The book review No. 23: A short history of nearly everything.

I would love to thank God, give me a chance to take this book. And I seemed I was ready to enjoy reading this book. Bill Bryson describes the science from Big bang to Life. I am very impressed by this book and him. I am excited, I am not sure, how hard I have to learn to write this level of book. But, I am excited now.

You can enjoy each topic, carefully chosen and its good introduction in this book. He is good at writing motivate you read the topic. Actually, this book is relatively long, like 500 pages. But this writing is very inspiring. You will realize you read faster than you usually do.

I just am excited to read. Many physicists have been contributing to the science. A lot of geniuses were there our history. Each big innovation in science sometimes is not triumphant in short term but beautiful in long term. Sometime I am struggling for science not to have enough achievement though, I can see my work in long term now. Even if I do my best today but end up nothing today, I have tomorrow to pursuit as long as God gives me. I need to be careful to go up each scientific process, but I don’t need to be trapped by them. When I am tired, when I feel failing, I could see long term. Let’s challenge tomorrow again.

So as a scientist, I have 2 things I am pursuing. One is the study of magnetism. The other is development of experimental techniques.

The magnetism: In short, the physicists who are working for magnetism are trying to answer two questions. One is “What is the magnetic structure like?” The other is “Why is the magnetic structure?” There are many kind of magnetic structure though. I will use two of them here. The ferromagnetism which is every spin aligned in the same direction in the material, antferromagnet in which every spin aligned alternately in the material and we have several more kind of magnetic structures. Once we know the structure of magnet, the next thing we would love to know is why they aligned like this? To know this we hit one of spin in the material and make wave. By looking close at this wave we could know how the spins are connected.

Neutron scattering experiment techniques: I am using neutron scattering to study magnetism. Neutron is very useful study of material. Since neutron has no charge and so small. So it can penetrate inside of materials. And also neutron have spin, this spin have interaction with the spin in the material. Because, the spin is the source of magnetism, neutron can be strong tool to study magnet directly. I am also responsible for the development of experimental techniques. The neutron scattering has almost 80 years of history. However, we have still lot of things to do.

I am excited to read this book. Of course, I am a professional scientist. My first responsibility is to find out the origin of magnet by using neutron scattering techniques. But, I realized, I also want to know the history of this science. Like a puzzle game, what part of pieces I am going to fill for the collection of knowledge of science. And then, I would love to pass on the map for the next generation. I am enjoying science now. I really love to do that.