I've had this book sat under my copy of IBM and the Holocaust for about 12 months, and decided that since I've been stitched to look after Max today after his mother abandoned us I might as well start it.
Due to a hyperactive Max and the few bands worth watching on Live Earth, it's taken me most of the day to get through the first hundred pages.
It's a perfect example of why education means nothing.
For those who can't be bothered googling it, the book is a history of the relationship between Eddington and Chandra during their development of ideas about black holes. It's written by someone who has a PhD in physics, so you'd expect them to know their stuff.
nope.
He constantly refers to white dwarfs as "cold dead rocks". The ideal gas law is referred to as the perfect gas law, the adiabatic gas laws as imperect gas laws (the last two are admittedly minor transgressions, but something that makes me scream mentally every time I see it)
And now, the bit that made me throw the book out the windows in disgust.
Remember, this is coming from a physicist. Someone who knows about numbers
"eddington calculated the number of protons and electrons in the universe to be 1.5e79. But it's impossible to have fractions of particles, so he wrote the answer as 1365x2^256, pointing out 2^256 is almost exactly 10^79"
GARGH!!!!
NO!!.
admittedly Eddington was a bit of a wacko, but even he knew 1.5e79 wasn't talking about half a particle, and 2^256 isn't anywhere near 10^79. Infact, you need roughly 136 to make 2^256 into 10^79.
The reason Eddington worked hard to fix an answer at 136x2^256 was to link the fine structure constant with his own 16 arbitrarily chosen constants. Not because he hated have half a particle in his universe.
So, if you want a good history of the development of one of the most important astrophysical developments of the last century, find a different book.
Empire of the Stars
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Winston Blake
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