Physics, Curiosities, Oddities, and Novelties John Kimball
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Exploring Materials through Patent Information David Segal Royal Society of Chemistry, 2014 266 pages, $38.90 ISBN 978-1-78262-112-6
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his book does exactly as its title proposes and describes several classes of materials in terms of patents that have been awarded toward their practical application. Following a good introduction about patents in general, how to file one, and how to research them, Segal provides a credible patent history for a range of materials: light-emitting diodes (LEDs), including quantum dots, organic LEDs, and liquid-crystal displays, threedimensional printing, health care, block copolymers, aerogels, ionic liquids, flame retardants, graphene, hydrogels, and superhydrophobic materials. The chapters first describe the fundamentals of each technology, and then describe how specific patents improved upon the technology. I found it very unusual to read a “patent history” of a material instead of learning its history from academic literature. For
instance, Segal devotes four chapters to LED technology. His approach is to give a brief technological background to LEDs, referencing a few papers in the literature, and then to give the historical case for the patents toward LED commercialization. To Segal’s credit, his approach was almost the same as Dr. Hiroshi Amano’s, one of the 2014 Nobel laureates for blue LEDs, but more technology driven. The book left me wondering how Segal identified which patents were critical to a material’s development. While writing a material’s history from published literature, it is relatively easy to link key papers through their numbers of citations, but such lists do not seem to exist for the materials described in the book. Did he somehow know that these patents were licensed? While his motivation to write the book is to encourage
Physics, Curiosities, Oddities, and Novelties John Kimball CRC Press, 2015 380 pages, $34.95 ISBN 978-1-4665-7635-3
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alileo Galilei (1564–1641) stated, “The book (of nature) is written in mathematical language.” John Kimball has tried the impossible: Summarizing the whole of physics in 380 pages and 207 figures almost without using the “language of nature,” mathematics. The topics range from Newton’s laws of movement to Einstein’s theory of relativity, to Maxwell’s electrodynamics, to Planck’s quantum physics, leading to
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tunneling phenomena and dark energy. Is this possible? My answer is yes and no. The author explains everything in plain, well-understandable words. However, all physicists know that quantum mechanics and relativity cannot be described using words alone—many of these facts are immediately clear using appropriate mathematics. However, Kimball is not the first one to fall into this trap; he has famous predecessors (e.g., Einstein’s
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researchers to delve into the patent literature to assist their research, it is not clear how one goes into a search engine and finds out which technology patents are key, as Segal was able to do. Despite my confusion a
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