In an attempt to not totally lose my most recent education (as my electrical engineering knowledge has long flown the coop), I have been trying to read less fiction (which I so dearly love) and more physics-related non-fiction. It helps that I am reading the Harry Potter series to my daughters, so I get my fiction/adventure fix there.
I’ve just finished Carl Sagan’s Billions & Billions – the last book he wrote (indeed, the final chapter was written from his hospital bed). Very insightful, but that is nothing surprising for Sagan. Right now I’m working on Feynman’s Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun. So far, it’s been historical information, which is very interesting and an easy read. Eventually it’ll get into the math and I’ll be slowing down a bit to figure it out with him.
A long-time neighbor (they’ve lived here nearly as long as we have and we’ve been here over a decade now) died last year after a long illness. Knowing my interest in physics, his wife has kindly offered me any books from his library that interest me. And boy do they interest me! It turns out Bruce was a mathematician with a strong bent towards physics and astrophysics (especially solar studies and orbital science). I wish I had known his passion for physics during our early years as neighbors, before he got too sick to socialize. We could have had some good talks, I expect.
I brought eight books home with me (in no preferential order; the smallest book is on top and each one is physically larger than the next as they are in one big, neat stack):
- Introduction to Space Dynamics
- Fundamentals of Astrodynamics
- Methods of Orbit Determination
- General Relativity
- Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science
- Gravitation
- Comet by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan (the non-revised edition, though)
- Spacetime Physics
Not exactly light reading. The hard part was holding myself back from trying to cart it all away. Not that she would have minded, but I didn’t want to seem too greedy – and, let’s face it, there’s no chance I’ll get through even what I did pick up! I have been invited back for any additional books I might desire (he had a number of other Sagan books as well as a demonstrated fondness for both fictional and non-fictional accounts of Albert Einstein’s life).
In an unrelated event, I managed to snap a great sunrise picture the other day. I really need to carry the camera around with me more.
