Nicole Yunger Halpern is a Fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS), a theoretical physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland.
Yunger Halpern's new book is Quantum Steampunk: The Physics of Yesterday’s Tomorrow.
At Lit Hub she tagged five books imbued with the romance and wonder of Victorian science, including:
Laura J. Snyder, The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the WorldRead about the other entries on the list at Lit Hub.
Early in the 19th century, four students determined to transform science: enhance its precision, professionalize it, augment the role of evidence, and harnessscience for the public good. In this book, historian Laura Snyder argues that they succeeded. Furthermore, the friends’ enchantment with all of nature’s facets enchanted me. In one striking image from the book, the polymath William Whewell describes how he plans to commune with a mountain: Upon “sketching it from the bottom I shall climb to the top and measure its height by the barometer, knock off a piece of rock with a geological hammer to see what it is made of, and then evolve some quotation from Wordsworth into the still air above it.” The book shows that this broad-mindedness and curiosity, together with rigor, determination, and collaboration, enabled the four friends to forge the modern science.
--Marshal Zeringue
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