Reviews for A physicist on Madison Avenue

The average rating for A physicist on Madison Avenue based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-04-09 00:00:00 Mitchell Conahan The title essay is a very important anodyne to those who believe that the psychocrats of the advertising industry can control our decisions by manipulating our subconscious minds. The author is at a boardroom discussion on what colors, pictures, etc make people buy magazines. He graphs the sales figures and discovers a normal curve--random variation (except that, for some reason, people buy more magazines in December). He attempts to point out the randomness, and is politely snubbed. It's useful to consider how often such scenes are repeated in divers boardrooms. The smug certainty of the advertisers is in inverse proportion to their innumeracy, at least in this case. How many other cases?

Review # 2 was written on 2012-03-15 00:00:00 Warren Bonner This is a delightful book by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. The basic premise of the book is that most of the physics mechanisms are emergent. For example, Newton's Laws are not an approximation to quantum mechanics. They emerge from quantum mechanics, when the quantity of matter involved becauses sufficiently large; they are a "collective organizational phenomenon". Robert Laughlin gives lots and lots of examples of this sort of thing. This book is perhaps more about the philosophy of physics, rather than about physics itself. For example, he writes about his father, At one point he became exasperated with the barrage of ignorant statements about reality from the kids and explained, barely controlling himself, that logic was the systematic method of committing error. Laughlin does not give complete descriptions of the physics concepts that he discusses; instead, brings up various issues where he disagrees with the majority of physicists. Then he uses metaphors to help the layman understand the issue. For example, in reference to an aggregation of atoms, he writes, One might compare this phenomenon with a yet-to-be-filmed Stephen Spielberg movie in which a huge number of little ghosts lock arms and, in doing so, become corporeal. Or, with another metaphor, The generation of uncertainty by amplifiers resembles the generation of vacuousness by news organizations when there is no news. Laughlin compares the dilemma of students in understanding superconductivity to contestants on the "Jeopardy" game, he compares the energy gap in a superconducting state to Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments in which Moses parts the Red Sea, and an idealized model of superconductivity to the game Sim City. And my favorite, Nuclear force is typically a student's first encounter with the idea that empty space is not really empty. Coming to grips with this fact--a physics rite of passage--is simultaneously thrilling and upsetting, like sneaking off to a dark place with your girlfriend and discovering that you have mistakenly gone to the bunkhouse. While the book is very entertaining, Laughlin does not give enough of the background for each of the issues he brings up, for a non-specialist to truly understand it. But the lighthearted humor, the fantastic metaphors and his keen perceptions about physics make this a great book.