Princeton University Press, 1989
Princeton University Press, 1989
This is a collection of somewhat iconoclastic essays on a variety of scientific
topics. They are meant for a nontechnical audience and require no mathematics.
The first essay concerns cosmological models beyond the standard Big Bang model.
The second explains and questions the assumptions behind the popular inflationary
universe model. The third concerns the concept of geodesics and gives a history
of geodesic domes that doesn't have much to do with Buckminster Fuller. Popular
attempts to adapt the concept of entropy to non-physical sciences (and nonscience)
is the subject of the fourth essay. The fifth essay is about the nuclear winter
calculations that were done ten years ago. The last essay is a biography of
the French mathematician Evariste Galois and a criticism of standard biographies
of him. Science a la mode is currently out of print.
The essay which is apparently still of most interest is the Galois study, which
I have uploaded to this website.
See oictures of the original geodesic dome by clicking on chapter 3, below.
From the review in Science magazine.
Links to other books are below the Table of Contents
1. The Garden of Cosmological Delights (With G.F.R. Ellis)
2. Metaflation? (With G.F.R. Ellis)
3. Geodesics, Domes and Spacetime
4. The Evolution of Entropy
5. A Memoir of Nuclear Winter
6. Genius and Biographers: The Fictionalization of Evariste Galois