This post is a review of the book The Secrets of Soviet Cosmonauts by Maria Rosa Menzio (2022). The book gives insights into the Russian space program, starting from the launch of the Sputnik in 1957 that stunned the world, to the International Space Station. Many of the details, especially of the launch failures, had been classified for a long time. The main content of the book is centered around the following themes: Motivation : The book describes the main progenitors of

This post is a review of the popular science book Haphazard Reality by H.B.G. Casimir , first published in 1983. Casimir was a well- known Dutch physicist who made notable contributions to both pure (Casimir effect, Casimir invariant, Gorter-Casimir model) as well as applied (as Director of the Research Lab at Philips) physics. I re-read the book after many years, on prodding from a colleague, while I was visiting the Netherlands over the last two weeks. Casimir's memoir is

The last two weeks I have been traveling in the Netherlands, for the first time. I stayed in Amsterdam and visited several places about an hour by train. A few places I went to: Amsterdam : Lots of canals, as is well known. I went to the Anne Frank house (turned out to have the same street number as my dorm room in college), the Hotel Pulitzer with a grand piano hanging from the ceiling above the entrance, the van Gogh museum, the Rijksmuseum [which had exhibitions on armoury

This is a review of the book This Is For Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee . Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, which has, of course, completely revolutionized our lives. This book is his own account of the origin and development of the web. I was particularly fascinated by it as my generation saw the web come up in our own lifetime - I remember in 1995 the librarian at the University of Rochester asking my incoming graduate class in physics to indicate by show of hands how