I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in physical chemistry, and introductory courses for majors and non-majors. I also supervise our teacher education program that prepares students to teach chemistry and physics in secondary schools. I advise the students in the program to maintain a file of articles, pictures, and references coordinated with the topics that are likely to come up in their curricula. I believe that the same practice can help teachers at any level. What I have in mind are found in the titles below. Some are books published a while ago; all are items I have read recently and which I think might be of interest other teachers of science, and especially chemistry. I pass them along to you with my recommendation.

Hal Harris

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Selection for January, 2009: "The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth of America" by Steven Johnson, Riverhead Books (Penguin Group) 2008 254 pp. 9781594488528, $25.95 The BCCE in 1994 was at Bucknell University, not far from the US home of Joseph Priestley, and I was one of a group that went there to see his place. While I knew some of his scientific contributions, I did not at the time appreciate how important a role he had played in the intellectual life of the nascent republic. While they were not close when either of them was in office, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams exchanged 165 letters during the last years of their lives. In them, the two men wrote about Alexander Hamilton (a mutual antagonist) twice, Benjamin Franklin five times, and George Washington three times. They mentioned Joseph Priestley, the expatriate Unitarian and discoverer of oxygen, fifty two times. Such was the influence on his adopted country of this "amateur" scientist. Priestley was no theorist - he left to others (including Lavoisier) the careful quantitative experiments that were essential to prove that mass is conserved, even in chemical reactions that involve gases. Priestley's science was of sufficient quality to get him into the Royal Society, but his theological tracts against the worship of saints and the divinity of Jesus got him run out of the England. Priestley made all of the details of his work available freely to colleagues, hiding nothing and spreading his love for experimentation to anyone showing an interest. His motto, "Exciting the Attentions of the Ingenious" would be a good one for my JCE Feature, "The Cost-Effective Teacher".

Selection for February, 2009: "Group Theory in the Bedroom, and Other Mathematical Diversions" by Brian Hayes, Hill and Wang (Macmillan) 2008 269 pp. 9780809052196, $25 I am an enthusiastic fan of Brian Hayes' "Computing Science" column in the Sigma Xi publication, American Scientist, which is the source of most of the essays in this book. Before that, I read his articles in The Sciences, a now-defunct but beautiful little magazine once published by the New York Academy of Sciences. Hayes claims not to be a mathematician, but he brings computer tools to bear on problems that use mathematical concepts that are familiar to most students of science. The title essay is the one that is most closely related to the chemistry curriculum. Schemes that guarantee that your mattress will get its lumps evened out when your turn it every few months is an application of group theory that I will use as an example in my quantum chemistry course. Another essay discusses the location of the "continental divide", a topological problem that may have occurred to you if you have ever driven across the country and seen markers for it in places that seem odd or impossible. "Inventing the Genetic Code" looks back at the 1950's, when it was not known how DNA/RNA specifies proteins to be synthesized. Elegant schemes were proposed by Gamov, Feynman, Teller and especially Crick, whose "adaptor hypothesis" is called by Hayes "the prettiest wrong idea in all of twentieth-century science". As it turned out, evolution thought of an even prettier one.

Selection for March, 2009: "The Symmetries of Things" by John H. Conway, Heidi Burgiel, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss, A. K. Peters Ltd. (Wellesley, Mass) 2008 426 pp. 9781568812205, $75 This beautiful book could certainly enhance your coffee table, but don't buy it just for its looks. Be prepared to spend some time with it, and join the wonder that mathematicians are expressing at the brilliance of this new way of describing and inventing symmetries. "The Symmetries of Things" begins with a classification of the elements of symmetry - the orbifold signature notation, whose features are "wonders, gyrations, kaleidoscopes, and miracles". Combined, they give the "signature" of a pattern. There is a Magic Theorem that tells you how features can be combined. John Conway may be known to you from his cellular automaton "Game of Life" and the puzzles and amusements that have been described by Martin Gardner. His coauthors are a former graduate student (Burgiel) and Goodman-Strauss, who is a mathematician whose exceptionally beautiful illustrations are widely-known. More than twenty years in the making, the book is divided into three parts. The first should be accessible to lay readers who may be lured into mathematical ideas before they realize it. Part two introduces color to symmetry and requires some understanding of group theory (and was more than sufficiently challenging to this physical chemist). Part three is intended only for professional mathematicians and goes into symmetries in higher dimensions. I do not see exactly how this is relevant to chemistry, but I would not be surprised if it finds application in supramolecular chemistry and self-organization.

Selection for April, 2009: "The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn" by Louisa Gilder, Alfred A. Knopf 2008 443 pp. 9781400044177, $27.5 While quantum mechanics has been able to answer many practical questions about the structure and bonding of atoms, molecules, nuclei, and even subatomic particles, it still does not adequately yield its own ultimate meaning. The ability of an electron to be in more than one place at once, to appear on both sides of a node, and to have no defined boundary are only the "down payments" for the mysteries of quantum mechanics, about which even its developers were conflicted. I was fortunate to have heard a David Mermin lecture based on his famous Physics Today (1985 38(4) 38) article, "Is the Moon There When Nobody Looks?", an understandable introduction to the disturbing consequences of what is called "entanglement" that is still well worth reading. The first part of Gilder's description of modern quantum mechanics does not break much new ground, but this reader tuned in when she began to describe David Bohm and his "hidden variables" attempts to find a deterministic interpretation. She builds her history through real correspondence and imagined but plausible conversations between the likes of J. M. Jauch, John Bell and interviews with Nicolas Gisin and Anton Zeilinger. She may have filled some gaps with conversations that never occurred, but through that, she has made clear the disturbing truth about the “meaning” of quantum mechanics.

"Brain Gain: The Underground World of 'Neuroenhancing' Drugs" by Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker April 27, 2009, 2009 p. 32 $4.99 The off-label use of neuroenhancing drugs such as Provigil (modafanil), Adderall (mixed amphetamines), or Ritalin (methylphenidate) is a fact of life and a growing practice in high schools, colleges and universities and in the business world. These drugs are apparently not difficult to obtain, either with a prescription written by a compliant physician, diversion from a family member diagnosed with ADHD, or from Internet sources. Margaret Talbot describes the extent to which these so-called 'smart pills' are being used now, and raises questions about the extent to which they may have harmful side effects or be addictive. Do they constitute an unfair advantage akin to the use of anabolic steroids by athletes? Should they be constrained for that reason? Will we soon be asking our students to pee in a cup before tests? Professors and teachers may be as susceptible as their students to the temptation to try these drugs. Under pressure to complete a manuscript or a proposal, how many will resist the temptation to gain hours of productive work, or clarity of thought? This article makes clear that our society has not yet begun to deal with the consequences of these drugs and their successors.

Selection for May, 2009: "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain" by Oliver Sacks, Vintage Press (Random House) 2007 424 pp. 9781400033539, $14.95 What good is music? Oliver Sacks (author of The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, The Island of the Colorblind, and especially - for chemists - Uncle Tungsten) concludes in the Preface to Musicophilia that there is no apparent evolutionary advantage associated with human appreciation for certain combinations of sounds and rhythm. Nevertheless, music remains one of the most powerful evocators of memory and stimulant of emotion. As is always the case with Sacks, his writing is inventive and his perspective combines neuroscience with experiences that we can relate to. One of his chapters deals with the use of music therapy in the treatment of Alzheimer's and other patients with dementia. My daughter who is a hospice social worker had only recently told me similar stories about clients with whom she has had very positive results using music. Like much of the workings of the brain, the response to music is mysterious. It is great to have a guide like Oliver Sacks to take us on a tour of exploration. This inexpensive paperback edition is revised and expanded from the 2007 clothbound.

Selection for June, 2009: "Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World" by Eugenie Samuel Reich, Palgrave (Macmillan) 2009 266 pp. 9780230224679, $26.99 Jan Hendrik Schön published some of the most exciting and ground-breaking physics of the past decade. He published it in the most prestigious specialty journals such as Physical Review Letters, Nature and Science. He won several important prizes and was being nominated for more of them when a problem came to light. The “problem” was that Schön had no data to substantiate his “discoveries’. His deception was disclosed not by assiduous reviewers or journal editors, nor his supervisors at Bell Labs, but by an ad hoc group of skeptical readers of his papers on solid-state physics, molecular electronics, superconductivity, and nanoscience. They saw that his results were too good to be true, contained identical “background noise” in some figures, and that there were too many breakthroughs in too little time to be plausible. While Eugenie Samuel Reich gets the big picture largely correct, she fails to give sufficient credit, in my opinion, to some junior scientists like Lydia Sohn who risked their own careers to challenge the integrity of a rising supposed superstar. The fundamental problem turned out to have been something that is taught in the first chemistry course - how and why to record one's original data in a scientific notebook.

Selection for July, 2009: "Science Teaching as a Profession: Why it Isn't How it Could Be" by Sheila Tobias and Anne Baffert, Research Corporation 2009 142 pp. 9780963350480, Free The shortage of well-trained science teachers is widely recognized, but the solution to the problem requires first an appreciation of its causes. This little book, which is available free online, addresses the tangible and intangible reasons why fewer talented people choose science teaching as a career or choose not to stay in teaching. Compensation is a factor, but it is not as important as the perceived and real erosion of the status of teaching as a profession. Tobias and Baffert examine the effects of No Child Left Behind and testing, tenure, and unions as both positive and negative influences, and the role of National Board Certification and Professional Learning Communities. Finally, they examine the success of Finland in science and mathematics education, and identify the critical role that teachers have played in that success. This extended essay ought to be required reading for teachers, principals, school boards, and legislators.

"Of Beauty, Sex and Power" by Andrew Gelman and David Weakliem, American Scientist (Sigma Xi) July-August, 2009 p. 310 Having just returned from the Gordon Research Conference on Chemical Education Research and Practice, I can attest to the central role that statistics plays in chemical education. "Of course", every published experiment in chemical education results in a statistical improvement, so it is amazing that all of those three, five, or ten percent improvements have not, so far, changed the overall performance of our students. Statistical methods are essential to prove that one teaching method is superior to another, and the differences are not generally very large. This situation can lead one astray, as the authors show occurred in the published "proofs" by S. Kanazawa that gender ratios are significantly affected by the attractiveness, physical stature, occupations, and tendency toward violence of the parents. A cautionary tale for educational researchers.

Selection for August, 2009: "Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution" by Nick Lane, W. W. Norton 2009 344 pp. 9780393065961, $26.95 When I saw this new book on the subject of evolution, I thought it would probably be one side or the other of the very tired evolution/creationism-"intelligent" design debate. I was delighted to find instead a very smart discussion of the status of our understanding of the origins of life, how life has changed over the millennia, and how we have learned about those things. Mr. Lane is a biochemist who has an insider's understanding and a broad perspective of the status of evolution, and I think the best parts of the book are the places where he points out the things that are not yet agreed upon, or not known at all. The chronologically-organized chapters describe how evolution led to DNA, photosynthesis, the cell, sex, and sight. This is a chemical rather than purely biological view of evolution, and I enjoyed it a great deal. It was nice to see the phrase "chance and necessity" appear in many chapters, an homage to the famous 1971 book by Jacques Monod, which was a Hal's Pick in September 2005.

Selection for September, 2009: "The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie" by Alan Bradley, Delacorte Press (Random House) 2009 384 pp. 9780385342308, $23 Meet Flavia de Luce. You are going to like her. It is 1950 and Flavia, a very precocious eleven year old, lives in a small village in England in a deteriorating grand mansion with her father and two older sisters. Her passion is chemistry, which she has learned on her own by reading a textbook owned by her deceased mother and practiced in a laboratory inherited from her uncle. This little girl is full of the kind of chemical knowledge that fascinated most of us when we were young. She knows all about poisons and describes how to steam-distill urushiol from poison ivy to prank her sister. Flavia puts her wits and her chemistry to work to solve a murder mystery that literally drops on her doorstep. A stranger (who turns out to have had deep connections to the family) is found dying in the cucumber patch by Flavia herself. When Flavia's father is arrested for the crime, the young CSI goes to work to clear him and also to discover who the stranger was and why he was killed. This is an entertaining, light and wholesome read. It has already won the Debut Dagger Award from the Crime Writer's Association. Flavia reminds me of Harry Potter, but her power comes from chemical knowledge rather than magic.

Selection for October, 2009: "Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America's Public Schools" by Eric A. Hanushek and Alfred A. Lindseth, Princeton University Press 2009 411 pp. 9780691130002, $29.95 America's public schools are in trouble, and there are few who would disagree. But despite billions of dollars spent in "reform" efforts, little real progress seems to be occuring. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was a step (or a misstep, perhaps) toward greater accountability by schools for student achievement. It had (has) many flaws, but it was at least an attempt to make necessary, big changes in our schools. Eric Hanushek (of the Hoover Institution of Stanford University) and Alfred Lindseth (a lawyer with expertise in school finance law) lay out a plan even more ambitious than NCLB. It would dramatically raise the pay and the status of teachers, but base their compensation (and even their continuation as teachers) on student outcomes. Students would be tracked across schools and districts if necessary, and assessments would be value-added, instead of yearly "snapshots", so that teachers teaching in economically disadvantaged areas would have a better chance to have a measured impact than those in advantaged situations. This problem will requires solutions far beyond the schools, and that is why courthouses and statehouses are in the title. This is a thought-provoking book.

Selection for November, 2009: "Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives" by Michael Specter, Penguin Press 2009 295 pp. 9781594202308, $27.95 One part (but only one part) of the decline in science in the US is the growing minority of citizens who semiautomatically adopt positions antagonistic to those of the scientific consensus, regardless of the issue. The "scientific community" is not a monolith, and skepticism and dissent are essential to the process of science. But the people about whom Michael Specter are writing are not arguing reasoned minority positions on the basis of data. No - their response is visceral, often based on suspicion of government, emotional attachment to a previous position (consider the reaction to the suggestion that mammogram screening should be less aggressive) and sometimes hostility to science in general. Those who continue to claim that cell phones and power lines cause cancer would be in my list of denialists,but Michael Specter goes after groups that refuse vaccination, the "organic food" movement, and the "health food" stores - and especially the belief in the use of echinacea as a cure for a variety of ills. He begins with an essay about the Vioxx lawsuits and has an informative chapter on how genetic knowledge may someday replace the cruder delineations of "race". I found his last chapter, on synthetic biology, to be particularly informative. The creation of life in the laboratory is around the corner and is requires science that many will want to "deny".

Selection for December, 2009: "Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist" by Thomas Levenson, Houghton Mifflin (Mariner Books) 2009 317 pp. 9780151012787, $25 Isaac Newton was a complex man. Every student learns of (but few master) the laws bearing his name that govern the motion of objects from bullets to planets. Many know that the same great mind invented calculus along the way toward his Principia Mathematica. But Newton was also intrigued with alchemy throughout his life, and filled notebook after notebook with descriptions of experimental results. He may even have had a mental breakdown as a consequence of depression after a promising route to transmutation collapsed. Newton never married, and little is known of any life we would call "personal", but Thomas Levenson has unearthed a rich trove of original material related to Newton's job in later life, Warden of the Mint. At the time (1687-1702), England was fighting a war with France while her currency was both being counterfeited and undermined by silver/gold arbitrage. The greatest physicist turned into a relentless and ferocious defender of the coin of the realm. He used intense coercion to induce counterfeiters to turn on one another and often obtained the death penalty for those convicted. Levenson focuses on a particular notorious culprit, William Chaloner, but it was clear that Newton was fighting a host of clever counterfeiters, and that he waged an effective, ferocious defense of England's money.

"Mammogram Math (The Way We Live Now)" by John Allen Paulos, New York Times Magazine December 12, 2009 p. 19 Imagine a highly reliable cancer test. It detects 95% of a certain type of cancer, and has a "false positive" rate of only 1%. This test is used on a population in which this type of cancer occurs in 0.5%. One day your doctor tells you that you have tested positive. What is the chance that you are actually sick? Surprisingly, it is only about 32 percent! The mathematics of health screening (and of epidemics as well) are not necessarily intuitive. Opposition to the recent evidence-based report recommending less frequent mammograms needs to be supported by facts. We need a health care system based on science rather than emotion.

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Hal's Selections in 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995