Travels of A Thermodynamicist by Rick Fleeter

The Barnes & Noble Review

Literature has presented us with many scientists who are elegant and powerful stylists: Loren Eisley, Richard Selzer, Freeman Dyson, Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins. These science-trained authors are able to convey gracefully their most subtle observations about the natural universe in sentences worthy of Flaubert. And then, on the other hand, we have Rick Fleeter. Reading Fleeter's Travels of a Thermodynamicist is like watching Dave Barry channel Lester Bangs at his stream-of-consciousness peak, like navigating through the Unabomber manifesto after it's been redacted by Dustin Hoffman in his Rain Man mode. If The Triplets of Belleville were journalism, Rick Fleeter would win a Pulitzer. Thus, the experience of reading Fleeter is not altogether enjoyable or easy. And yet -- somehow there emerges a portrait of the author and his life that is, to a certain degree, both charming and illuminating. We get to inhabit fully the perspective of a geeky outsider with something funny and clever to tell us. A university professor and aerospace entrepreneur, Fleeter is also an avid bicyclist and triathalon participant. The majority of the essays here concern his long-distance bike rides, during which he records physics-flavored observations both naïvely acute and acutely naïve, concerning the people and places he passes. In essence, this book is a blog: evidently self-published and unfiltered, with minimal attention to formatting or design. If you lived next door to Fleeter, you'd share these rambling reminiscences over your common fence with a beer in hand on a summer night, and then go home pleasantly bemused at your quirky, likable neighbor. --Paul DiFilippo

From the Publisher

They say fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, but what they don't tell you is that thermodynamicists gotta travel. In fact, travel is so fundamental to the life of the engineer or scientist, that most of them no more realize that simple fact, than fish realize what water is. One who did was the greatest Thermodynamicist of all, Ludwig Boltzman. As so often happens, seeing a greater perspective led him to write - in his case the essay "Travels of a Thermodynamicist in California" but also to his profound depression, which he successfully, and appropriately, resolved by hanging himself from a hotel room chandelier. I thank the dearth of chandeliers in today's La Quinta and Econolodge hotels for my having thus far escaped emulating even that element of Boltzman's greatness, and thus providing the time for writing this book. Such is the importance of travel that I owe my life to budget hotels.

How did I decide to compete swimming breaststroke, pick up the Cello, pursue long distance solo cycling and do a PhD in Thermodynamics? The common denominator is the search for a pursuit so archaic, so unappealing to the opposite sex (or even my own), so widely ignored, that even I, with minimal effort, could, if not dominate, at least get to the first rung on a competitive sports, music or career ladder. That strategy propelled me to the #1 (and not coincidentally the only) position worldwide in authoring books on microspacecraft.

A quick scan of Amazon or your local bookstore tells you why I will never write a book on starting a company, or pioneering a new field in Engineering. The shelves are full of well written books I couldn't hope to outshine. But a book on the experiences andthe lessons learned from a career of mostly pointless business, recreational and competitive travel? There's a niche even Rick Fleeter can own for a long time. And, dear potential reader, therein might lie a similar opportunity for you to be unique in having actually purchased and read that book. For $35.95, can you bypass the opportunity to be the first on your block, and maybe on the planet? I hope not.

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