Thursday 25 January 2007

Book I'm pretending to read today: 'Vibrational-rotational excitations in nonlinear molecular systems.'

Reviews not found on the back:

‘Vibrational, rotational… sensational!’ The Daily Express.

‘Molecular systems have never been so excitating!’ The Mirror

‘A rip-roaring, block-busting, page-turning romp through the world of multi-quantra intra-molecular transitions in the vicinity of bifurcation points. Don’t read it on public transport – you’ll laugh like a loony!’ The Sunday Times

‘Disappointing’ The New Scientist

Actual first sentence:

“If there would be no God – then what a staff-captain am I?” said one of the characters in a novel by Dostoevskii. In a similar way we can exclaim: “If there would be no nonlinearity – then what physics would that be?”

Difficult to pick my favourite word there: obviously ‘staff-captain’ is very tempting, but I’m going to have to go for ‘exclaim’.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wanted to send this to my best friend, Marian T Stankovich, PhD, Professor of Chemistry at Minnesota University. She would have enjoyed it had she not died at her desk in 2007. It's so annoying to want to e-mail something amusing to someone you keep forgetting is dead. . . She would have loved everything you write.

Anonymous said...

Quite, quite pleased that I actually understood the title. Not so pleased that the only connotation of which is an afternoon fiddling about with the CG molecular structure on the computer wearing 3D glasses. Ah, college...

nickh said...

Just looked for this book on Amazon.
It's £104. That's one-hundred-and-four-british-pounds. Paperback.
Holy crap! Won't be pretending to read that in a hurry.