A Grand and Bold Thing
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey was the first systematic, beautifully-calibrated survey of the sky and everything in it. It’s also the first survey to be digital, that is, log on to the website and download galaxies.
A Grand and Bold Thing is about the very human scientists who built the survey: people doing their best, screwing up anyway, fixing it, running into trouble with the money, getting their feelings hurt, forming armed camps, and managing the unintended consequences of their best intentions. But they never gave up, And they found all kinds of things in all areas of astronomy: asteroids in whole families, star streams around the Milky Way, the era when quasars were born, the evolution of galaxies, the structure of the universe on the large scale, and compelling evidence for dark energy. With the Sloan, cosmologists could see the universe as a whole, as a single system with parts that interact and evolve. And then they made the whole thing public. Go look.
The Jasons
The Jasons (Viking/Penguin, 2006) is about a group mostly of academic physicists which has spent every summer for the last 45 years working on problems for the government, mostly for the defense department and mostly classified. Academics generally dislike classified work, but these Jasons are some of the country’s smartest scientists. The book won a prize in 2008 from American Institute of Physics.
After the Death of a Child
After the Death of a Child (Free Press, 1996; JHU Press, 1998) is about what has changed in the long term in parents whose children have died. I wrote it because my own son died and about four years later, I wanted to know whether my reactions were normal; and they were. Nevertheless, the book is not autobiographical.
Read More:
Short article in New York Times about the biology of grief