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Podcast Mentions

MR TOMPKINS

George Gamow

Mr. Tompkins" is a series of popular science books written by physicist George Gamow in the 1930s and 1940s. The books use fictional stories and characters to explain complex scientific concepts in an accessible way. The main character of the series is Mr. Tompkins, an average man with a keen intere...

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StarTalk Radio

The Mr. Tompkins series was recommended, which explores physics and how things get distorted when travelling close to the speed of light.

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And he wrote a series of books called Mr. Tompkins, the Mr. Tompkins series. And this is, Mr. Tompkins, I think that the root name of the series is Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland, but is it Wonderland? No...

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The Mr. Tompkins series was recommended, which explores physics and how things get distorted when travelling close to the speed of light.

"

And he wrote a series of books called Mr. Tompkins, the Mr. Tompkins series. And this is, Mr. Tompkins, I think that the root name of the series is Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland, but is it Wonderland? No, that's Alice in Wonderland. I'm getting my fictional worlds mixed up, but it's definitely Mr. Tompkins. And he goes into worlds where the constants of the laws of physics are different. And one of the stories is the speed of light is 60 miles an hour or like 100 miles, something where you're in a car and you can approach the speed of light just as a regular Joe doing so. And when you do that, he then describes what you see and how things get distorted and so I highly recommend the whole Mr. Tompkins series because it brings exotic phenomenon of physics into your everyday life experience.

So if you go very fast near the speed of light, the light sources in front of you become basically blue shifted. They have higher energy than you would otherwise measure them to have. And if you look behind you, everything has lower energy.

Note: The book recommendations on this page are discovered automatically from podcast transcripts, and may be incorrect or incomplete.