The Dodo and the Solitaire was reviewed in the following publications:
"Paleobiologist Parish presents a tour de force examination of two birds that have been extinct for approximately 400 years. Written in comprehensive detail, it is dense with an amazing amount of history, references, facts, maps, and illustrations." —Library Journal
"Parish has crafted a book that will firmly resist obsolescence." —This View of Life
"Augmented by numerous illustrations of traces made by both ancient and modern organisms, the book shows how ancient trace fossils directly relate to modern traces and tracemakers, among them, insects, grasses, crabs, shorebirds, alligators, and sea turtles. The result is an aesthetically appealing and scientifically accurate book that will serve as both a source book for scientists and for anyone interested in the natural history of the Georgia coast." —Birdbooker Report
"[A] highly valuable resource for anyone with a serious interest in dinosaurs. Even as dinosaur family trees change, and discoveries alter what we thought we knew, the new volume is a fertile starting place for students and experts interested in paleontological problems they have not considered before. At the very least, The Complete Dinosaur demonstrates how exceptionally rich the study of dinosaurs has become." —National Geographic Laelaps
IUP author S.C. Pryor is part of the Federal Advisory Committee that has overseen a draft of the recently released National Climate Assessment report. An important resource for understanding climate change, this report covers several topics, including how climate change impacts regions and sectors across the United States. Pryor is one of the lead authors on the section of the report about the Midwest, which is also discussed in her new book.
In Climate Change in the Midwest,
Pryor and several other contributors focus on identifying and
quantifying the major vulnerabilities to climate change in the
Midwestern United States. The book also considers the challenges and opportunities
to develop local and regional strategies for addressing the risks posed
by climate change in the context of developing an integrative policy for
the region.
Learn more about Pryor's new book in this excerpt. You can also read a draft of the NCA report here.
S. C. Pryor is Provost's Professor of Atmospheric Science at IU Bloomington and editor of Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres and of Understanding Climate Change: Climate Variability, Predictability, and Change in the Midwestern United States (IUP, 2009).
We're ending this year on a high note as two of our books have made "best of" lists for 2012!
Earth Works by Scott Russell Sanders has been named an Englewood Honor Book in the nonfiction category by the Englewood Review of Books. This honor is given to "the Best Books of the year for the life and flourishing of the Church." Englewood praises Sanders's book for being "full of energy, hope and life."
Jolyon C. Parish's The Dodo and the Solitaire received an Honorable Mention on The Birdbooker Report's Best Bird Books of 2012 list. Birdbooker calls the book "extraordinary" and "the most comprehensive book to date about these two famously extinct birds."
by Martin Krieger
In the second edition of my book Doing Physics, I have added a chapter on mathematics as production machinery for doing physics. As in all production processes, sometimes the machinery is not available to make something, and sometimes there is lots of wonderful machinery that no one knows what to use for production. And sometimes people start producing things because the machinery is available, and they see that they can do something with it.
None of this is very philosophical or mysterious, at least in the world of machinery. But mathematics' role in the physical sciences, and the natural sciences more generally, has been a source of wonder and mystery.
Galileo spoke of mathematics as the language of natural science. In the middle of the 20th century, the distinguished physicist Eugene Wigner, wondered about the extraordinary success of mathematics in the physical sciences.
Now imagine that we were to say that everyday language is the language of poetry. And we wondered about the extraordinary success of everyday language in the poetical endeavors. I've just replaced machinery by everyday language, and the produced objects by poetry.
It is wonderful to note that we can speak prose (although in actual life, what we say is very different than written prose), but I am not sure what more there is to say.
What I have tried to do in this added chapter is look quite concretely at the role of mathematics in physics, in particular in mathematical physics (for example, solutions of a two dimensional “magnet,” the Ising model). (I draw on two earlier books: Constitutions of Matter and Doing Mathematics.) What one discovers is that the precision of mathematical expression turns out to be a way of revealing interesting otherwise not noted features of a physical process; that when there are very different modes of mathematically analyzing and describing a single phenomenon, figuring out why those modes all work may lead to interesting discoveries about the mathematics and the physics; and in one case there is a remarkable analogy of a mathematical analogy with a physical analogy (an analogy of analogies is called a syzygy), something that demands explanation but for the moment is somewhat open.
As for the social sciences, the achievement is to strip way lots of interesting features so that the mathematics is adequate to the features that are left. (This is probably true in the physical sciences as well, but we have forgotten how much work we have done in that stripping away over the centuries). That the stripped away world is amenable to mathematics is interesting. But what is even more interesting is whether that stripped away world is an adequate representation of the world we experience.
Martin Krieger is Professor of Planning in the Sol Price School of
Public Policy at the University of Southern California and a Fellow of
the American Physical Society. He has taught at Berkeley, Minnesota,
MIT, and Michigan and has served for many years on university promotion
and tenure committees. The second edition of his book Doing Physics was released last month. See his previous guest posts for the IU Press blog:
Doing Physics arose out of my teaching a course on physics for honors nonscience students. I wanted to give students the motivations for what physicists do, and analogize those motivations with what they were learning in their other freshman courses on literature and history and social science. Hence the references to the market, kinship theory, spreadsheets, and theater (Greek tragedy was what they were reading).
But I would not have had those analogies in mind if I had not spent all of my career teaching in schools of city planning, public policy, and social science. I received my PhD in physics and along the way realized that experimental work was not for me, at least in high energy physics as it was constituted in 1969 and in the subsequent 40+ years. I had some ideas about modeling urban change when I was a graduate student, using a model drawn from a physicists’ model of a phase transition (such as freezing), and developed them during spare moments using a computer model of what would now be called agent-based modeling or object-oriented programming, albeit written in Fortran. I could not convince my postdoc institution that it might go in this direction, using physics ideas to understand some of society, but I was fortunate that the city planning department thought the work was interesting enough to invite me for a semester. I came to visit and stayed in the field. My subsequent research has had two big themes: the meaning of models from physics and the mathematics they use; theories of design and planning, as understood in urban planning, and more generally documenting urban phenomena. Probably most curious, at least to me, was that often I would find ideas from the sacred and religious realm, drawn from my religious background and my education in the great books, suggested models much as did my education in physics.
My college asked us to read C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures before we started our freshman year. Snow was a scientist by training, a government advisor, and a novelist. Since then, I keep discovering how much we live in one culture, with local sub-cultures that borrow from the main culture and other sub-cultures. Doing Physics is one testimony to that, but all my books work in this vein. The books on mathematical physics keep asking what is the meaning behind the mathematical calculation and proof, and that meaning must be about how nature works. The work on urban photographic documentation say that what we see is evidence of larger historical forces, and you can see that in front of your eyes if you pay attention. It is not a matter of technical economics or geography, alone, but also history and the built environment and its decay and revitalization.
My forthcoming book, due out in late 2013, is a guide to surviving as an academic. Just as Teiresias was in his life a man and then a woman and then a man…, I have experience and work in almost all the conventional disciplinary areas. Moreover, for much of my career I have been on the side, not a regular tenure track faculty member, watching the world. And I have been a fellow at a number of multidisciplinary research centers, so I saw the strongest people in the disciplines up close. And as a regular faculty member, I have been asked to serve on our university’s tenure/promotion committee and read all the dossiers for about six years. The book is lessons learned. And one of the recurrent themes is that while the various disciplines and fields are distinct, there is enormous overlap in their ideas, borrowings from one field to another, and the scholarly issues and academic issues are recurrent. My most important advice is that a truck is coming, you don’t want to be crushed by it, and you don’t have to be. When someone tells me, “what truck?”, I know they are in trouble.
Martin Krieger is Professor of Planning in the Sol Price School of
Public Policy at the University of Southern California and a Fellow of
the American Physical Society. He has taught at Berkeley, Minnesota,
MIT, and Michigan and has served for many years on university promotion
and tenure committees. The second edition of his book Doing Physics was released this month. See his previous guest post for the IU Press blog here.
On Thursday, November 15, at 7:30 p.m., author Michael Homoya will discuss the various plant species detailed in his book Wildflowers and Ferns of Indiana Forests at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
The veteran botanist and plant ecologist for the Indiana Department of Natural Resources will deliver his talk in The Toby room of the IMA. The event is free and open to the public. Copies of Homoya's book will also be available for purchase and signing at the event. For more information, visit the museum's website.
Today we feature a guest blog from author Martin Krieger about his book Doing Physics.
When I am writing I always have one of my teachers in the back of my mind. My worry will be that they will find out that what I am saying is wrong, or that I made a mistake. Now if this were a matter of mathematical or physics reasoning that would concern me much less than when I am trying to convey in everyday terms: what the physics is about. So if I am analogizing the theory's division between particles and fields and their interaction, the analogy being to Adam Smith’s pin factory where there is a division of labor, I have not only to worry about the quantum field theorists but also the economists. When I am analogizing particle interaction to the rules of kinship and marriage, there is the theoretical particle physicist and the anthropologist of kinship who is looking over my shoulder. Doing Physics is meant to be read by high school students on, and I surely don’t want to spread nonsense. And I don’t want to be unfaithful to the science.
On the other hand, my subsequent books Constitutions of Matter (Chicago, 1996) and Doing Mathematics (World Scientific, 2003), try to make sense of highly technical work in mathematical physics and mathematics, itself. My nightmare would be that specialists would find my account flawed, a mistaken interpretation. I don’t expect them to think any of this is physics; rather it is about how work is done, and it had better be true to life. In Doing Mathematics I discern an analogy between an analogy in physics and one in mathematics. Such an analogy of analogies is called a syzygy. The mathematicians have been working in this realm for 150 years, while the physicists are rather latecomers. On the other hand, the physicists have a very clear example of the analogy. I was enormously relieved when one of the experts in the mathematics seemed to have liked my discussion and not found it too wanting.
Why do this sort of book writing? I am not doing a popularization, and my book is not a gee-whiz account. Rather it is an entrée into an esoteric world, much as one might want an everyday account of a sacred text of antiquity. This is what is going on here. These are the moves being made. This is how these people think. This is what they have in mind. This is how the physics is part of the everyday culture you know already. In the case of the more technical books, the idea is to point to the motivating themes and ideas, themes and ideas that are not so technical in fact.
I have one other big goal. I want people to appreciate the physicist’s account of the natural world, how that account is not beyond them. In the 20th century physicists discovered why the sun shines, and they have the most powerful account of creation since Genesis. Just as the first six days of Genesis is also an account of the rules of the Hebrews’ world, so the physicist’s account of the origin of the universe is also an account of the rules of the physical world.
What’s strange to me is that all popular writing about physics and mathematics is in baby terms. Yet in fact a cultured person might be able to see why physicists do what they do and how they account for the world, and what mathematicians do and how they describe the structure of their abstract world. Yes, it’s not the same as a PhD in these fields, but it is possible to get close to what is going on. At least as close as it is possible to understand another culture without being of that culture.
Martin Krieger is Professor of Planning in the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He has taught at Berkeley, Minnesota, MIT, and Michigan and has served for many years on university promotion and tenure committees. The second edition of his book Doing Physics was released this month.
"Throughout his engaging life narrative, Raff holds forth on intriguing scientific topics, and makes his case for the teaching of evolution in schools, the consequences of scientific assumptions 'harnessed to politics,' and more. At once a cri de coeur from an eminent scientist on behalf of his profession, Raff's work is also an engaging and informative jaunt through the richly diverse history of evolution as a phenomenon and a course of study."—Publishers Weekly
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