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You are here: Home / Books / For A Good Time In Cambridge…Tonight!

For A Good Time In Cambridge…Tonight!

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So it’s here — Publication Day!  The Hunt for Vulcan is now live.

There’s a bit of backstory on how the book came to be over at Gizmodo (thanks JeffreyW!). Spoiler alert: Ta-Nehisi Coates bears part of the blame.

More backstory on Einstein’s role in all this here.

And last, tonight (in an hour and a half actually) this:

Levenson_BkTlk_flyer.REVISED

If that doesn’t read too well:  I’ll be talking about the book with my colleague, the wonderful physicist and historian of science David Kaiser at 6 p.m.  We’ll be at the MIT Museum — free and open to the public.

If you can’t make it, there will be alternatives.

And with that:  shameless self promotion at least temporarily brought to a halt.

Reader Interactions

42Comments

  2. 2.

    A guy

    No offense but if I was in Cambridge and given the option of attendance at your gig or shoving fish hooks thru my eyelids, I’d take the fish hooks

  4. 4.

    Tom Levenson

    @A guy: To which I respond, offense taken.

    Or to put it another way: here’s a couple of hooks. What’re you looking at now, my man?

    Jeez, dude.

  8. 8.

    Phylllis

    Added to my wishlist. I really enjoyed Newton and the Counterfeiter. Alas. nowhere near Cambridge, so will have to pass on tonight’s event.

  9. 9.

    dmsilev

    My first introduction to the Vulcan story was via Isaac Asimov; he wrote a series of real-science essays back in the 70s, one of which was called “The Planet That Wasn’t”. Cool stuff.

  10. 10.

    BGinCHI

    Congrats Tom. Great accomplishment and a fascinating topic, with a blurb from Junot Diaz no less.

    Hipster….

    /Raising my glass to you from Norway.

  11. 11.

    Betty Cracker

    Congrats! If the Vulcans would invent that transporter already, I’d definitely attend!

  12. 12.

    Mr. Longform

    I want to attend the thing where Tom swings “A guy” around by the fish hooks and explains how there isn’t really such a thing as centrifugal force.

  14. 14.

    Brachiator

    I saw the Gizmodo piece earlier this morning. Great anecdote on one of the inspirations for your book. In a way, what Einstein did was similar to what earlier astronomers did when they swept away the Ptolemaic spheres that were needed to account for planetary motion.

    Congratulations on the new book.

  15. 15.

    Matt McIrvin

    I’ve always wondered how James Clerk Maxwell felt when he calculated the speed of an electromagnetic wave in his system of equations and it matched the measured speed of light.

    Einstein’s moment must have been similar.

  17. 17.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    I emailed a link to G but as a poor graduate student, he’ll probably check it out from the library. Possibly even the one he’s going to start working at in a few weeks.
    ;-)

    BTW, it turns out that municipal employees in California have to take a loyalty oath to the US and CA constitutions. Very weird. I remember having to do it years ago when I worked at UCLA (which made me a state employee).

  19. 19.

    MomSense

    @Tom Levenson:

    It’s best to just ignore him.

    Congratulations on your book. I’m going to buy it for the “house”. Every year the house gets books for Christmas that I think the inhabitants will enjoy.

  21. 21.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Tom, I just downloaded The Hunt for Vulcan and really look forward to reading it. Hope all goes well tonight. Me, I’m off in a few minutes to see David Suchet (!) as Lady Bracknell in a (London) West End production of The Importance of Being Earnest, which is among my most favoritest plays evah.

  22. 22.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @MomSense:

    What a great idea! I’m going to do the same.

    i live alone, so a book for “the house” is a book “for me” — but it feels ever so slightly less self-indulgent when I use your terminology.

  24. 24.

    MomSense

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    It’s really fun. I just bought Between the World and Me because I think it is an important work and I want my boys to read it. I found an interesting history of the blues and a cool book called Natural Born Heroes by the author of Born To Run.
    If anyone has suggestions for interesting reads, please do share.

  25. 25.

    Schlemazel

    @A guy: at least that would make you smart

    you have proven incapable of learning so that smart is the only kind you’ll ever get.

  33. 33.

    Felonius Monk

    Congratulations on the book, Tom. I saw you on The History Channel yesterday in the Einstein program they were rerunning.

  38. 38.

    Joy in FL

    I have two copies ordered– one for me & one for a friend. I think it’s a great topic, and I wish I could attend your talk.

  39. 39.

    WaterGirl

    Tom, my two copies arrived today! The book looks fascinating and it’s really quite beautiful. Some books seem to be produced with too little care these days – cheep paper, sloppy margins, sometimes crooked, etc. Your book was obviously done with great care.

    These two copies are gifts, and I can’t wait to give them.

    Edit: is it wrong if I try to read a few pages – very carefully! – before the book leaves my hands?

  40. 40.

    Tom Levenson

    Thanks to (almost) all. Just got back from the farrago to read this lovely thread. Proper thanks on the blog tomorrow, but for now — don’t listen to what John says about y’all. You’re the greatest. (With the obvious exception.)

  41. 41.

    SteverinoCT

    Tom, I got the Kindle version. I cracked it open, so to speak, at lunch; I just finished it now, with various interruptions like chores and dinner. Excellent read.

    I discovered two typos:

    — Chapter 9, first paragraph, Einstein says, “I know longer understand it myself.”

    — Chapter 10, when Einstein is making his presentation to the academy on Nov 18, 1915, he says, “…a perihelion advance of 43 arc minutes per century,” which of course should be “arc seconds”.

    That’s in the Kindle edition.

    I will be composing a suitable encomium in the Amazon review, tomorrow.

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