Volume 93 | Number 4 | July-August 2005
David Cassidy
A review of The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born, by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan. A biography that excels in its portrayal of Born’s tragic personal life.
Val Fitch
A review of 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos, by Jennet Conant, and Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community, by Jon Hunner. Anecdotes of life in the hometown of the Bomb.
Patricia Churchland
A review of The Ethical Brain, by Michael S. Gazzaniga. Will discoveries about brain function and organization challenge the conventional wisdom underlying our morality and system of justice?
Dan Lloyd
A review of Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation, by William Hirstein. Is the orbitofrontal cortex the culprit in confabulation syndromes?
Peter Westwick
A review of The Fly in the Cathedral: How a Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the International Race to Split the Atom, by Brian Cathcart. How intellectual curiosity led physicists into the nucleus.
Susan Hough
A review of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, by David L. Ulin. Must people invoke a fabric of mythology and superstition to cope with living in earthquake country?
Reuben Hersh
A review of Converging Realities: Toward a Common Philosophy of Physics and Mathematics, by Roland Omnès. Omnès says that mathematics is "the laws governing
Tom Körner
A review of The Triumph of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern Life, by I. Bernard Cohen. The history of the rise of social statistics, told through individual cases.
Geoffrey Landis
A review of Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons, by George Pendle, and Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science, by M. G. Lord. The early days of American rocketry research.
Total Records : 14
About once a month at Sigma Xi headquarters, we liven up the lunch hour with an American Scientist Pizza Lunch talk. In these informal lectures, scientists describe new research to nonscientists. The series is light on jargon but heavy on solid science. Each Pizza Lunch offers an in-depth look at its subject, whether it's bedbugs or the smart grid. Click below to read about and download these talks -- and to subscribe!
