Brilliant Fade

Tesla: Inventor of the Modern by Richard Munson
New York : W.W. Norton & Co., [2018]   
306 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.

I've wanted to read about Nikolai Tesla for a while now.  Someone told me how Tesla had developed plans for harnessing and distributing low-cost (if not free) energy - and so had his career quashed by powerful oil/gas interests and even had his papers seized by the government after he died.  Given Tesla's revolutionary inventions and discoveries, I had to wonder if there was something to this.

This biography does a great job of conveying just how brilliant and visionary Tesla was in both his thinking and his development of applied science.  He is the towering figure behind the modern use of electricity in industry and in its wide distribution.  By figuring out how to harness and use alternating current (AC) through generators and AC motors, he triumphed over the Edison devotees of direct current.

However, much of his life was spent pursuing fruitless dreams of using high-frequency electric current to send and receive wireless energy and signals through the earth.  In spite losing himself in the pursuit of these earthbound visions, he also developed the airborne transmission of signals and has been credited with the invention of radio - though Marconi became its most famous developer and inventor.

This biography led me to believe that there is not a lot of substance to the belief that special interests shut down Tesla's potential.  Instead his own visionary brilliance seems to have trumped a more practical approach that would have greatly benefited Tesla.  He was terrible with money and contracts and did not reap the fabulous riches that his work should have earned for him.  Nevertheless, he did have years of great fame and huge financial backing, but was unable to develop that into a lifelong success with research and income.

All in all, it is a fascinating biography that I would highly recommend to anyone interested in late 19th century science and technology - especially electricity and wireless communication.
   

Big Hopes for the Very Tiny

The Quantum Age by Brian Clegg
London : Icon, 2015.
vi, 282 p. : ill. ; 20 cm.

I'm not sure why Clegg's Quantum Age just didn't hit the sweet spot for me.  I like science and I like trying to wrap my mind around quantum concepts. I guess that there were several concepts that I never felt were covered well enough, and therefore when they'd get referred to later - I'd find myself still somewhat confused.  Some of these important concepts were tunneling, superposition, decoherence, entanglement, and Cooper's pairs (electrons).

I still muddled through the book and found parts of it interesting enough. The book does help the reader see not only how quantum physics underlies many day to day processes - for example anything involving light - but how modern science has applied it's knowledge of quantum physics to create computing as we know it, and such medical technologies as MRIs. He also points toward the many potential breakthroughs that seem to be on the horizon - practical superconductivity, quantum computing, and advanced encryption to name just some.

I'm glad I read the book, but I can't say it is one that I'll be highly recommending.  I wouldn't discourage a student from checking it out, but I'll definitely be on the lookout for something that I find even better.    

Robophobia

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson
New York : Vintage Contemporaries, 2012, c2011.
396 p. ; 21 cm.

Robopocalypse picks up a fairly common theme in popular culture - the specter of intelligent machines turning on their human creators.  This has come up in movies such as 2001: a Space Odyssey, The Terminator, and I, Robot.  Wilson writes a tense and informed thriller that picks up at the very end of a cataclysmic war where humans have barely managed to defeat machines with AI that have waged a war of extermination against humanity.  Following this opening, the rest of the novel is a retelling of the events of the initial machine uprising, the ensuing war, and humanity's success in fighting back.  There's a lot of action, exciting plotting, and some gruesome machine-on-human violence (e.g. pluggers - little machines programed to take their sweet, agonizing time boring into humans and drilling away until they reach the heart, where they explode).

Given the exponential growth of computer systems and devices and human dependence on them it is no wonder that people worry about where this technology is taking us.  And it's a question that scientists, such as Stephen Hawkings, and institutions like Smithsonian Magazine, take seriously.  

If you are looking for a fast-paced, exciting tale of dystopian survival - Wilson scores a home run with his book.  With a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon, Wilson writes convincingly of the frightening technological capabilities of interactive machines gone rogue.  There are military droids, assassin "smart" cars, drones, and self-replicating/self assembling machines that nearly succeed in wiping humanity from the globe.  Given the current life/death dependence of human on digital systems (e.g. energy, transportation, finance, military, etc) and the almost limitless spending on "smart" lethal military machines - there is a lot to think about and ruminate over after reading Wilson's book.

My main complaint with the book is that it reads like the novelization of a movie.  Each chapter feels mostly like the set piece of the parts of an action movie - the onslaught, the specific roving bands of survivors, the few "liberated" robots, etc.  If you like that style of fiction you will love this novel.  And if you don't, but like that kind of movie, hold on, because Robopocalypse - in spite of many delays - is still likely to end up as a blockbuster action movie (probably under the direction of Steven Spielberg).

I'll definitely recommend this book to any students who are looking for an action packed dystopian novel.