Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day has a pretty cool movie of lightning discharge between clouds and the ionosphere.

This is a pretty fine example of amateur science at work on the Internet – the whole thing started as a forum thread on an enthusiast site, then passed via a space news site to the hands of scientists who recognized what they had on their hands.

“The Scientist As Rebel” is a collection of essays by Freeman Dyson, most of which originated as book reviews in the New York Review of Books. As noted in the preface, however, this doesn’t make them unsuitable if you’re not interested in the books concerned:

One of the pleasures of writing for the New York Review is the fact that it publishes long reviews. The reviewer is asked to write about four thousand words, which means that the review can be an essay reflecting on the subject matter rather than a simple appraisal of a book.

This means that the review of Michael Crichton’s thriller Prey can contain a discussion of the dangers of nanotechnology, engage Bill Joy’s famous article and contemplate what we can learn about nanotech regulation from the development of the international bioweapons regime. A review of a book describing the advent of particle accelerators not only summarizes the race to split the atom, but also manages to discuss epistemology and the development of the theorist-experimentalist split in physics.

Most of the substance is on the history of science, with a particular focus on 20th century physics. A major sub-thread is dedicated to ethical and personal issues in science, as exemplified by the development of nuclear weapons and the lives of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller. However, the subject matter fades into the background for the sheer quality of Dyson’s writing. Throughout the book, he displays a level of erudition that is hard to describe – he quotes poetry, injects personal anecdotes from his education under G.H. Hardy or his work with Richard Feynman and expresses his sadness at the fact that today’s Cambridge fellows can not be expected to speak classical Greek any more.

The picture of Freeman Dyson that emerges is that of the classical “gentleman scientist”, who doesn’t disdain other areas of human endeavour, but spends time contemplating art, philosophy and religion, even though his profession was to be a research physicist. Given the title of the book, Dyson’s quite conservative attitudes – his open acceptance of religion, for example, and his opposition to unlimited capitalism – may come as a surprise, but the preface already clarifies his stance:

Benjamin Franklin combined better than anyone else the qualities of a great scientist and a great rebel. [..] For most of his long life he was a loyal subject of the British King. [..] Franklin became a rebel only when he judged the time to be ripe and the costs to be acceptable. As a rebel he remained a conservative, aiming not to destroy, but to preserve as much as possible of the established order of society. [..] The rebellion that Franklin embodied was a thoughtful rebellion, driven by reason and calculation more than by passion and hatred.

The first chapter then recounts various ways in which science actually served as a rebellion against social constraints, ranging from Arab astronomers to the HUAAC opposition of the 1950s.

Overall, one of the best books I’ve read in recent times, highly recommended!

PS: Hopefully, the first of many book reviews. I love the “Reading List” posts on Fourmilog, and find that writing book reviews is a great way to re-digest a book I have finished a little while ago. So far, I have mostly been disdained by my inability to do justice to the books I read, but I figure this won’t improve unless I keep trying, so here we go.