User:Footlessmouse/toDo

A to do list. The references and any statements that may be made on this page can be used by any editor for any reasonable purpose without notice. If you wish to create one of these pages and you use the references from here, please take the time to remove the entry from here. Note: Prior to building a page, I do not bother looking up references in newspapers and other popular periodicals, the referecnes below are all from scientific journals and books. Most are reviews, though some are just recommendations and short appraisals.

To move out of user space

 * The End of Everything - sandbox
 * How to Survive a Plague - sandbox
 * The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World - Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World - sandbox
 * The Undying - sandbox
 * Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton - sandbox
 * Problematic:
 * Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines - sandbox
 * Einstein Lived Here - sandbox (Reviews not great, possibly create and merge into Bibliography of Abraham Pais instead.)
 * Nancy Thorndike Greenspan - sandbox
 * Rob Iliffe - sandbox

To create

 * Pfizer Award books
 * Science Writing Award books (continuation)
 * 25 greatest science books of all time
 * 100 best science books of all time
 * another list

Textbooks

 * Griffiths Particles
 * Yu and Cardona - sandbox
 * The Quantum Theory of Solids - sandbox
 * User:Footlessmouse/Thermal Physics (Kittel book)
 * User:Footlessmouse/Theoretical Mechanics of Particles and Continua Fetter and Walecka.
 * User:Footlessmouse/Pathria and Beale

Books

 * The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

People

 * Family of Max Born - sandbox
 * Stanley Goldberg (physicist)

Relativity priority

 * Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity - sandbox A. I. Miller


 * Electrodynamics from Ampére to Einstein - sandbox Olivier Darrigol


 * Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps - sandbox Peter Galison

To expand pages

 * add to Purcell and Morin.
 * Relativity priority dispute Physical Relativity: Space-time Structure from a Dynamical Perspective Harvey Brown

Bloch definitions
Searching for definitions of Bloch functions and Bloch form to possibly propose something to do with the terminology on Bloch's theorem. The literature is contradictory, so I will probably propose creating a new terminology section to sum in all up.
 * "The solutions to the Schrodinger equation which always have the required translation property are known as Bloch waves."
 * Refers to the periodic potential alone (excluding plane wave) as the Bloch function.
 * Refers to the entire wave function as the Bloch function. - Kittel: Intro to Solid-State Physics p. 259, Quantum Theory of Solids p. 180 and Yu and Cardona p. 20
 * Refers to the juxtaposition of a plane wave with periodic potential as the Bloch form - Ashcroft and Mermin p.139
 * Refers to only Bloch wave packets and Bloch wave functions does not say Bloch function or BLoch wave alone. Uses Bloch form, Bloch electron, Bloch state, etc. as the other CM books do (I scanned both books not just individual chapters).
 * Refers to Bloch functions throughout the book as the solutions to Schrodinger's equation in a periodic potential. Specifically calls Bloch wave and Bloch state synonymous. I'm also 98% sure it says they are synonymous with the Bloch functions but it is awkward about it. It does say that the Bloch functions are the wavefunctions, then it writes one and says they are called Bloch waves or Bloch states. Very awkward.

My audible library
Expand or create as needed

I got an audible account about a year ago and I really enjoy it. Most of the books I've downloaded so far have been pretty popular and are notable. Basically all the popular books I've gone out of my way to edit, other than science biographies, have been because I've read or listened to them. I don't really read a lot of novels and have yet to download one on audiobook:
 * Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
 * Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
 * Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change
 * Free Will
 * The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
 * The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
 * Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
 * The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World
 * How Democracies Die
 * The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality
 * The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations
 * The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Disclaimer: I hate this book. His cocky attitude, his rude remarks about other scientists, his pretending that he is the only one that understands complex probability distributions even though his PhD is "management science": I've never enjoyed finishing a book less. There's no doubt that he is an expert and when it comes to subject matter he generally understands the concepts he is talking about, but his commentary and some of his oversimplified summaries and judgements can only be described as garbage, IMO. Honestly, the best possible review of this book comes from mathematics professor David Aldous as stated in the article itself: "Taleb is sensible (going on prescient) in his discussion of financial markets and in some of his general philosophical thought, but tends toward irrelevance or ridiculous exaggeration otherwise." ridiculous exaggerations and irrelevant side discussions indeed. Translation: garbage. I hated reading it and I'm glad I got this off my chest, I am unable to understand its generally positive reception, except as a bout of anti-intellictualism, even within a highly intellectual topic.)
 * Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
 * Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
 * The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
 * Anti-intellectualism in American Life
 * The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
 * Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family
 * Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, and the Bomb
 * Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs
 * Thinking, Fast and Slow Since I gave a bad review to the black swan, let me leave one good review: This has got to be one of the best books I've ever read. I cannot recommend it enough, and it is written for a general audience, so I recommend it to everyone
 * The Selfish Gene
 * A Promised Land
 * Becoming
 * Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
 * The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
 * The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
 * My Own Words
 * Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
 * The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
 * Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents