Next: Not-recommended Books Previous: Recommended Books about Physicists Up: Cool Stuff
Next: Not-recommended Books
Previous: Recommended Books about Physicists
Up: Cool
Stuff
(Also have reviews of good non-technical non-fiction, some good fiction, nasty reviews of bad books and capsule reviews of books about the Vietnam War. Some science monographs are also discussed in the non-fiction section.)
Disturbing the Universe by Freeman Dyson
Of all the many accounts of 20th century physics I've read, Dyson's has to be my favorite. As the title indicates, Disturbing the Universe has to be the only physics memoir to extensively quote T.S. Eliot. Dyson's presence at remarkably many of the major events of the last fifty years is what makes his memoir worth such compelling reading. Dyson not only did seminal work on quantum electrodynamics, he also had original ideas about space colonization, nuclear power and arms control. Somehow he even had time to advise Stanley Kubrick about 2001: A Space Odyssey. What really sets Disturbing the Universe apart is its moral clarity. Before undertaking a science career, he analyzed statistics about the WWII British bombing campaign and managed at the height of "the last good war" to see the folly and evil behind the strategy of targeting civilians. Dyson's strong sense of ethics infuses his portraits of Oppenheimer, Feynman, and Teller, whom he knew well but does not judge. Charmingly, Dyson is not afraid to run the numbers about any arbitrarily wild-eyed idea. His comparative cost analysis of the Pilgrim expedition to America, the Mormon journey to Utah and the voyage of space colonists to the asteroids is the highlight of this very entertaining and thought-provoking work.Carver Mead, Collective Electrodynamics: Quantum Foundations of Electromagnetism
In Collective Electrodynamics, Carver Mead is out to convince the physics community that the electromagnetic vector and scalar potentials are more fundamental than the electric and magnetic fields. In addition, he supports the wave picture of electromagnetic interactions as being more fundamental than the particle view, and he endorses Einstein's criticisms of Bohr's (non-)interpretation of quantum mechanics. None of this would be worth mentioning except that Mead's arguments are fairly convincing, as he shows that his methods give the correct answers to well-known problems, and the non-existence of particles and fields eliminates any problems with infinite self-energies. Electromagnetic interactions are confusing when viewed from the point of view of the exchange of photons, he says, and simple when viewed as the accumulation of phase of electron wavefunctions. "The potentials A and V are not degrees of freedom on their own -- they are, as their name implies, the potential for interaction of the collective degrees of freedom of the electron system," he writes. Another fascinating section explains how the collective motion of electrons carries the energy and momentum typically ascribed to the electromagnetic fields. Even more interestingly, Mead introduces the "transactional" view of quantum mechanics in describing how a correct treatment of the problem of radiation damping leads inevitably to the conclusion that causality is a statistical property of the universe, not a fundamental law. Mead introduces the electrodynamic theory of Feynman and Wheeler, which treated advanced and retarded potentials on an equal footing, and which concluded that "if there were only a few chunks of matter in the universe . . . the future would, indeed, affect the past." To follow this fascinating discussion, the only prerequisites are an understanding of simple calculus and a vague recollection of undergraduate-level electrodynamics. After finishing Collective Electrodynamics, I'm anxious to read Time's Arrow Today, Cosmology and Action at a Distance Electrodynamics by Hoyle and Narlikar, and Schodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality by John Gribbin.
Read an interview with Mead about Collective Electrodynamics on the American Spectator website. Despite an introduction full of outrageous and ill-informed bombast ("Perhaps more than any other man, Mead has spent his professional life working on intimate terms with matter at the atomic and subatomic levels"), the interview itself is worth reading. (Thanks to David Haddon for the tip.) Mead's comments may make you consider whether Bohr's Correspondence Principle isn't after all a cultural construct, in keeping with the spirit of the times in the '20s and '30s.
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes and Jacques Badoz, Fragile Objects: Soft Matter, Hard Science, and the Thrill of Discovery
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes' new book Fragile Objects is rather small in format and has reasonably large type so that when I received it I thought, "For this I paid $24?" My first impression was wrong. Not only does the book contain an entertaining exposition of the physics of polymers, gels, foams, surfactants and colloids at a beginning undergraduate level, but it also offers some thoughtful reminiscences by de Gennes on his career. It's inspiring to read the frank thoughts of a scientist who has not only revolutionized the fields he worked in, but to some extent has pioneered them. de Gennes offers practical advice on how to change scientific fields, deplores the overreliance of young scientists on fancy equipment, stingingly criticizes the way science is taught, and exhorts scientists to leave the ivory tower and work on problems of real societal significance. The book is a fast read and an entertaining one as well. (By the way, does anyone know whether Ettore Majorana really disappeared?) I'm looking forward to reading de Gennes' other Springer Verlag and Cambridge University Press books.
Engelbert Broda, Ludwig Boltzmann: Man -- Physicist -- Philosopher
Broda's brief but entertaining biography of Ludwig Boltzmann is an easy if somewhat unsatisfying read. Touching and funny tales about Boltzmann's life are interspersed with fascinating anecdotes about the birth of statistical mechanics. Unfortunately the book also has long excerpts from Boltzmann's writings about epistemology, which is not what he is remembered for, to say the least. We learn of Boltzmann's job-hopping before his mysterious suicide at age 62 in 1906. Popularly it has always been supposed that the cause of Boltzmann's despair was the advent of quantum mechanics and relativity, but this work shows that belief to be incorrect. It seems almost incredible in 2002, but it was Mach's and Ostwald's attacks on the reality of atoms that most upset Boltzmann.
Russell McCormmach, Night thoughts of a classical physicist, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1982.
McCormmach's book is a fictionalized autobiography of Ludwig Boltzmann, whose work was unappreciated in his lifetime and who eventually committed suicide. This book is much more entertaining than that description would suggest. Some of the academia jokes are worthy of David Lodge.
Jagdish Mehra, The Beat of a Different Drum: The life and science of Richard Feynman
Jagdish Mehra's The Beat of a Different Drum: The life and science of Richard Feynman is an excellent review of Feynman's personal and professional life, far outclassing Gleick's depressing opus Genius, which added little that was new IMHO. Mehra's book is much better than the title, which reminds me of that horrid Linda Ronstadt song. It traces the development of Feynman's thinking on matters like the path integral in a way that I (who never took a course in field theory) can understand. Mehra's book is not for those who want to read more Surely You're Joking types of anecdotes; it's a serious biography.
Nuel Pharr Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer, New York, Simon and Schuster [1968]
N.P. Davis' Lawrence and Oppenheimer is a vivid portrait of two very different men: Lawrence the narrow-minded hick who was the first big-instrument physicist, and Oppenheimer the self-destructive dreamer who nonetheless managed to run the Manhattan Project. A fairly light read with new (to me) info about the history of postwar research funding.
Emilio Segre, From x-rays to quarks : modern physicists and their discoveries, San Francisco, W. H. Freeman, 1980.
Emilio Segre, From falling bodies to radio waves : classical physicists and their discoveries, New York, W.H. Freeman, 1984.
Segre's histories of modern and classical physics are full of interesting personalities and anecdotes about how they made their discoveries. There's much more here than you will find in Halliday and Resnick or some other dry tome. These books are also easy to read. A particularly fascinating character is Michael Faraday, the bookbinder's apprentice who learned by reading the books. Faraday invented the motor and the transformer, discovered benzene and pioneered electrochemistry and field theory.
Abraham Pais, Inward bound : of matter and forces in the physical world, New York, Oxford University Press, 1986.
Pais' history of postwar physics explains to us condensed matter folks exactly what it is that all those particle Nobelists did. This book is rather dry IMHO, although the info is interesting. I tried to read Pais' book on Einstein, but couldn't stand it. I'm just too bored with Einstein legends to consume a whole book. The only anecdote I remember from Inward Bound was about Rutherford. Evidently he was out in his family's garden in New Zealand digging potatoes when the news came by mail that he'd been admitted to Manchester University . Evidently he threw down his trowel and proclaimed, "That's the last potato I'll ever dig!"
Edward Regis, Who got Einstein's office? : eccentricity and genius at the Institute for Advanced Study, Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley, 1987.
Regis' book is a bit too frothy for my taste; the science is really watered-down and there's an air of giddiness that seems inappropriate somehow. Nonetheless readers will be rewarded with some fascinating tales of bickering and infighting among the physics glitterati. Learn who turned down IAS posts, etc. Definitely a gossip volume.
Samuel Goudsmit, Alsos, Los Angeles, CA, Tomash Publishers, 1983. [Also reprinted by AIP, I know.]
Goudsmit's book is about the US intelligence effort to track the German bomb project during the war. Alsos is truly poorly written, but contains fascinating tales of famous physics personalities. When the German bomb scientists, infamously led by Heisenberg, heard that the US had exploded a nuclear weapon, they didn't believe it! They couldn't conceive that their students, who had fled to the US, had made something work which they could not.
Richard Rhodes, The making of the atomic bomb, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1986.
Rhodes' story of the Manhattan project is probably the best book ever about how physics research is done, IMHO. The Making of the Atomic Bomb is chock-a-block with amusing anecdotes of the bomb projects and fascinating technical detail. If anyone knows a better book about personalities in science, I'd like to read it! Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History.
Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The making of the Hydrogen Bomb, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1995.
Rhodes' follow-up is an equally fine book, although more frustrating to read. When the first book ended with a brief account of the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb, I thought, "Of course: everything about the hydrogen bomb is classified. Naturally the book can't continue." I'm quite surprised, therefore, to see how much detail the follow-on volume contains.
The story of Soviet espionage in the US during the '40's is just plain painful to read; what were government leaders thinking? The titanic struggle of Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheimer is told in a way that does less credit to Teller and more to Oppenheimer than previous sources I have read (see below). This volume contains much political and technical detail about how decisions regarding The Bomb were made. Despite the fact that I have already completed several books relevant to this subject, I learned a great deal by reading Dark Sun, which draws on many new interviews with participants.
Stanley A. Blumberg, Edward Teller : giant of the golden age of physics : a biography New York, Scribner's, 1990.
A sympathetic view of Teller's life. Did you know that Luis Alvarez, the co-proposer of the dinosaurs-killed-by-comets theory, also testified against Oppenheimer? Learn how Teller lost his foot. But in general you have to be really interested in Teller to read this book.
Richard Feynman, What do YOU care what other people think? : further adventures of a curious character, New York, Norton, 1988.
Richard Feynman, "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!" : adventures of a curious character, New York, W.W. Norton, 1985.
Feynman memoirs: you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll take up the bongos! Bestsellers.
Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, Simon and Schuster, 1983.
The Enigma is a fine portrait of a scientist who was way ahead of his time not only in computer science, but also in several other fields of mathematics. His work on cryptography, algorithmics, and quantitative biology are explained clearly, and his personal life is also sketched. Alan Turing was a classic example of a misunderstood genius, and the pathos of his life is sure to sadden any sympathetic reader, even those who are straight. The Enigma is a bit long, and the extended metaphors (referring to Turing as Alice, etc.) get a bit irritating, but all in all it is a good read.
Daniel Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community, Harvard University Press, 1995.
The Physicists was a bit a disappointing to me. There is good coverage of the beginnings of physics in the US with Michelson, Henry and Gibbs. In addition the history of radar development at MIT durring WWII and the development of sonar at New London during WWI are given a thorough treatment. Many physics history books gloss over these non-nuclear military developments in a rush to treat the more glamorous Manhattan project in excessive detail.
Unfortunately much of the rest of the book is about the National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council, and, in laborious detail, the prehistory of the National Science Foundation. I would much rather have read more about the founding of the American Physical Society and the Physical Review (which are given short shrift) than learn so much about the National Academy, which seems less significant in the history of physics. In general Kevles' book gives a lot of attention to statistics and Congressional actions and much less to the development of the culture and institutions of US physics.
Hugh Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War, University of California Press, 1996.
Nuclear Rites is an anthropologist's view of two competing tribes, namely nuclear weapons scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab and Bay Area antinuclear activists who oppose the Lab's work. Rather than argue about which side is right, Gusterson instead investigates the question of how two groups of mostly middle-class, well-educated people could come to such fervently held and bitterly opposed beliefs. Through extensive interviews Gusterson learns how Lab employees could rationalize working on weapons of mass destruction and why protestors were willing to disrupt their lives by being arrested in "direct action" demonstrations. This unusual approach to the controversy is quite illuminating, and would serve well those who wish to understand other unending debates, such the battles over abortion or gun control.
I find many "science studies" books unbearable when they waste energy claiming that scientists' models and theories are elaborate social constructions rather than sensible responses to experimentally observed facts. Refreshingly, Gusterson eschews this viewpoint, being more interested in how weapons scientists think about the unthinkable. As he says, "Indeed, it would seem to me to be almost grotesquely irrelevant and scholastic to argue that the scientific principles of weapons designs are social constructions . . . when the weapons' ability to wipe out entire nations has already been experimentally demonstrated on two cities . . . ." Yes, "grotesquely irrelevant and scholastic" is a perfect description of the humanities' critique of science, particularly that put forward by feminists. Nuclear Rites is an accomplishment in that it puts aside such falderal and approaches the weapons scientists (and protestors) with an open mind.
Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man out of Time and Tad Wise, Tesla
Doesn't someone out there want to write a decent Tesla biography? Both these books are disappointing. The Wise book is so clunky and stilted that I simply couldn't finish it. Cheney's book is full of ridiculous claims (Tesla inspired the synchroton, Tesla invented the electron microscope, etc.) and pure anti-science BS (Tesla had precognition, Tesla's work explains Kirlian photography, etc.). While Tesla was obviously a shameless self-promoter, Man out of Time demeans his memory by obscuring his real and undeniable engineering contributions. Cheney implicitly endorses the completely nonsensical idea that Tesla invented beam weapons and broadcast power devices whose designs have been suppressed by the Military-Industrial Complex and have not been independently rediscovered. The author's poor judgement is all the more frustrating since she has clearly done a huge amount of research on Tesla's personal and professional life. Tesla is arguably the inventor of the brushless ac motor, the transformer, the electrical power grid, remote control, fluorescent lighting and radio, and he deserves a far better biography than either of these two books. Remarkably the American Physical Society has more or less recommended the Cheney book.
Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World
Winchester's book tells the little known but important story of William Smith, the first geologist to realize the importance of fossils for dating and ordering strata of rock. Smith was a British working-class civil engineer whose fascination with fossils led him to found the science of stratigraphy. Winchester's narrative focuses on the difficulty that Smith had in getting credit for his ideas and his struggles with financial insolvency. While Smith is an appealing character, the book is poorly organized and repetitive. Readers will find themselves wondering, "Didn't anyone edit this manuscript?" While I'm glad to have read The Map that Changed the World, Smith like Tesla deserves a better biographer.
Rebecca Goldstein, Properties of Light
Goldstein's novel will remind theatergoers of David Auburn's recent Proof as both works feature the basic plot of a graduate student courting the daughter of a mad-genius professor-father. The academic subject matter of Properties of Light is alternative theories of quantum mechanics rather than number theory. Assuredly these are both subjects that have proven altogether too fascinating for many too smart people. Goldstein's protagonists are Samuel Mallach, a washed-up and obscure professor, and Justin Childs, a young theoretical physics hotshot. Unfortunately the tale of Justin's collaboration with Samuel and romance with Samuel's daughter Dana is rather bloodless compared to Auburn's hot-tempered play. In an unfortunate afterword, Goldstein informs readers that the reviled Prof. Mallach was based on the well known physicist David Bohm. Goldstein appears not to understand that the unpopularity of local hidden-variables theories derives from their inability to make testable predictions. In fact, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox and the Bell Inequalities continue to be lively subjects for discussion in physics circles.
Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel
This extended essay by the same author on the life and work of Kurt Gödel is far more engrossing. Gödel's work raises the provocative and even disturbing question of how we can know that assertions are true if we can't prove them. Readers can decide for themselves whether they are post-modern positivists like Ludwig Wittgenstein, who believe that numbers are human constructions, or hard-headed platonists like Gödel, who believe that mathematical truths await our discovery of them. Gödel is contrasted not only with his contemporary and fellow Austrian Wittgenstein but with his friend and Institute for Advanced Study co-worker Einstein. The self-referential nature of Gödel's landmark incompleteness proof is sketched so that laypeople can understand it. Simultaneously Goldstein gives us a portrait of the withdrawn and alienated man that Gödel was. Mathematicians and philosophers have apparently criticized Goldstein's book as superficial but I enjoyed it immensely, coming as I do to the topic as I did with little previous knowledge. The text goes way beyond what a reader will glean from the amazing but more lightweight Gödel, Escher, Bach.
Incompleteness is part of W.W. Norton's wonderful Great Discoveries Series, which also includes an evaluation of Copernicus by William Vollmann. My only disappointment is that there doesn't seem to be a way to order the entire series at a discount.
John Adams and Peter Sellars, Dr. Atomic
Readers of the books recommended here will agree that the story of the development of the atomic bomb is truly operatic in its scope and conflict. Drama abounds in the post-war struggle between Teller and Oppenheimer or in the Japanese cabinet's post-Nagasaki tie vote on surrender. Oppenheimer was a remarkable man whose extramarital affairs and Communist friends (Haakon Chevalier and his brother Frank) greatly complicated his life. While the work went on at Trinity, Feynman's youthful love Arline lay dying of tuberculosis and Klaus Fuchs was plotting the treachery that would later take the lives of the Rosenbergs. All this melodrama is perfect for an opera, yet none of it is presented in Dr. Atomic.
Peter Sellars, the librettist and director of Dr. Atomic, instead presents the audience with snatches of Muriel Rukeyser poetry and Native American songs. Rather than have the main characters pantomime the drama, viewers are consigned to watch a dozen dancers twitch about to Adams' brooding music. While the plot does deal with the inner conflicts of the few historical characters on stage (Gen. Leslie Groves, Oppenheimer, Teller and Robert Wilson), the interaction between them takes up little of the running time. A stunning soliliquy by the Oppenheimer character at the end of the first act that is based on a poem by John Donne is a rare high point in a performance which has more weather jokes than consideration of the morality of weapons use.
As presented at San Francisco's Opera House, Dr. Atomic had a dynamic set that suggested an industrial site. The evocative lighting showed the distant Sangre de Cristo mountains in flashes of lightning. The Bomb mockup that hung over the center of the stage for most of the performance had all the menace that its creator intended. Most of this cleverness is wasted on the minimal recounting of the Trinity story. In the end I had the impression that Sellars' determination to create large roles for female singers distorted his choice of material to the point that the second act is hardly about the Bomb at all.
Perhaps Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist would make a good opera?
Bob Buderi, The Invention that Changed the World: How a small group of radar pioneers won the Second World War and launched a technical revolution
The disparity between the amount written about the development of atomic weapons compared to the attention paid to the history of radar is striking. Buderi's book is an attempt to rectify the imbalance by taking a detailed look at radar's development, with a special emphasis on the work done at the MIT Radiation Lab. The tome starts with the invention of the cavity magnetron at the University of Birmingham and follows with a blow-by-blow account of radar's development and utilization during World War II. As with many such works, the narrative suffers from the introduction of too many characters and acronyms for a reader to keep track. The technical level is strangely mixed, with some concepts explained at an introductory level while other jargon and acronyms are tossed off without explanation. While the reader may have to page back and forth and use the index to refresh his/her memory of who's who, Buderi's book is reasonably easy and entertaining to read. His tales about the desperation of the Battle of Britain, the cleverness of engineers trying to piece together information about Germany's radar network and the intermittent British-American rivalry can't help but be compelling. As with the Manhattan Project, readers will find inspiring the tale of how much a laboratory can accomplish when highly motivated and talented people are all pulling together.
The second half of the book is about how WWII veterans utilized the new microwave technology to make major advances in magnetic resonance spectroscopy, silicon devices, masers and lasers, early warning radars and radioastronomy. Some of the stories (notably that of the transistor) have been better told before but Buderi's account is still worth reading. The second half is less sprawling than the first, as the individual technologies are treated in self-contained chapters which are tidier than the intrinsically unmanageable story of WWII. Buderi has been editor of Technology Review and some of the MIT-related content appears to be derived from articles that previously appeared in MIT publications. Nonetheless the stories of the founding of Lincoln Lab, MITRE, the High-Voltage Engineering Corporation and the Research Laboratory of Electronics will interest non-alumni as well.
John H. Moore, Christopher C. Davis, Michael A. Coplan, Sandra C. Greer, Building Scientific Apparatus
While Building Scientific Apparatus is not a scientific biography or memoir, it is far and away the most useful job-related book I own. I consult it nearly every day and could really use three copies, one for my cubicle, one for my lab and one to leave at home. The book is encyclopedic, covering topics in electronics, optics and mechanical design in exhaustive detail. The text is also very pedagogical, clearly explaining the principles behind rules of thumb and illustrating concepts with simple diagrams and worked examples. While various specialized areas like fiber optics, vacuum system construction, cryogenics and statistical data analysis are covered in more detail in other works, Building Scientific Apparatus remains the best one-volume place for finding how-to information. The section on digital electronics and computer interfacing in the version I own is fairly dated, but I see that there's a new 2002 edition. The book is packed with enough interesting trivia that you can entertain yourself by flipping through it randomly.
If you love science, what you really want to do is visit the Sidney Harris homepage.
