around, give it a try and release your inner Einstein.

Oh, and for flautists it is of course interesting because it is quite close in time (as well as in the Koechel Verzeichnis) to the two flute concertos.

Next up: a Telemann fantasia ...

april book reviews

The April issue of Chemistry & Industry includes two book reviews from me, on page 40 a long one on

Still only one Earth:
Progress in the 40 years since the first UN Conference on the Environment.
R. E. Hester and R. M. Harrison, eds.
RSC publishing, 2015
(vol 40 of the series: Issues in Environmental Science and Technology)
ISBN 978-1-78262-076-1

snippet:

"This look back over four decades is bound to produce a quaint mixture of issues that have been fixed and are thus mainly of historic interest, such as the ozone hole and leaded fuel, and on the other hand issues in progress that should have been solved but haven’t, such as climate change and local pollution in the rapidly growing economies like China and India."

... and on the following page a short one on

Einstein’s dice and Schrödinger’s cat:
How two great minds battled quantum randomness to create a unified theory of physics
Paul Halpern
Basic Books 2015
ISBN 978-0-465-07571-3

snippet:

"Simplifying the complex network of the physicists that shaped our current world view by focusing on a subset of two, this analysis shows that it is not just the individualities of each that shape the process, but also the interactions between them."

collision course

The Large Hadron Collider is up and running now, after year-long repairs, and producing actual collisions and scientific measurements. And just on time, my review of Paul Halpern's book "Collider" has appeared in this week's edition of Chemistry & Industry (issue 23, p27, restricted online access).

Here's a snippet:

What I found most exciting in this book was the story how physicists came to build bigger and bigger accelerators, ending up with the LHC. There is much to be learned about the nature of human endeavours from this side of the book alone. For example, the fate of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), which was to be built from scratch in a remote part of Texas, until Congress pulled the plug, contrasts with the LHC which is based on using existing CERN infrastructure and recycling as much as possible from previous instruments, and thus could be financed without much pain.

platypuses reviews

A few reviews of The birds the bees and the platypuses are beginning to appear:

Highbeam.com: SciTech Book News (hope this one is ok, haven't bothered signing up for a free trial in order to read the text)

Paul Halpern's review on Amazon.com (also appeared on his MySpace blog

well, err, that's all I've spotted so far, apart from the texts by the publisher and various book chains. hope to be able to expand this list soon ...

threat or promise

The science of The Simpsons has been one of my favourite topics for a while, and as Paul Halpern has published a book about it last year, I jumped at the opportunity to review it. My review is now out in Chemistry and Industry, No.2, page 29-30. The title is "Threat or promise", and it comes with a nice picture of Frankenstein's monster ...

vintage book review

My MySpace buddy and fellow science writer Paul Halpern discovered a page where our 1997 books are reviewed together: Lebensformen unter extremen Bedingungen.

The Simpsons conquer the Milky Way

The Simpsons have now been broadcast to everybody living within a radius of over 20 light years. While this range covers only a small part of our galaxy (100,000 light years across), it does include for example the three planets of the red dwarf star Gleise 876. As these planets are roughly 15 light years away, we will have to wait another ten years to hear back what their inhabitants thought of the first series.


This is just one of many anarcho-scientific-humouristic thoughts you can get when you mix up The Simpsons, Carl Sagan, and some hard science. In his new book “What’s science ever done for us”, essentially a “Physics of the Simpsons” book in the now well-established tradition of Laurence Krauss’s “Physics of Star Trek,” Paul Halpern explores the scientific content, background, and humour of 26 Simpsons episodes (I’m not a serial TV viewer, but this is probably the number of episodes per season?). Highlights include the Coriolis effect (Bart vs. Australia), donut-shaped universes (They saved Lisa’s brain), and lots of travel through time and space.


In the over 400 episodes of the series so far, there have been masses of references to science, from which Halpern has mainly selected those based on physics, astronomy and cosmology. He also displays an enhanced affinity towards the “Tree-house of horror” episodes, in which the laws of science are often broken gratuitously. Thus, his book is entertaining and stimulating, but by no means comprehensive.


While treaties on the philosophy of The Simpsons already exist, crucial topics such as the everyday engineering (remember the monorail?), the biology (what was written in the flowerbeds outside the botanic gardens when the family went to see the smelly flower?), and the maths of the series remain to be explored in depth. (For maths, the book cites http://simpsonsmath.com which I need to check out soonish!) Also, the book was of course printed before the simpsons movie came out, so it can only offer a "checklist" of possible scientific aspects to look out for in the movie. Many years from now, when the Sun will turn into a red giant and The Simpsons will have explored all avenues of human knowledge, a complete “science of the simpsons” would end up just being a funnier version of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

mmmmm ... pi !!!!

Al Jean, executive producer of The Simpsons and Harvard graduate in maths is interviewed in today's issue of Nature
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v448/n7152/full/448404a.html
(appears to be open access)
Complete with a list of the top 10 science moments in the series (overlapping with those chosen in Paul Halpern's new book (What's Science ever done for us?), and in my Guardian piece:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,,1073542,00.html )
Interesting explanation of some maths jokes, too. The Simpsons also feature in the Nature podcast, if you can handle this kind of technology ...

faraway worlds

Science fiction has bombarded us with so much detail about putative planetary worlds beyond our solar system that many people may not be aware of the novelty of extrasolar planets.
In fact, it was only 12 years ago that Mayor and Queloz found the first conclusive evidence for the existence of _any_ extrasolar planet. Since then, researchers have found over 100 more.
My MySpace buddy Paul Halpern has written a children's book about these "faraway worlds", which is lavishly illustrated by Lynette Cook. I reckon it must be difficult to sell the hard little biscuit of the actual facts in competition to the abundance of fiction and fantasy confectionery that is everywhere. While Halpern's text sticks with the facts and vivid explanations, Cook has compensated for reality's handicap with artistic licence, making up the bits that we don't know yet about those worlds.
So if you and/or your children are wondering what landscapes might greet the space traveller on planet HD 209458b, check this out.
http://www.amazon.com/Faraway-Worlds-Planets-Beyond-System/dp/1570916160/