A collection of essays that appeared in the magazine American Scholar, and probably elsewhere. They're all well written and rather chatty. Bernstein got to hang out with many great physicists, so it's a fun kind of memoir almost. Not just physicists - Bernstein got to hang out with Stanley Kubrick when 2001 A Space Odyssey was being filmed! Bernstein was at Los Alamos and got up close to atomic weapons. He's a particle physicist so he talks about Gell-Man and quarks. There's quite a bit about Minsky and artificial intelligence. Some of it is so dated it gets a bit painful, as he's explaining bits and bytes and FORTRAN. Well maybe for some people it'll be a nice introduction but for me, whew, I was coding FORTRAN in 1970! ( )

Essays reprinted from the New Yorker, on physics, Time, energy, artificial intelligence, game theory, and science as "theory".

Bernstein can get distracted. For example, his interviews with Gell-Mann and George Zweig on the 1963 invention of the quark, is not helpful or even clever. However, he provides one of the best explanations for us laymen of "Time". He walks us through the way Einstein changed the world, moving from Newton's concept of "absolute time and space", to the conjoined space-time and the formidable entropic "time's arrow". He reminds us that the 1905 paper, "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Korper" is almost "entirely free of mathematical formulae", the obstacle being our resistance to the idea of Time. Even so, Bernstein fails to flatly say that E=mc2 is really about Time, and the fact that Time is affected by motion and even gravitating matter. And he gives short-shrift to Poincare's theorem, particularly in light of the observation that our known universe, all of it, is approximately 15 billion years old. It is not enough to say that relativity gives us two general possibilities: Either expansion continues until the universe dies in a "heat death", or the expansion (entropy increasing) will slowly decelerate, then stop, and then reverse itself, recontracting "to its original state--a ball of superdense matter". There is still that entropic issue, and the mathematics of the arrow.