This post is a review of Sisters in Science by Olivia Campbell. It is a book about 4 women physicists who were able to escape the Nazi regime in Germany and (re)build successful careers in other countries. These were Hedwig Kohn (a spectroscopist), Lise Meitner (nuclear pioneer), Hildegard Stucklen (spectroscopist) and Hertha Sponer (physical chemist). The first two had to flee because they were Jewish and all of them had to flee because they were women (Nazi rule opposed aca

This post is about the following, perhaps radical, conjecture: that, without education, human beings would essentially be animals of some type. Education, for the purpose of this post, is not just degrees, but any kind of systematic training. My views on this - and I have no qualifications in biology, behavioral science, psychology, etc. - are based solely on my experience as an educator. This is in fact, a vast topic, but I thought I should make a beginning at some point in

Imagine Today Imagine RIT: Creativity and Innovation Festival 2026 was held, mostly indoors with driving rain outside. Imagine is the tech fair of my university, and today had more than 400 exhibits and 3000 exhibitors. On a fair weather day, there are about 10,000 attendees; I am not sure there were that many today, though I had to circle around for a quite while to get parking. Some editions (not today's) run into two days and generally I find the number of exhibits so lar

This post is a review of the quaint little (156 pages) popular science book The Periodic Kingdom by P. W. Atkins . When I was an undergraduate, I had loved the clear expository style of his textbook on quantum mechanics. Though he is a chemist (retired from Oxford) the book was very accessible for a physics student like me. Atkins is in fact an excellent pedagogue and has written about 20 books, some of which are considered market leaders (e.g. Physical Chemistry is a clas