Each month feature editor Hal Harris recommends readings for teachers of chemistry and related sciences. Hal maintains a file of articles, pictures, and references coordinated with the topics that come up in his curriculum. Examples from that file make up this eclectic list of items he has read recently and which he thinks might be of interest to other teachers of science, especially chemistry.

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

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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. 9, $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 and in 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, editors, or his supervisors at Bell Labs, but by an ad hoc group of skeptical readers in his fields of solid-state physics, molecular electronics, superconductivity, and nanoscience. They perceived that his results were too good 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 to some junior scientists like Lydia Sohn who were willing to risk 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 May, 2009: "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain" by Oliver Sacks, Vintage Press (Random House) 2007 424 pp. 9, $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 April, 2009: "The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn" by Louisa Gilder, Alfred A. Knopf 2008 443 pp. 9, $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 lecture by David Mermin based on his famous Physics Today article, "Is the Moon There When Nobody Looks?", a wonderful 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" approaches, and continues 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 the disturbing truth about the what quantum mechanics means.

"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 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 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. 9, $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 don?t see exactly how this is relevant to chemistry, but I would not be surprised if it is finds application in supramolecular chemistry and self-organization.

Selection for February, 2009: "Group Theory in the Bedroom, and Other Mathematical Diversions" by Brian Hayes, Hill and Wang (Macmillan) 2008 269 pp. 9, $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. Back issues of it can be downloaded freely. 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 eponymous essay is the one that is most closely related to the chemistry curriculum. The 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 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. 9, $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".