Jeremy Bernstein

A collection of essays that appeared in the magazine American Scholar, and probably elsewhere. They're all well written and rather chatty. Bernstein got to hang out with many great physicists, so it's a fun kind of memoir almost. Not just physicists - Bernstein got to hang out with Stanley Kubrick when 2001 A Space Odyssey was being filmed! Bernstein was at Los Alamos and got up close to atomic weapons. He's a particle physicist so he talks about Gell-Man and quarks. There's quite a bit show more about Minsky and artificial intelligence. Some of it is so dated it gets a bit painful, as he's explaining bits and bytes and FORTRAN. Well maybe for some people it'll be a nice introduction but for me, whew, I was coding FORTRAN in 1970! show less

This is another book which I remember vividly reading many years ago, and nearly idolizing the team from Bell Labs that accidentally stumbled upon the background radiation of the universe, and if I recall correctly, also gave us the closest practical example we have to anything reaching almost Zero degrees Kelvin.

This book deserves to be read again, and with care, as it explained a great many things, like the accidental discovery of important techniques and how researchers and experimenters show more need the leeway to take the time to follow up even seemingly unrelated ideas sometimes, contrary to our modern rushed and hurried short-term way of looking at outcomes. show less

I doubt that I would have enjoyed this book much if I had not already had a good qualitative knowledge of fundamental particle physics. Others may well be perplexed by the slapdash organization, full of jump-aheads and backfillings, and some inexplicable errors such as calling the W and Z particles mesons instead of bosons. The book is pretty short and includes some of the author's personal opinions and reminiscenses of working as a researcher in the field.

Bell Laboratories was catalyst one of the most important foundations of the information age. It gave us the transistor, cybernetics, the laser, LEDs. The computer language Unix was developed there. While it still exists in other forms of is no longer the same freewheeling assembly of thinkers it once was. Jeremy Bernstein gives the reader a series of snapshots of people working at the lab at the time of the AT&T breakup. We have both lost and gained things because of the breakup. We no show more longer have to have hardwired phones in our homes or to pay for each phone jack. We have cellular phone service. It was suggested to me that couldn't have exploded the way it did without the breakup. Guessing alternate histories is of course just a guess, but the fading of Bell Labs and it's creative contribution has been a real cost - also not quantifiable.
That speculation aside this snapshot of the lab is fascinating. Now I need to read the more contemporary version: The Idea Factory.
History is interesting because it is a good story. Sometimes we also can learn from it, but the lessons aren't always clear. show less