Mini-Reviews of Books #25…
The Pope of Physics. Gino Segre and Bettina Hoerlin, authors (Henry Holt/Macmillan 2016). Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi not only brought Italian physics out of the Dark Ages, he was a national and international icon who was the last great physicist to excel in both theory and experiment. He was also a great teacher to many students. He had a cameo role in my novel Sing a Samba Galactica for asking one day at Los Alamos, “Where are they?” He was referring to extraterrestrials. That statement is now called the Fermi Paradox: if ETs are abundant in the Universe, why haven’t they come to visit? It probably inspired Freeman Dyson to come up with his famous estimate for the number of ET civilizations.
Fermi’s less rhetorical accomplishments, while noteworthy, aren’t described in great detail in this biography. The book is more a tribute to the man. The person who first explained beta decay, designed the first atomic reactor (then called a nuclear pile) at the University of Chicago, and helped bring World War Two to a swift close with the development of a fission bomb, was a complex person who tried to isolate politics from science—for him the bomb was an experiment in nuclear science. He’s been criticized for that attitude, but the criticism is unjust—one can read between the lines here that scientists were used by the politicians. They still are.
Perhaps more important in this story is how Fermi, who wasn’t Jewish, still suffered from anti-Semitism. His wife was Jewish, so they had to flee Mussolini’s Italy. His wife’s father died in a concentration camp. Friends and their relatives were persecuted and murdered. Fermi’s flight from Italy was immensely beneficial to the U.S., though, as it was the case for many refugees from the hatred and bigotry ravaging Europe.
My only complaint is that the Pope’s ability to teach and motivate students, who in turn have created more students, is downplayed so much. He affected generations of physics students even after his death. The public might remember him for many things, but physics in the U.S. and the world benefitted and will continue to benefit from his practical way of considering physical phenomena. We often worship the likes of Einstein and other dreamers whose theories are often so far ahead of experimental science that they can’t be proven—dark matter and dark energy are recent examples—but Fermi always seemed to get to the heart of the matter (no pun intended), a practical man who theorized and experimented and obtained immediate results.
La Niña Perdida (En órbitas extrañas 1). Ramon Somoza, author (Editorial Dragón 2013). This is probably the most unusual review I’ve ever written. This is the first installment for a series of young adult (YA) sci-fi novels by gifted polyglot Somoza. Although I consider myself bilingual in English and Spanish, I would never dare write a book in Spanish. Whether you read these books in Spanish or English, I think we have the start of something big here.
After corresponding a bit with the Spanish novelist (you meet interesting people on Goodreads), I decided to practice my Spanish a bit and read the…first chapter? First episode? Whatever. I usually don’t like partitioning novels into bits and pieces (Howey did it for Wool—I waited until he bundled everything together to read it), but this was Spanish practice for me. What a great experience!
The author’s technical background and interests make this first adventure about the little ten-year-old genius who joins the crew of a colonizing starship seem plausible. The language is reminiscent of Heinlein’s Time for the Stars and the main character of Heinlein’s Podkayne. There’s a bit of “world building” at the beginning as the whys and wherefores of the expedition are analyzed, but then things pick up a lot.
As usual, these books can also be enjoyed by adults who are young at heart, taking one back to when you played space explorer in the backyard (OK, that’s my nostalgia—yours might be better). Consider this little review segue into the novels. In fact, the first five Lost Girl episodes are available as a bundled set in English and expertly translated from Spanish…by the author! I’d never try that either. In any case, we might have a new sci-fi star in the firmament. Check him out. (Note: the link above is to Ramon’s author page on Amazon where you can see all the books displayed, English and Spanish.)
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Coming soon! Gaia and the Goliaths. Climate control and environmental issues are on everyone’s mind right now. They’re on Chen and Castilblanco’s minds too when they’re called in to solve the murder of an environmental activist. A Big Apple case soon becomes national and international, though, with Russia and an old nemesis of the detectives become involved in a multi-country hunt for the activist’s boyfriend. This is #7 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series.” It will be available in all ebook formats, as are the first six books in the series. Don’t miss it.
In libris libertas!
