Tau Zero, by Poul Anderson

Posted on February 2, 2025 by skullsinthestars

Book 7 for my 2025 goal of 30 books for the year!

I love a good science fiction story that really leans into one of the weird aspects of modern physics, and so as soon as I learned the premise of Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero (1970), I knew I had to snap it up and read it!

(I am again taking advantage of the decent quality and dirt cheap SF Masterworks editions of books. I found this one for $7.00 at 2nd & Charles.)

The book is centered around a premise from Einstein’s special theory of relativity: the idea that clocks move slower while in motion, and the slowness increases the closer the speed approaches the speed of light. I’ve blogged about this before, noting that it is in principle possible to move fast enough that a journey of a million light years could seem to take ten minutes — even though a million years would pass on Earth!

In the book, a colony spaceship is sent from Earth on a journey to a planet some thirty light years away, which will only be five years for the crew on board, moving at a relativistic speed. But on the way, an unexpected disaster strikes, disabling the drives that will decelerate the ship. With no way to slow down, a daring plan is proposed — go even faster, pushing ever closer to the absolute speed of light, in the hopes of reaching a location where the deceleration drives can be safely repaired. This will involve spending aeons of time relative to Earth, first hundreds of thousands, then millions, then billions of years. Along the way, the crew will have to hold together under the psychological strain of being isolated for years at a time, with no certain future…

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I Believe in Mister Bones, by Max Booth III

Posted on January 30, 2025 by skullsinthestars

Book 6 for my 2025 goal of 30 books for the year! I’m off to an absurdly good start.

Sometimes it takes something very simple to draw me to read a book. In the case of I Believe in Mister Bones (2024), by Max Booth III, it took two simple things. The first is the excellent creepy cover, done by the ever entertaining Trevor Henderson.

The second is the subject matter itself: a creepy supernatural skeletal being known simply as “Mister Bones.” I’m a sucker for animated skeletons; heck, one of my original book reviews on this blog was of the super-obscure gothic novel The Animated Skeleton from 1798. This review, incidentally, led to my friendship with the folks at Valancourt Books. Also, when I was in college, ages and ages ago, I wrote a short horror story called “Old Bones” that was about a creepy supernatural skeletal being itself! So a novel about such a being is instantly going to intrigue me. I agree with a comment in the novel: “I’ve just always thought there’s not enough spooky skeletons in horror.”

And I Believe in Mister Bones did not disappoint! I read it in a couple of days, and read the last few chapters in one sitting to see how things would turn out. It is a clever, unsettling, and interesting tale of the supernatural.

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1844: Mayer mentions his work on conservation of energy

Posted on January 30, 2025 by skullsinthestars

As noted in a previous post, I’ve started translating a collection of correspondence of the amazing German physician Julius Robert Mayer, who around 1840 traveled to Indonesia as a ship’s doctor and along the way discovered and elucidated, for the first time, the principle of conservation of energy.

I thought I’d share a brief snippet of one recent letter I translated, written to his friend Paul Friedrich Lang. This is the first mention I’ve found of Mayer’s discovery in his letters; the discovery was made around 1840 and he first published his work in 1842. This letter comes from March of 1844, and this brief description made me chuckle:

You see that there is still something of the mathematician in my way of thinking; and in fact I am constantly trying to devote all the time I have to an attempt to gain a mathematically clear understanding of natural phenomena, whereby my horizons are broadened even further and I arrive at real results, which it would be far too boring to even mention here.

It is really quite funny that Mayer says that his results would be “far too boring to even mention here,” considering he is referring to work on conservation of energy, which is a transformative concept that literally touches every aspect of physics!

At this point, I suspect Mayer was already engaged in controversy about priority of discovery, as his paper appeared in 1842 and Joule’s work on the same topic appeared in 1843; this brief snippet says little about the storm of controversy that would soon erupt.

Anyway, more later!

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Latest Dead Reckonings is out!

Posted on January 28, 2025 by skullsinthestars

Hi folks! For those who are familiar, I occasionally write book reviews for the horror and weird periodical Dead Reckonings, and the most recent issue is out!

I wrote about Laird Barron’s recent collection of horror fiction, a return to his roots; I also wrote about it in brief here late last year. I managed to secure the first spot in the issue, which is probably less due to my writing acumen and more due to the fact that Laird Barron is cool as hell.

Anyway, just wanted to share — more blog posts soon!

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The Andromeda Anthology, by Fred Hoyle and John Elliot

Posted on January 26, 2025 by skullsinthestars

Book 5 for 2025! My goal is 30 this year, and I’m off to a great start.

Since I’ve been enjoying the “SF Masterworks” series like Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book, I popped by the store a week ago to see if any others looked intriguing. The one that really caught my eye is the so-called Andromeda Anthology (1962/1964), by Fred Hoyle and John Elliot.

Probably the biggest draw for me was seeing the name Fred Hoyle! Hoyle was an astronomer and theoretical astrophysicist, and I was already familiar with his work through his very unusual 1957 novel The Black Cloud. That novel was an intriguing alien first contact story, and the Andromeda Anthology is another — albeit a very different type of first contact!

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More on Mayer and Tyndall (1862)

Posted on January 17, 2025 by skullsinthestars

I’ve previously written about the amazing story of Julius Robert Mayer, the physician — not physicist — who first conceived of the concept of conservation of energy, and how he was then discredited by the British scientific community in favor of James Joule, who independently discovered and published the concept a year after Mayer did.

Recently, I picked up an old 1893 collection of Mayer’s surviving correspondence, and I am currently working my way through translating it (with the help of Google translate, which has gotten much better). But in the meantime, I found absolutely charming letters between Mayer and John Tyndall that I wanted to share here.

To review the history, though it can be found in full at the link above and I encourage folks to go read this amazing story: Mayer was utterly broken by the most prominent physicists in Britain, who in a fit of nationalism decided that Joule should get sole claim for the discovery of conservation of energy, evidence be damned. Mayer ended up taking a fall from a window that may have been a suicide attempt, and ended up in a cruel psychiatric institution for some time. But in 1862, London was hosting the International Exhibition (like a World’s Fair) and the Royal Institution asked John Tyndall, Irish physicist, to prepare a lecture on the exceedingly British discovery of “energy.” Tyndall agreed, but performed extensive research on the history of the subject to make sure he was getting it right. Along the way, he discovered the papers of Mayer, and he and his colleague Rudolf Clausius were astounded at Mayer’s insights and discoveries.

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The Night of the Ripper, by Robert Bloch

Posted on January 15, 2025 by skullsinthestars

Book 4 for 2025! My goal is 30 this year.

My friends at Valancourt Books have recently been reprinting the works of horror master Robert Bloch, most famous for penning Psycho (1959) but also an award winning author of many other frightening novels and short stories. I recently read Valancourt’s reprint of Bloch’s The Opener of the Way, and that led me to his 1984 novel The Night of the Ripper.

One of Bloch’s early breakthrough stories was “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” a story about a man tracking a seemingly immortal Jack the Ripper in “modern era” (in Bloch’s time) Chicago. The Night of the Ripper is therefore, in a sense, a return to Bloch’s roots, focusing on the real-life character that propelled him indirectly to fame. The story is not supernatural this time, but a true murder mystery — and it is informed by Bloch’s own extensive research as a “Ripperologist.”

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Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis

Posted on January 12, 2025 by skullsinthestars

Book 3 for 2025! My goal is 30 this year.

Now that my rush to fulfill my arbitrary book-reading deadline for last year is done, I can relax and read books that are a bit longer. One I’ve had on my shelf for possibly years is Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis (1992). Once again I relied on a nice inexpensive “SF Masterworks” edition that weighed in at 587 pages.

My review, in short: this book is amazing, and easily qualifies for the title of “masterwork.” It is a story of a time travel journey gone wrong, as the traveler in the past and her colleagues in the present struggle with their own unexpected crises.

Strangely, one can’t help but wonder if Connie Willis is a time traveler herself, because her novel remarkably anticipates many of the crises that have hit humanity in modern times!

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Talking Invisibility on the Peculiar Book Club!

Posted on January 12, 2025 by skullsinthestars

For those who aren’t yet tired of me talking about the physics of invisibility and my book about it, a couple of days ago I was a guest on the Peculiar Book Club, hosted by Brandy Schillace! It was a really fun show and great experience and I got a lot of great questions from the club. The whole thing was recorded, so you can watch it here:

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Godel’s Proof, by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman

Posted on January 11, 2025 by skullsinthestars

Book 2 for 2025! My goal is 30 this year. This is actually a book I read years ago but it was time for a reread to try to better understand the subject.

I honestly wish more people would explore mathematics and not avoid it as much as possible, because it is a stunningly beautiful subject. Even if one does not have the time or inclination to master it, there are many mind-boggling mathematical subjects that can be at least roughly understood by a dedicated layperson with the right information in front of them. The mathematics of infinity, for example, is something I’ve blogged about in the past and it is just fascinating and some of the most important proofs related to it require no higher math at all to gain an understanding of.

One topic I’ve always been fascinated with is the incompleteness theorems of Kurt Gödel, first published in 1931. The actual paper is quite involved to read and understand, and requires a lot of background context to properly understand what Gödel accomplished. Fortunately, there is a book out there that makes a valiant effort to explain it in non-technical terms: Gödel’s Proof, written by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman and first published in 1958. I have a copy of the NY University Press edition of 1986:

It is a slim book: 102 pages in my edition, not counting appendices and the index. It leads the reader through a brief history of 19th and early 20th century mathematics to appreciate what Gödel proved in his paper, which shook the foundations of mathematics.

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