This 78-page book on physics is selling more copies than 'Fifty Shades of Grey'

Since it was published last September, Carlo Rovelli's book, "Seven Brief Lessons on Physics," has sold more copies in Rovelli's native country, Italy, than E.L. James' smash hit "Fifty Shades of Grey," The Spectator reported.

And the English translation has quickly risen to become Penguin's fastest-selling science debut in the publishing company's history.

So what's Rovelli's secret?

After all, it's not like physics is a topic that people flock toward. In fact, physics has been the least popular STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) major for US undergraduates since the late '60s.

For starters, Rovelli is an expert on the topic.

He's a theoretical physicist by profession with a focus in quantum gravity — a field that attempts to join the greatest two theories in history: Isaac Newton's theory of gravity and Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Rovelli is also an avid writer of popular science, so he has a habit of transforming complex ideas into clear, simple concepts.

Nobel goes for developing drugs from nature

A trio of winners found treatments for common human infections using chemicals made by bacteria and a plant.

On October 5, the 2015 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology was awarded to three scientists who developed drugs that have saved the lives of millions of people around the world. The winners will share prize money worth $958,000. Two worked on a drug to combat infections due to tiny insect-borne worms. The third discovered a drug to treat malaria.

Each medicine was based on chemicals made by Mother Nature.

“This is one of those Nobel Prizes for drugs that have truly impacted hundreds of millions of people, no exaggeration,” says Anthony Fauci. He directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md.

One half of the award goes to William Campbell of Drew University in Madison, N.J., and Satoshi Ōmura of Kitasato University in Tokyo, Japan. They worked on a drug called ivermectin (EYE-ver-MEK-tun). It treats infections caused by roundworms, a type of parasite.

The other half of the Nobel goes to Youyou Tu of the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences in Beijing. She discovered artemisinin (AR-the-MISS-eh-nin), which is used against the parasite causing malaria. It’s spread by mosquitoes.

Together, ivermectin and artemisinin “have been more benefit to humankind than any other” drug, says Christopher Plowe. He’s an expert on parasites who works at the University of Maryland. He’s also president of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. 

From a golf course

Ōmura discovered a bacterium called Streptomyces avermitilis (STREP-tow-My-sees AV-er-MY-till-is) near a golf course in Japan. This germ naturally makes avermectin. “Microorganisms are very important in nature, and … I learn from microorganisms,” Ōmura said in a telephone call with a representative of the Nobel committee.

Nash’s mind left a beautiful legacy

Death of game theory pioneer ends a genius’s dramatic story.

His mind was beautiful, but troubled. His math was just beautiful.

John Forbes Nash Jr., who died in a traffic accident on May 23, gained more fame than most mathematicians, though not only on account of his math. His battle with schizophrenia, described artfully by Sylvia Nasar in her book A Beautiful Mind, made for drama suitable for a movie. Russell Crowe played Nash in the 2001 film, which garbled the math but made the point that despite his affliction, Nash accomplished works of genius — particularly in the theory of games.

That genius emerged in the 1940s when Nash was an undergraduate at Carnegie Tech, the forerunner to Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. He started out as an electrical engineering student, but soon shifted to chemical engineering and then just plain chemistry. But the lab was not for him. He switched to math, and by age 20 he was on his way to graduate school at Princeton with a one-sentence letter of recommendation from a Carnegie professor: “This man is a genius.”

At Princeton, Nash revolutionized economic theory, showing how the freshly developed game theory of the great John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern could be made more relevant to real life. In their book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, von Neumann and Morgenstern had attempted to derive a mathematics of strategy. They showed how participants in an economy could choose the most profitable behaviors. Von Neumann, one of the foremost mathematicians of his time, and Morgenstern, an economist, realized that their math could be applied to human behavior more broadly, evaluating strategic choices in realms from poker to warfare.

But the original theory offered rigorous solutions only for two-person games where the winner won what the loser lost (hence the label “zero-sum” game). Nash extended game theory both to cooperative situations (where win-win scenarios were possible) and to competitive games with multiple players.

Out of this work came the concept of the “Nash equilibrium,” the set of strategies that guaranteed the best possible payoff for all participants. Nash’s genius was to prove that at least one such set of strategies was always possible. In other words, as the economist Samuel Bowles once put it, there is always “a situation in which everybody is doing the best they can, given what everybody else is doing.”

Why War: Einstein and Freud's Little-Known Correspondence on Violence, Peace, and Human Nature

“Every man has a right over his own life and war destroys lives that were full of promise.”

 

Despite his enormous contributions to science, Albert Einstein was no reclusive genius, his ever-eager conversations and correspondence engaging such diverse partners as the Indian philosopher Tagore and a young South African girl who wanted to be a scientist. In 1931, the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation invited the renowned physicist to a cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas about politics and peace with a thinker of his choosing. He selected Sigmund Freud, born on May 6, 1856, whom he had met briefly in 1927 and whose work, despite being skeptical of psychoanalysis, the legendary physicist had come to admire. A series of letters followed, discussing the abstract generalities of human nature and the potential concrete steps for reducing violence in the world. In a twist of irony, the correspondence was only published in 1933 — after Hitler, who would eventually banish both Einstein and Freud into exile, rose to power — in a slim limited-edition pamphlet titled Why War?. Only 2,000 copies of the English translation were printed, most of which were lost during the war. But the gist of the correspondence, which remains surprisingly little-known, is preserved in the 1960 volume Einstein on Peace (public library), featuring a foreword by none other than Bertrand Russell. 

Your phone screen just won the Nobel Prize in Physics

You’ve probably got the fruits of this year’s Nobel laureates’ handiwork in your pocket. In fact, if you’re reading this on your phone or a relatively recent flat-screen monitor, you’re more than likely staring at some of them right now.

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura for their pioneering work on blue LEDs, or light-emitting diodes. Blue LEDs are important for two reasons: first, the blue light has specific applications of its own and second, because it’s a vital component of the white light which makes white LEDs, and therefore LED computer and phone screens, possible.

A flash of inspiration

So, what is an LED? Fundamentally, the simplest LEDs are two pieces of a semiconductor material sandwiched together. Semiconductors, as their name suggests, are materials which don’t conduct electricity all that well.

This property might seem to demarcate them as thoroughly unremarkable, but in fact this propensity for unimpressive transmission of electrical currents has a huge advantage to technologists: its flexibility. If you take a semiconductor – silicon, for example – and mix in tiny amounts of impurities during manufacture, you can radically alter its electrical properties.

The two broad types of semiconductor you can make are called n-type and p-type. To make an n-type semiconductor, the impurity you add needs to be something which has lots of electrons. This gives the semiconductor an excess of electrons, and makes it a slightly better conductor of electricity.

30 Days of “Quantum Poetry” Celebrating the Glory of Science

From black holes to DNA to butterfly metamorphosis, bewitching verses on the magic of nature.

“The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper,” the influential biologist E.O. Wilson said in his spectacular recent conversation with the former Poet Laureate Robert Hass, exploring the shared creative wellspring of poetry and science. A beautiful embodiment of it comes from 30 Days, an unusual and bewitching series of “quantum poetry” by xYz — the pseudonym of British biologist and poet Joanna Tilsley, who began writing poetry at the age of eight and continued, for her own pleasure, until she graduated college with a degree in biology.

 In April of 2013, while undergoing an emotional breakdown, Tilsley took a friend up on a dare and decided to participate in NaPoWriMo — an annual creative writing project inviting participants to write a poem a day for a month. Immersed in cosmology and quantum physics at the time, she found herself enchanted by the scientific poetics of nature as she strolled around her home in North London.

 Translating that enchantment in lyrical form, she produced a series of thirty poems on everything from DNA to the exoplanet Keppler-62F, a “super-Earth-sized planet orbiting a star smaller and cooler than the sun,” to holometabolism, the process by which the caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly, to the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human being to see Earth from space.

Einstein Hated Quantum Mechanics. Brian Greene and Alan Alda Discuss Why

Albert Einstein was not a fan of quantum mechanics. He was annoyed by the uncertain, random nature of the universe it implied (hence the famous quote “God does not play dice with the universe”). So, Einstein tried to develop a unified theory that would circumvent what he saw as quantum mechanics’ flaws.

Stephen Hawking: physics would be 'more interesting' if Higgs boson hadn't been found

World-famous cosmologist admits to losing bet as a result of particle's discovery.

Physics would have been "far more interesting" if scientists had been unable to find the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, according to Stephen Hawking.

The cosmologist was speaking at an event to mark the launch of a new exhibit about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the Science Museum in London and discussing the unanswered questions at the edges of modern physics as part of a history of his own work in the field.

Though the Higgs boson was predicted by theory in the early 1960s, not everyone believed it would be found. If it had not been, physicists would have had to go back to the drawing board and rethink many of their fundamental ideas about the nature of particles and forces – an exciting prospect for some scientists.

"Physics would be far more interesting if it had not been found," said Hawking. "A few weeks ago, Peter Higgs and François Englert shared the Nobel prize for their work on the boson and they richly deserved it.