​The book is not particularly my cup of tea. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it, despite the sad subject. The Golden State Killer, also known as the East Area Rapist, raped and killed from the 70s until just recently when he was caught. An ex-cop! Michelle died in 2016 before the book was started.

I saw Patten Oswald, the author's widower, on a talk show and was intrigued. The book was stitched together from McNamara's extensive research and writings on the GSK. In fact, she provided the moniker. She was obsessed with this particular case. She maintained a crime web site for many years. She was tireless in her quest to see the GSK put away. Endless interviews, site visits and so on were her bread and butter.

She had written published articles on the subject, as well as several partially complete  essays, and reams of notes and thoughts. These were compiled together into this book.

Her writing is excellent. The subject matter is gruesome, but she never allowed the reader to get drawn too deep into the darkness. Unfortunately, other parts of the books are not her words directly. The narrative jumps about in time, which is confusing, is it tries to pull the pieces together.

Reading about young women (and couples), attacked, bound, psychologically tortured, and often finally raped and killed is pretty hard.

The GSK was finally found by submitting DNA to a commercial DNA ancestry tracing service. The bad guy turned out to be a cop. Surprised? I am not. Rape is about exercising power and control over others. That is practically the job description of a cop.

The book is engrossing and despite that fact that I knew how it was to end, enjoyable (and disturbing). It is a real shame that the murderer was caught just after her death and the release of the book. She earned the right to see the story's ending.       

This is the great man's attempt to explain the two theories to the lay person in 1916. The treatment of Special Relativity is more or less complete and not hard to follow.

Aside: No real math is involved in the book. But a good physical imagination does not hurt.

The treatment of the General Theory is quite cursory, mostly because the General Theory is much, much more complex that the Special Theory.

I have read such explanations many times. It was interesting to read them in Einstein's own (translated) words.

The only point of interest for me is noting that, in 1916, the metaphor for rapid travel was railroads. When it came to freefall (zero-g), there were no comparators. Today, the idea of weightlessness is common, and a spaceship is the usual vehicle for motion related metaphors.  

Einstein used basic physics, and a preternatural ability to cut to the bone of an argument, to take the fact that the speed of light is constant regardless of you motion and turn it into a simple paper that was not fully accepted by his fellow physicists for another decade.

Sunsets can be fabulously beautiful. Get the conditions just right and they are awe inspiring. Every other woman's profile on dating sites cite "walks on the beach at sunset" as a favorite activity. "Spiritual" people have been known to pity the poor slobs (i.e.: people like me) who cannot see the greatness of god or the glory of nature in a sunset. It is true… I do not see that. I think I see a little more.


When I see a sunset, perhaps off a beach in Hawaii, my thoughts have been known to wonder down a number of paths. Here is one spontaneous, extemporaneous, well thought out, chain of idle musings, while staring at the horizon.


My first thoughts go to the beauty. When the clouds are just right, with the  sunlight, forced to colors from the redder end of the spectrum, bouncing off them,   the sense of 3D hugeness is hard to avoid. The sun itself goes pear shaped as it touches the horizon. All of that is caused by water and warm wet air. The clouds are suspended micro-droplets of water. Evaporating water changes the density of the air and its refractivity. Nice, very nice, but boring to watch. So again my mind wanders...


I then see the ocean. Water.  Dihydrogen monoxide. H2O. The most dangerous chemical on Earth (floods and such take more lives than any other natural disaster).


The Earth has a lot of it. The average depth of the oceans is about four kilometers. If the Earth's surface where a little less dimpled, we would all be under thousands of meters of water. Having lots of water is not unique to the Earth in the solar system. But having water in all three forms -- solid, liquid and gas -- on the surface, is.


"Water, water everywhere" is true in one sense. Hydrogen makes up 75% of the matter in the universe. Helium, a "noble" non-reactive, chemically boring gas, makes up 23% of the universe. The remaining 2% is everything else. Oxygen is number three on the hit parade at 1%, taking half of what is left, and carbon is number four  at 0.5%, again taking half of what is left. Hydrogen compounds are everywhere. The simplest hydride of oxygen is water. H2O. So it should be no surprise that there is a lot of it about.


Water is both an acid and a base at the same time. The universal solvent. Real chemistry needs a solvent because most chemistry of note requires a liquid where the atoms are close together, but can move freely, get cozy with each other, and then move on. Water was required to create most of the minerals that today make up both the crust of the Earth and our bodies. Most of the Earth's hydrogen is bound up in water. Oxygen reacts strongly with almost everything  (just ask the astronauts who lost their lives on Apollo 1) and is big part of the crust of the planet. If not for life on Earth, there would be no oxygen in the atmosphere today. The Earth would have "rusted" it all out. In a feedback loop, life created oxygen, which created new minerals, which created more new life and so on. Most of the Earth's crust came from life, directly or indirectly. And that needs water. In that sense, there is truth to the idea of a living planet (aka Gaia).


Water has a few more unique properties. Have you ever noticed that ice floats? Of course you have. But why? As a general rule, gases are less dense then liquids, and liquids are less dense than solids. Most solids sink in the molten version of themselves. But not water. And that is a damn good thing. It is a result of the dipole nature of  the water molecule. As it solidifies, the dipole molecules line up in such a way as to decrease density slightly (about 9%). If ice sank, here is what would happen. Some ice would form in winter. It then sinks into the colder and colder water where it will never melt. Slowly, the water column would fill with ice from the bottom up. And finally all the water on Earth would be solid (a snowball world). The Earth would be white as a cue ball and highly reflective. New incoming solar radiation would be reflected back into space, keeping the Earth frozen forever.


Water creates snowflakes and rime and other crystals. Delicate little displays of fantastic mathematical symmetries. Fabulously beautiful.


Water in space is creepy. What would happen if you hand-wrung a water-soaked towel on the Space Station? The water would simply move from the inside of the towel to the outside. Now you have a cylinder of water between you hands, with a towel going down the center. But it gets weirder. Due largely to surface tension, the water would spontaneously start creeping up (or down?) your arms. Shades of "The Blob".


To a chemist, water is strange. It bucks a lot of trends. Its boiling and freezing points are much higher than other similar hydrides like hydrogen sulfide,  which boils at -62 degrees C. Water's boiling point "should" be lower still. water 's Heat of Vaporization is also exceptionally high (this makes it ideal for steam engines). Ditto water's surface tension and cohesion. These properties result in rain, rather than what I would imagine as a choking falling mist. All these properties make water act like water.


Where did all the water come from? There was none on the hot primordial Earth. We are not 100% sure, but a lot probably came from comets containing cubic miles of the stuff impacting the Earth. And just a few hundred millions years later, life and water was all over the place.


Water is everywhere. On planets, and in nebulae (giant gas clouds), comets, and other cold objects  between the stars.


After the sun sets, the stars come out. Perhaps you can see Andromeda, the remotest naked eye object and our twin galaxy, two million light years away? You will need good eyes and dark skies, and you will need to be north of the equator. Whole civilizations could have risen and fallen multiple times in the 2 million year transit time of the light. What would a civilization that is one million years old look like? But I digress...


Where was I? Oh yeah. Yep… the sunset sure is purdee.         


Full disclosure: OK, I had to look up the boiling point of H2S and the percentages for carbon and oxygen in the universe, so it is unlikely that those numerical values would have been featured in my spontaneous daydream.

Krauss is an excellent writer, akin to Carl Sagan, and has a bent for philosophy. The book, as the title implies, is the history of big ideas… all physics of course ("god" is actually a very small idea).


The book is sprinkled with anecdotes about people who do not think like you and I.


E.g.: Paul Dirac (a mathematical genius who has his own formula named after him) was giving a lecture involving a lot of math. A student stated "Sir… I do not understand what you did between steps 12 and 13." Half a minute went by. Another student asked Dirac "Sir, are you going to answer his question?" Dirac replied "What question?"


Faraday was asked what all his electrical experiments were good for by Gladstone, the future PM of England. He is reputed to have replied "Well, sir, there is a good chance that in the near future you will be able to tax it."


The book has virtually no math in it, and is relatively easy to follow, up until it isn't. Even though I know the nomenclature fairly well, I get lost in the sea of particles (as did many physicists in the 60's).


Physicists have, throughout history, been dragged kicking and screaming toward their conclusions. Each step was thought almost ridiculous. There is a speed limit in the universe! Absurd! The "two-slit experiment" tells us of a ghostly world of weird interactions, and that weirdness is the foundation of our modern world.  


Here is my encapsulated version:


If you want a nice overview of the progress and challenges of modern physics to date, this is a terrific place to start.    

1. Galileo provides some moving insights, and Newton discovers gravity (it was over there, in a box, all along) between jobs writing about the occult and alchemy.
2. Faraday delves into electricity and changes the world… later.
3. Maxwell get mathematical with rays of light and writes his famous equations, out of which pops "c", the speed of light.
4. Not satisfied, Einstein invites all his relatives.
5. Fermi gets involved and everything gets all timey/wimey.
6.  Max Plank causes interference and everything gets blurry.
7. Hiesenberg is uncertain; Plank is very small about the subject; and Einstein goes big.
8. Subatomic particles (neutrons, neutrinos, meson, pions etc) start accelerating our expectations.
9. It is confusing.
10. Feynman makes a notation, and QED, things get better.
11. Madame Wu shows that the universe leans left, not right.
12. Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg unite the particles, break symmetry, and create the Standard Model.
13. Murray Gell-Mann introduced gluons to quarks while trying to understand super-conductivity.
14. Weak and strong forces unite to create W and Z.
15. And the Higgs field is like a total drag, man. 

The physics of the last 60 years (my lifetime) have illuminated the world in ways that we cannot imagine (OK, I read the book and I cannot imagine). Near the end of the book, I confess I got lost, like the physicists of the 20th century, in a sea of particles.


The final chapter talks of great things: CERN, SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator) and LIGO (Laser Interferometry Gravitational Observatory) are some of the biggest, most expensive, machines ever built.


True monuments to the power of the human mind and utter weirdness of the world we live in. If it were not for cell phones and other forms of modern magic, I would think it all bullshit.


If you want a nice overview of the progress and challenges of modern physics to date, this is a terrific place to start.