This post is about review articles in physics. Below I will put down my philosophy about what reading and writing such articles involves. What they are : Review articles are useful but somewhat unusual objects, in that they do not represent original research, like most published papers, but rather a summary of (usually recent) developments in a field. Why they are useful to the reader : Review articles are useful to researchers looking to get into a new area of physics. This

This post is a review of the book Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man Who Trusted Atoms by Carlo Cercignani (329 pages), and includes a preface by Roger Penrose. Boltzmann was one of the all time great physicists, and the founder of the discipline of statistical mechanics. He showed how to quantify the second law of thermodynamics, with the equation named after him. He was the first to give a statistical definition of entropy, a formula famously inscribed on his gravestone. He was

This post is about one of my favorite topics: academic peer review. I have written about it before, comparing different fields , and suggesting alternatives . Today I will state my analysis of some classic characteristics that I think most reviews of low quality share. I am writing this in the hope that it will be helpful to people just entering the process. It is often not until much later in their careers that they begin to analyze the defects and recognize them and acquire

This post is a review of the book Lise Meitner: A Life in Science by Ruth Lewin Sime. Meitner was the first woman to be a full professor in Germany, a post she later lost due to being Jewish, and was also unjustly denied a Nobel prize in chemistry for her work on nuclear fission. The book is quite substantial, at 417 pages. It divides naturally into three parts. The first part deals with her birth and childhood in Vienna. The author does a great job of describing the milieu