Viktor Toth mentioned at his blog site a new eBook by Konstantin Kakaes about the Pioneer Anomaly.

Please excuse the plug for the book.

After reading Viktor's comments I had it down loaded to my Toshiba AT 300 Android tablet and had an enjoyable read with a free Kindle reader..

It brought back a lot of memories about the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions and conversations with Viktor Toth.

I must admit a surprise to see my name mentioned in print.

Do read what Viktor has to say and some of the reviews at Amazon.com.

The story behind the story, told in an entertaining way, may interest you as well.

- LRK -

Viktor's blog

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Spinor Info

http://spinor.info/weblog/?p=5248

I spent a part of yesterday afternoon speed-reading Konstantin Kakaes’s new e-book, The Pioneer Detectives. It’s a short book (still well worth the $2.99 Kindle price) but it reads very well and presents a fair picture of our efforts researching the origin of the anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft.

Yes, I was one of those “detectives”. (In fact, I still consider myself one, as I don’t believe our job is quite done yet; we still owe the community a detailed account of our research and an update of our Pioneer Anomaly reviewbefore we can move on with a clean conscience.) So I have an insider’s view of this very intriguing story.

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The Pioneer Detectives

- LRK -

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http://pioneerdetectives.createsend1.com/t/ViewEmail/i/BEC92898C34868EF/85F4B1A130D0A3FE2540EF23F30FEDED

The Pioneer Detectives

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At Amazon.com

- LRK -

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The Pioneer Detectives: Did a distant spacecraft prove Einstein and Newton wrong? (Kindle Single) [Kindle Edition]

Konstantin Kakaes

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A number of reviews. A snip of one for flavor.

- LRK -

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http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DV5SERW/

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

A Smart, Enticing Science Mystery Delivered By A Great Storyteller July 18, 2013

By Alexander H

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

The heroes of science are those who follow the evidence wherever it leads them. Scientists may be motivated by glory and fame, they are human after all, but the good ones are also motivated by a fundamental desire to understand. Those men working on the Pioneer Anomaly, which, if true, would upend Einstein's theory of gravity, were motivated by understanding. What force could be acting on a spacecraft that made its actual distance so much different than the distance it should be at under Einstein's theory?

"Detectives" was a great word to choose for the title. This short book reads like an unfolding mystery, and Kakaes holds the answer until the end. In doing so, you learn to appreciate the incredible amount of honest work done by the team at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (also known as the coolest place on earth) in the face of bureaucratic intransigence along with lost and fading data.

The pacing of the book is excellent, and while Kakaes expects a lot from the reader (he doesn't skip over the science, since it's the integral to understanding the issue), he's a more than capable guide and you need not have a previously strong understanding of general relativity before diving in. Still, I admire for Kakaes for trusting his audience's intelligence, which allows him to tell a story without reverting to gimmicky metaphors. For those dismayed by the current canon of science writing for general readers as too dumbed down and extrapolative, this is the book for you.

Kakaes ends with some big thoughts, ones that leave the reader thinking long after finishing.

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Thanks for looking up with me.
- LRK -

Web Site: http://lkellogg.vttoth.com/LarryRussellKellogg/
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http://spinor.info/weblog/?page_id=2

About

~~Recently~~ In October 2008, I ended up acquiring the domain name spinor.info on a whim. I was looking for something else when it happened. Usually, nice and short names like spinor are already taken, even under a relatively new top-level domain like .info. But, spinor turned out to be an exception. And spinor.info has a kind of a ring to it.

One reason I like the name is that spinors play such an important role in modern physics. To say that without spinors, matter would not exist is not an exaggeration. “Stuff” in physics comes in many forms, all defined by their properties under a coordinate transformation. For instance, light (electromagnetism) can be described by a vector field, which means that the basic quantity of electromagnetism transforms as a vector does when we change coordinates. Gravity is a tensor field; it transforms as a rank-2 tensor. The hypothetical Higgs boson that is supposedly responsible for giving mass to matter transforms like a scalar field.

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This Web site is owned and operated by Viktor T. Toth.

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