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

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

This must be one of the most important subjects of the century. Bernstein does a nice job of introducing it. The approach is almost entirely historical. He discusses the discovery of Uranium in the early days of chemistry, and then the discovery of radioactivity at the beginning of the twentieth century. He goes into greater detail with the 1930s when fission was discovered and people were trying to synthesize transuranics, e.g. Plutonium. There is a lot of discussion of chemistry, valence show more electrons, and the periodic table of elements.

An explanation of the chemical behavior of lanthanides and actinides occurs in a couple places. I rather suspect the second discussion, at the bottom of p. 149, got garbled by an editor who knows no science. Which electrons matter for chemistry, the outside ones or the inside ones? On p. 73, it seems it's the inside electrons that don't play chemistry. This seems correct. It gets turned backwards on p. 149.

Another blooper on p. 160 has U-238 absorbing a neutron, which creates U-239 "along with the emission of two neutrons". The next sentence starts with U-237. How about "followed by the emission of two neutrons" and then "The resulting U-237"...

I was impressed that Bernstein did pretty well getting across electron orbitals. This is a great book for folks to be introduced to these ideas, the foundations of modern science. I hope these little errors don't discourage any budding scientists!

I was disappointed that there was so little about the toxicity of Plutonium. There was some talk here on the subject. but just a few pages. How dangerous is Plutonium? There are essentially two risks: bombs, and pollution. Bernstein does a good job covering the bombs & the possible use of different mixes of isotopes of Plutonium. It's an easier subject, for sure, than the statistics of cancer etc.

Bernstein is a physicist, and this book really concentrates on the physics of Plutonium. It's surely a great starting point and foundation for further research. I suspect, though, that there aren't too many accessible next steps! We need more books like this, that move the discussion further. How does Plutonium move through biological tissue? How does Plutonium move with ground water, or in the atmosphere?

Bernstein tells us that there is currently about 1900 tons of the stuff that has been created since the birth of nuclear technology, increasing at about 70 tons per year. This is a serious global risk that we need to manage carefully. Folks can start learning what this means from Bernstein's book. show less

The history of plutonium requires the explaining of a lot of physics and chemistry. This was one of the most difficult books I've ever read on science history, but Bernstein does a brilliant job of communicating the science involved to the lay reader. It's rewarding to make it through this book, and it's a fascinating subject, but unless you know a lot about the science involved already, be prepared for an uphill climb as you get deeper into the book. It's well worth it, though. Great book.