This week I have finished the book “Grădină din Sticlă” by Tatiana Țîbuleac. It has always impressed me how books can teleport us to places within seconds. The combination of paper and imagination trumps Virtual Reality. Tatiana Țîbuleac took me to Chishinau. Her minimalistic and concealed style has impressed me. So much was said in so few words. No, it’s what was not said. Her sentences are like clues on a murder mystery scene that require focused attention to stitch the complete picture. But once you uncover the next plot development, you feel elated from puzzle-solving the story. And while I could not relate to the characters, I could smell my hometown from the pages of the book.
So where will books take you this summer?
People to be inspired by. Chien-Shiung Wu is widely considered one of the most influential scientists in history.worked on the Manhattan Project at Columbia University and developed a process of enriching uranium to produce large quantities as fuel. Wu’s work was termed the most important development in the field of atomic and nuclear physics to date; a 1959 AAUW press release called her experiment the “solution to the number-one riddle of atomic and nuclear physics.” Her male co-workers Lee and Yang received the Nobel Prize for disproving the Parity Law. In a move that makes you mad just reading it, the prize committee overlooked Wu. Nevertheless Chien-Shiung Wu led a life of many firsts: the first woman president of the American Physical Society, the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Princeton, the first female recipient of the National Academy of Sciences’ Comstock Prize.
While reading “The Three-Body Problem”, a science fiction novel by Liu Cixin I was wondering “why 3 body problem has not been solved?” The issue can be summarized as: /how to predict the motion of 3 bodies interacting with each other through gravitation?/ The problem had been solved since Newton for 2 bodies : the gravitation law allowed one to find the position vectors. But the N-bodies (with N >2) problem happens to be much more complicated.It has been proven that there are not “usual” (integral) solutions for the problem. So lots of research has been done during the XXth century to find more useful numerical solutions. Physicists have discovered interesting and practicable solutions, but research is still going on to find “better” solutions.
Futher Reading:
“A Remarkable Periodic Solution of the Three-Body Problem in the Case of Equal Masses on JSTOR” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2661357?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents) alain chenciner and richard montgomery
“along the river during the qingming festival” (1085–1145)