Book Blog

This is where I will take notes on what I am reading. May be a daily thing, or just haphazard thoughts and summaries. Spoilers will be in here.

Further information on the books themselves can be found at the Book List.

February 19th, 2025	The Particle Zoo	Side note to yesterday: the weak force is named so because it rarely happens in nature, otherwise matter would be quite unstable. Today I read chapter 6, about symmetry and the Higgs boson. Boy, is any of this hard to believe. Let’s say there is symmetry in the universal. The laws of physics are the same everywhere and all the time. Space independence leads to conservation of momentum, time independence leads to conservation of energy. How particles going back in time and time dilation fit in I don’t know. Charge is another conserved number, so it must have symmetry. Somehow that fits into the particles moving in parallel paths at the same time thing. Color charge is another one, and Weak “charge” is another. These charges, the author says, are relative and arbitrary. What is red to quark A might be blue to quark B. Now that sounds crazy. So “gauge bosons” have to know their relative charge and communicate it. A photon holds a value, so does a gluon, so does a W boson. Then things get real weird. We can’t see the relative “phase” of electrons or “color” of gluons be we sure as hell can see an electron vs a neutrino, so the W is broken. Also, where is the neutral charge W? Why is W so heavy? There is a Higgs field that fills the universe and this field provides mass. Somehow the W interacts and picks up mass, photons and gluons don’t. I don’t know why not. Then there’s some nonsense about the photon and the Z boson both being amalgamations of the neutral W and the B (both undetectable). B is massless and the photon is mostly B with some W, while the Z is very massive and is mostly W. The author says “You can’t make this up”. That is exactly what it sounds like.
February 18th, 2025	The Particle Zoo	Can you discover something you can’t detect? We use that word lightly, like Columbus discovering America. Chapter 5 is about the weak force. It seems a bit more logical than the strong force and gluons. Something is needed to explain beta decay, where a proton or neutron switch “flavors” and emit an electron/positron and antineutrino/neutrino. In quark theory, a quark swaps between up and down and emits a W[eak] boson. This boson has electric charge of +/- 1, since the quark electric charge changes. The boson then decays into the lepton-neutrino pair. Now here are where things get weird, a W boson is 85 times heavier than the proton or neutron. Where the hell is that mass and energy coming from? It is a virtual particle, which I find hard to buy. It “borrows” energy to exist and thus must exist on borrowed time. Their existence is so short they cannot be detected; they travel nano-nano meters before decaying. The weak force has a binary charge, like a coin it can flip states. Thus things exist in pairs, up-down quark, electron-electron neutrino, etc. Except for quarks it’s BS because a heavy quark and become a lighter quark through the weak force a small percentage of the time. Why? The author admits this is not yet known. Is it because quarks don’t exist? The author goes through a sample collision between two protons. In this scenario, they have two gluons interact and become a super energetic gluon that decays into a top and anti-top quark pair. These are the most massive quarks decay to real (i.e., not virtual) W bosons (+ & -) and some other quark; they don’t have to be the same quark(or antiquark). Further decays happen and the quarks emit gluons that snap into more quarks. This goes on until we get stable or fairly stable particles/hardrons like electrons, muons, protons, or pions. That’s the part that gets me. If I understand this correctly, the only things that are actually detected are the particles/hadrons that we were already seeing without the colliders. The tops and W bosons are still speculation as to how these combinations of detectable items came to be. I just don’t know, man.
February 17th, 2025	The Particle Zoo	Chapter 4 is another chapter where things are told to you but nothing is really explained to you. Based on this reading, I am just supposed to take on faith that quarks and gluons exist. It even says in the end it is impossible to “see” a quark or gluon in isolation, but waves this away saying that the way things smash in the LHC proves it and if it weren’t this way, they’d have different results. I’m sure you could come up with another explanation for the results. To be brief, quarks have a color, or trinary, charge and can only exist in neutral combinations. Baryons are RGB, or anti-R anti-G anti-B, and mesons are combinations of a color and its anticolor. They’re held together by gluons, which unlike photons, carry charge. They’re pretty confusing. Quarks are constantly changing color by exchanging gluons. Why? I don’t know. Gluons can also create additional gluons. How? I don’t know. Are there different energy levels of gluons? Are there radio and gamma gluons? When an proton hits another proton, the author says it’s the internal quarks which collide, shooting one off. As it goes off, the gluons “stretch” by creating a gluon chain. Either the quark is pulled back in, or it escapes. The binding energy released turns the gluon string into a quark and antiquark. The quark joins the other two quarks to form a baryon, and the antiquark joins the free quark to make a meson. I may be mistaken, but I thought a proton would be the lightest and thus lowest energy baryon. So if smashing a proton creates a proton and meson, is this proton lighter than the original? Does it have less binding energy? Where did the energy come from? All poorly explained for the sake of simpliciation. I could get this garbage from a Youtube video.
February 16th, 2025	The Particle Zoo	The third chapter is better. It talks about the history of particle physics, starting with classical and going through the 70s. A lot of the JJ Thompson and Rutherford experiments were discussed in greater detail in The Making of the Atomic Bomb. There was some cool information about the invention of the cloud chamber. With permanent magnets, the trails will bend and the radius & direction can be used to determine polarity, speed, and probably mass. With this method, Carl Anderson discovered the positron, which had the bend of an electron that went the opposite direction. This was antimatter predicted by the Dirac equation. I wish more time was spent explaining the Dirac equation and using an example. We can handle the math. Another important discover was a V-trail, which can be explained as a gamma ray photon becoming an electron-positron pair and going off at opposite angles. Through the 30s to the 70s, a number of different particles were found based on the mass. Muons were heavy electrons, but pions, Kaons, and a number of others were somewhere in the proton region of mass. More and more were discovered and the cause was learned to be cosmic rays, or essentially protons traveling from space. Bubble chambers replaced cloud chambers as liquid is more dense and thus there is a higher chance for contact with high speed particles. It then just got more advanced from there. Discovering a bunch of heavy particles and heavier leptons is one thing, but the author did not explain any proof for quarks. Sure, smaller particles make sense at the surface level, but then the gluon and color charge gets out of hand. Hopefully the next chapter gets into that.
February 14th, 2025	The Particle Zoo	I have more problems with the second chapter. It talks about randomness and probability, about how it is impossible to know what type of interaction two particles will have until the moment it happens. I’m fine with that; we have to accept that there will be many unknowns in a level that is unobservable. Then it says there are situations where the electrons will not exchange one photon, but two, or three, or absorb one and emit it later, ad nauseum. The simplest is most likely, but experiment says its probability (alpha) is 1/137. That’s less than 1% of the time. But it follows this up by saying that all of these things, all possible paths for the electron, happen simultaneously. What is the proof of that? How can someone take that seriously? The more you get into it, the more Schrodinger’s Cat theory makes more sense. What is the proof against it? The book provides slim information and I don’t know who the target audience is. It explained what squaring a number is. For the love of God, if you can’t square a number, you are not reading about particle physics. And then we get into antimatter, which is fine, but how particles can travel backwards in time and all this nonsense without even a mathematical proof. So far this book is junk. If a gamma ray photon can turn into a electron-positron pair, does the photon exist at the same time as the particle pair because there is also a path where this does not happen? How does anything exist then?
February 13th, 2025	The Particle Zoo	The first chapter is pretty basic and someone picking up this book would be familiar with most of it. It talked about atoms, atomic particles, and subatomic particles. It touches quarks, electrons, the standard theory, and CERN. It’s a fine introduction but not the most interesting. I began the second chapter which also didn’t provide a lot of information. It broadly talks about general relativity and quantum mechanics as successors to classical physics. An important topic was Feynman diagrams, with the example of two electrons interacting. In words, the approach, exchange a photon, and recoil away from each other. This is Quantum Electro-Dynamics (QED) and explains why electrons repel. The comparison is to two dudes on skateboards who pass a ball. Conservation of momentum has the thrower and receiver go “backwards”. Then if they turn around and throw a boomerang that goes around, the still move “backwards” but now towards each other. This is QED attraction. I’m not satisfied with this explanation for two reasons: First, why is a photon being exchanged? Do electrons constantly fire photons, or does the electron “know” it is in proximity and then fire a photon? Second, how does this explain electrical attraction? An electron would fire a photon “behind” it, which would loop around to the proton? Can a proton fire a photon? Still many questions. This is then used to explain why solids do not pass through each other, because the electrons push each other away. However, clapping my hands has a different reaction than stabbing my hand. How do the knife electrons pass through my hand electrons?
February 12th, 2025	The Making of the Atomic Bomb	I finished the book today. I wanted to stop reading but pushed on through. The accounts of survivors are incredibly difficult to read. Nearly cried. There are so many horrible stories and this was just a small subset. After the initial slaughter, people started to die days later. Once the radiation wore off, the tissue from the gamma radiation took effect and more started to die. Probably 200k died in total, over the next couple years. Some Americans rejoiced, some people like Leo Szilard, Otto Hahn, and Otto Frish were sickened or horrified. I can see why a soldier would be glad that the war would end soon. Better them than you. But the Japanese government dilly-dallied, the Soviets invaded Manchuria, and the Americans dropped another bomb on Nagasaki. The author does not give much coverage to this. Another 100k or so died. While regular bombing continued, the Emperor got involved and forced a Japanese surrender, which ended up conditional. A third bomb would have been ready to drop by the 18th. It’s hard to imagine how much killing and murder occurred in the roughly 10 years of war in Asia and Europe. The people of today did not experience it and do not know its lessons. It will get worse before it gets better.
February 11th, 2025	The Making of the Atomic Bomb	The anticipation to the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima is like waiting to watch an execution. It is an unpleasant wait as this small group of men made the long trip to kill many people. Some of them can remain indifferent to it while I hope some of them felt some negative feeling. Then it happens. The blast itself, the heat, the concussion, the mushroom cloud, is well known. What follows are many pages of quotations from survivors. It all made me very sick to my stomach. The atomic bombing was such a horrible event that it is hard to believe that it really happened. But there is no denial of this war crime. I think this should be required reading for everyone. I’d like to think there’d be no one who justifies the bombing after that.
February 7th, 2025	The Making of the Atomic Bomb	A bit surprised I haven’t written in over a week. Guess I’m kinda lazy. Honestly, it’s a lot of prose and small details without much worth summarizing. The big things are they chose targets, Trinity happened. Where I stopped, the Enola Gay is mid-flight. The writing is good. There’s so much detail and build-up to the Trinity test that I didn’t want to stop reading. I didn’t want to stop now, but I have things to do. I’d like to say the book paints Secretary of War Henry Stimson in a good light. Despite his role, he is strongly opposed to the fire bombings and the area bombings that needlessly kill civilians. I don’t think he wants to use the bomb, and he forbids certain targets like Kyoto, which had zero military value. At them same time, he knows it’s going to mass kill civilians and has to be considered a guilty party. Savage killing was the zeitgeist, though this does not defend any city bombing. The big question everyone has is: would the Japs have surrendered, conditionally, without the atomic bombings? I think so. It’s a simple reality that without material a war cannot be fought. Why is an invasion even necessary if they will let the emperor remain and let the main islands remain in Japanese hands? A blockade would have worked with minimal loss of life.
January 30th, 2025	The Making of the Atomic Bomb	Yesterday I finished the second section of the book. There was some interesting parts about how at Los Alamos Otto Frische was doing some heavy duty experiments with near critical-mass U235. Very dangerous stuff. There was also a very interesting section about an American espionage group in occupied Europe searching for German uranium and scientists. They raced around the frontline, sometimes in front of it, picking up evidence for German nuclear research. They found convincing evidence that the Germans never bothered with a bomb. Groves demanded they find the Congolese uranium, which it was eventually found. Also found in safer Bavaria was a German pile, tucked inside a cliff. Scientists like Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg were picked up before the Soviets could find them. On Friday the 13th, April, a bombing in Japan destroyed all the nuclear work done so far in Japan. That same day (a day earlier in America), Roosevelt died. The final section will go over Trinity and the actual bombings. It starts with Truman’s early days as president and it took a worryingly high number of days to tell him about the bombs. He battled diplomatically with Russia and other less interesting things. On May 1st, Hitler killed himself and the Germans surrendered a week later. The big debate would be how to handle the Pacific. It looks like they were counting on Russia to join the war and put pressure on Japan to surrender. We’ll see how that goes.
January 28th, 2025	The Making of the Atomic Bomb	I have to say, I think Los Alamos is the least interesting part of the book. Maybe if it were more concise, but there are a lot of details I just don’t find interesting. There’s a side-story about Japan’s nuclear bomb work, but they just don’t have enough resources to accomplish anything. There’s background about Tibbets and how he came to lead to the atomic bombing missions, though he didn’t know what he was dropping yet, and Curtis LeMay gaining command over the Pacific. Then the tragic parts. First was the firebombing of Dresden, a city with no military value or significant industry. Some 100k people were killed, many suffocating in their basements due to the flames removing all oxygen. Churchill really was a war criminal. Following this was the development of firebombing of the wooden cities in Japan by B-29s. The planes were used to justify their own cost, even though they were not great and caught fire. Thin excuses for military targets brought death to over 150k people in Tokyo and other cities until the Americans ran out of bombs to use. To them, it was better to kill Japanese than let American soldiers die in an invasion. The topic of conditional surrender is rarely brought up. I can see some of that fear, though it is still hard to justify. Nearly 1 in 10 marines on Iwo Jima was being killed or wounded at this time. The Japanese were not going to do a suicidal charge here. They intended to kill as many as possible before being killed.
January 24th, 2025	The Making of the Atomic Bomb	There’s a lot of personal drama and it’s not very interesting. There are some interesting discussions are implosion and the workings of the bombs. One interesting story was the piles in Washington were found to have an oscillation. They’d produce a lot of energy, then decay for a couple days to dormancy, then increase again and repeat. It was found that some products of fission were Xenon or something, which had a huge neutron absorption rate. Once there was enough Xenon, the reactor would shut down. Then the Xenon would decay to something else, stop absorbing neutrons and everything would pick back up. I don’t think there was much of a solution other than add more uranium to prevent total starvation. There was also a bit about Bohr trying to get Churchill and FDR to discuss the bombs openly with the Soviets, otherwise there’d be a secret arms race between nations and arsenal build up. Churchill was a dick. FDR was interested until Churchill talked him out of it. The next chapter starts with life at Los Alamos. Seems like they had a good time on the weekends for people who were working on WMDs.
January 16th, 2025	The Making of the Atomic Bomb	The big story of this section is the British-Norwegian continued attack on the heavy water supply. The Germans got it back up and running pretty quickly, so the British bombed it during lunch to avoid casualties. The book does not report if there was any loss of life. The Germans then planned to move the factory and water to Germany, as informed by a Norwegian engineer. The only agent in the field organized a bomb to go off when everything was travelling by ferry. 26 people drowned. A senseless loss of life, no different than terrorism. The Germans then had no heavy water and were out of reactor development for the war. Then there was a description of the war in Pacific. Not known to the general public was the different fighting methods of the Japanese. While all eyes were on Europe, the Japanese were fighting to the death. Americans thought them little jungle monkeys, but they were a serious adversary and needed the government’s serious attention. Next chapter and a bunch of scientists come from England to work with the Americans. FDR commits to unconditional surrender, a big mistake.
January 15th, 2025	The Making of the Atomic Bomb	There’s a brief description of the Russian nuclear plans. They sniffed out that other countries had a weapons program when there was radio silence in all the physics journals from those countries. There was a brief investigation until Barbarossa changed priorities. By 1943 it was given some serious attention again. Meanwhile there’s a big drama between Szilard and Groves. Szildard hated the compartmentalization which disrupted the open discussions and ideas between scientists. Groves failed to appreciate that the program essentially existed to due to the insistence of this man and a few other immigrant scientists. In response, Szilard started to seek his patent rights and the man was certainly a fighter. A disgusting story then takes place in which Fermi suggests to Oppenheimer a use for spent nuclear material from the piles: poisoning the food supply. Oppenheimer loves the idea and wants enough strontium to kill half a million people. These are civilians were are talking about. And these scientists are civilians. I have lost all respect for Fermi and what amount I may have had for Oppenheimer. Bloodthirsty animals.
January 14th, 2025	The Making of the Atomic Bomb	The next chapter goes into production of U235 and plutonium. First is the cyclotron method, in which the lighter U235 turns with a tighter arc than U238. The separated U235 is then collected. The Oak Ridge plant in Tennessee is built for hundreds of these machines in Alpha and Beta stages, with problems aplenty. The problem I remember is the magnets. First, there is not enough copper available. The Treasury offers to loan 10,000 tons of silver bullion. This is melted down for wire. The transformers are wound with this uninsulated silver wire and submerged in oil. However the spacing is wrong and the oil is full of metallic FOD so the transformers short. Every one has to be dismantled and sent back for repair. Then there is gaseous diffusion, but it was kind of boring and I didn’t follow it too well. To get plutonium, a uranium reactor would be built in unpopulated Washington desert. The Du Pont engineers were going to helium cool it, but Wigner said, as they knew over a year ago, with better graphite and pure uranium it could be water cooled. A big graphite cylinder with aluminum tubes full of aluminum cans of uranium would be in another uranium tube for water flow, 75k gallons per day. This would fission for weeks and then new uranium cans would be popped in, popping out the old into a pool to continue radiating to safe levels. Then they’d be sent for separation. Something like that.
January 13th, 2025	The Making of the Atomic Bomb	It’s good that the author puts American and British actions against civilians in the atrocities category. Many people ignore these things because they are the “good guys”. But whether it is Germans killing Poles or Brits killing Germans or Russians killing Poles and Germans, it’s all evil. Back at Los Alamos, there is some work with plutonium after the cyclotron is running. They measure a significant amount of secondary neutrons from fission, more than U235. Next there’s talk about implosion and Von Neuman (a visiting adviser) and Teller start to discuss how it can be done seriously, and with less radioactive material. Last, we revisit Bohr in Copenhagen. Interesting to me is that the Nazis let the Danes keep their government because the Germans were incredibly dependent on Danish agricultural exports. A part of this deal was that Danish Jews were off-limits to the Nazis. As the Germans started losing the war, strikes and sabotage increased. This gave the Nazis a reason to take over the government and deal with radical elements. Bohr was on their list. He had an open invitation to England, but first he and his wife escaped across the water to Sweden. He personally tried to get the Swedes to openly declare against the Nazi’s (secret) plan to deport the Jews and take them as refugees. The bureaucracy failed and Bohr went around it directly to the king. His plan worked and the Swedish radio broadcast that it will take Danish Jewish refugees, with some 7000 people escaping to the Swedish coast guard. Fearing assassination, Bohr soon left for England in the belly of a Mosquito bomber over dangerous Norway. He soon learned about the reality of atomic weapons.
January 10th, 2025	The Making of the Atomic Bomb	Los Alamos opens and Oppenheimer’s crew are briefed and discuss what needs to be done. There’s not enough material to test anything, so a lot of this relies on theory. They definitely need help with the ordinance part; they’re not bomb builders and yet they need to be. The plan is to use a gun to combine two separate subcritical materials (with more in parallel) to initiate the reaction. A man named Neddermeyer has the idea to use a crushing implosion to bring the material together, but is mostly shot down. A parallel topic is the switch from precision bombing of German targets to area bombing and targeting civilians. The British wished to lower losses and switch to night-bombing. Dropping bombs half-blindly leads to the official adoption of area bombing using explosives and incendiary. The area bombings of Luebeck and Cologne proved successful. To be explicit, the target was no longer factories but the residential areas. Project Gomorrah was designed to destroy Hamburg. Several night bombings by the British and day bombings by the Americans destroyed some parts of the city in July 1943. On the 27th, the air conditions and the mixture of explosives and incendiaries were just right. A firestorm was created; a hurricane of fire, one massive fire over the city, was hot enough to melt the roads. Humans burst from the heat. 37k to 45k civilians, mostly women, children and elderly, were killed. This is horrific and shows the idea the using inhuman methods to “shorten the war” and to “save lives” do not work at best, and are lies to cover intentional war crimes at worst.
January 9th, 2025	The Making of the Atomic Bomb	The project brings on a new leader: General Leslie Groves. He is overall commander and seems to be good at organization and getting things done. He built the Pentagon, after all. He wanted to go overseas and leave Washington, but was not given much choice. Oppenheimer, despite his Communist ties, was chosen to lead the bomb project. Just watch the movie for that. The Japanese have weirdly decided that the bomb was not possible given their resources and also to spend millions of dollars on a cyclotron for bomb development. The Norwegians and British performed some covert operations against the heavy water facility in Norway held by the Germans. The first attempt ended in disaster, with two planes crashing and the survivors executed. The second attempt succeeded and set the Germans back well over a year in heavy water production. The most interesting part has been the Chicago pile work. I’d like a movie on that. The 57 layers of graphite and uranium, something like at 12’ sphere, took several full-time weeks to build. Cadmium control rods were inserted in several locations to absorb neutrons. Then the day came when they started to remove rods and take measurements. Everything matched Fermi’s calculations. Once the last rod was removed, the readings went up and up and up. It would not be stopped. While nerves were high, Fermi took data for 4 minutes and gave the order for the control rods to be returned. A controlled nuclear reactor had been made with natural uranium.
January 7th, 2025	The Making of the Atomic Bomb	Not much of interest has happened after Pearl Harbor. It’s mostly a lot of drama about bureaucracy and organization in the different projects. The New Yorkers are forced to move to Chicago, while Berkley remains in place. Oppenheimer is brought in to run Berkley. Lots of things happen until General Leslie Groves is given overall command, and he seems to be the only one who gets things done, though he didn’t want the job. Fermi and the now Chicago group build various experimental “piles” to get slow-neutron fission out of natural uranium. It’s a lot of engineering. They need big blocks of pure graphite, good uranium, spherical shapes, low absorbing containers, etc. Previous experiments showed a k factor between .8 and .9, meaning less than 1 neutron released on average. The goal is obviously to have more than 1 for a chain reaction. Things seem fine for the plutonium guys; I don’t remember the details. Also I think the Germans gave up on a bomb. There was also a long bit about the hydrogen, or “super”, bomb, in which a fission bomb creates enough heat to fuse hydrogen (deuterium) to helium. It is seriously considered.