Scrooge's Cryptic Carol: Visions of Energy, Time, and Quantum Nature [Hardcover]

Robert Gilmore (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0387948007 | ISBN-13: 978-0387948003 | Publication Date: August 29, 1996 | Edition: 1

When the destination sign on Scrooges train reads "HEAT DEATH" instead of "HEATHROW," when his dead partner Marleys face appears as a talking head in a department store TV, and when the street lights outside his flat begin acting strangely, it is a sign of a bad night to come. Like his famous ancestor, the modern Scrooge is about to be visited by ghosts. But its not his hard heart that needs opening; its his closed mind. Physicist Robert Gilmore, author of the popular Alice in Quantumland, presents here a delightful takeoff, where the three visitations represent Science Past, Present and Future. For everyone who wants a playful, painless yet surprisingly sophisticated introduction to the ideas of modern physics, this is a brilliant tour de force and a charming read.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Robert Gilmore is a lecturer in Physics at Bristol (UK) University. During his long career in particle physics, he worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and the CERN laboratory in Geneva.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 262 pages
• Publisher: Springer; 1 edition (August 29, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0387948007
• ISBN-13: 978-0387948003
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #794,691 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Introduction, June 13, 2000

By 

Ron (Arizona, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scrooge's Cryptic Carol: Visions of Energy, Time, and Quantum Nature (Hardcover)

I found that that book was a bit too simplistic to fully wrap one's mind around. Although the allegories had to be modernized, they could be more consistent with the original much as "Alice in Quantum Land" was. All-in-all a wonderful read and a great introduction to some more complex concepts of science and quantum mechanics.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Humbug- Finaly you will get to see what thermodynamics is all about, October 6, 2007

By 

Humberto Mejia "Still alive and kicking" (Perth, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Scrooge's Cryptic Carol: Visions of Energy, Time, and Quantum Nature (Hardcover)

My profile 44 yo frustrated enterpreneur but hanging in there, have a degree in mechanical engineering.

I have not finished the book yet, as I am also reading it in parallel to "A matter of degrees" by Gino Segré "The refrigerator and the universe" Goldstein & Goldstein, "Why hings are the way they are" Chandrasekhar and "The II law" by Atkins... it is part of this tour de force destined to conquer once and for all the tricky intricacies of thermodymanics.

As with all books that are in the popularizacion level, certain rigorous aspects of the language pertaining words such as heat, temperature are bound to be used sometimes in an intuitive level... so do not be confused if you suddenly read that a body has heat instead of a body has thermal energy, this subtleties are the ones that are discovered by reading many authors and finally come to handle the terms in their rigourous usage.

About the book, it is delightful and perhaps one of the best introductions you can have to the subject. Firs of all, it guides you to something hat in most textbooks is either omitted or mentioned as a curious note- The heat death of the universe- if the universe keeps on expanding because we are beyond escape velocity, then the death of the universe will look like this, it is an important limit to grasp.

This Scrooge is suprisingly astute in its observation to the spirits that visit him, he is not science ignorant.. and the spirits guide us through the laws of thermodynamics in a way that should be obligatory for us to learn in school.

Again I would recommend reading this books at par with some other similars so we can see the subject form many angles, but the prose, the examples and the exposition we see in Scrooge's is something we cannot miss, this is a book for old and young.