Frank Wilczek: Fantastic Realities

Technical note: Everyone who will be a visitor number 400,000 and who will submit an URL for the screenshot proving the number today will be allowed to post any article on this blog, up to 6 kilobytes. The reader #400,000 was Rae Ann who just returned from a trip - what a timing. :-) UncleAl has still opened the page (reload) when it was showing #400,000, much like Doug McNeil. I have no way to tell who was the first one. The others just reloaded the page and obtained the same number because it was not their first visit today, and it thus generated no increase of the counter. Congratulation to all three.



Yes, I just saw this irresistable book cover at Betsy Devine's blog. The book is called

• Fantastic Realities: 49 Mind Journeys and A Trip to Stockholm

and Frank Wilczek is apparently using a QCD laser. The journeys include many of Wilczek's award-winning Reference Frame columns. Have you heard of Wilczek's Reference Frame columns in Physics Today? Let me admit that I have not. ;-)

Because of the highly positive reviews, your humble correspondent has just decided to double the number of copies that Frank Wilczek is going to sell. Right now, the yesterday's amazon.com rank is 100,000 and today's rank is 130,000. Look at the promotional web pages of the book, buy the book, and see tomorrow what it does with the rank. Remember that the rank is approximately inversely proportional to the rates of selling the books.

Update: At 7:00 p.m., the rank was about 11,000, better than 136,000 in the morning. On Wednesday 8:30 a.m., the rank was 9,367, an improvement by a factor of fifteen from the rank 24 hours earlier.

The promotional web pages also reveal that Betsy is proud to be the 4th Betsy found by Google. Congratulations, and I wish her to capture the most important Frank Wilczek blog award, too. ;-)