Skip to main content

Light Years - Brian Clegg **** 


** UPDATED - new edition with Browsing section of classic light papers **
Light Years tells the story of light through the remarkable people who have been captivated by it. From Neolithic man’s worship of light at Stonehenge to the Impressionists’revolutionary observations of light in painting and the shattering conclusions of Einstein and Feynman, Light Years explores each stage of this extraordinary saga of discovery.
Brian Clegg weaves an entertaining history of humanity’s interaction with light, combining the gradual development of our understanding of what light is, insights into the lives of those who have tried to uncover light’s secrets, and the latest applications of light, with speculation on what light is likely to make possible in the future. Clegg asserts that light is at the very heart of our existence. Without a dancing web of photons knitting atoms together, there would be no matter, no universe. Without light-driven photosynthesis producing plant-life and oxygen there would be nothing to breathe, nothing to eat.
Clegg makes a good job of threading together the historical view of light, and showing how we have moved from Greek ideas of light pouring out of our eyes all the way through to quantum theory, but the best bits of the book are probably the remarkable ways that light is, or could be put to use. Whether it’s materials that can slow light to a crawl, the amazing power of quantum entanglement, or superluminal experiments, there’s fascinating stuff here.
According to Einstein nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Of all the mind-bending theories in modern physics, that, at least, seemed a rule that the universe would abide by. Yet in 1994 at the University of Cologne, Professor Günter Nimtz sent a recording of Mozart’s 40th Symphony through a physical barrier at four times the speed of light. Yet again, light had confounded those who had sought to understand it.
Light Years is a journey through time, telling the story of the individuals who were determined to unlock the secrets of this mysterious natural force. Appropriate, really, when light enables us to look back through time and take in the past of the universe, looking deeper into time as we see further in space.
Occasionally the pocket biographies of scientists become a little familiar. It’s fine with someone relatively unexplored like Roger Bacon, but there are too many books out there with summary lives of Newton or Galileo – however this isn’t a major flaw, as the lives are woven around the science, and are always presented in an effective fashion. This is a updated edition of the book with minor modifications throughout and an extra chapter delving into some of the quantum strangeness of light. There isn’t another book out there to compare with this on the subject – recommended (in fact, I would revise the star rating up from 4 to 5 with the new edition, but it isn’t allowed).

Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Martin O'Brien
Please note, this title is written by the editor of the Popular Science website. Our review is still an honest opinion – and we could hardly omit the book – but do want to make the connection clear.
Labels:

Comments

Post a comment

Popular posts from this blog

Models of the Mind - Grace Lindsay *****

This is a remarkable book. When Ernest Rutherford made his infamous remark about science being either physics or stamp collecting, it was, of course, an exaggeration. Yet it was based on a point - biology in particular was primarily about collecting information on what happened rather than explaining at a fundamental level why it happened. This book shows how biologists, in collaboration with physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, have moved on the science of the brain to model some of its underlying mechanisms. Grace Lindsay is careful to emphasise the very real difference between physical and biological problems. Most systems studied by physics are a lot simpler than biological systems, making it easier to make effective mathematical and computational models. But despite this, huge progress has been made drawing on tools and techniques developed for physics and computing to get a better picture of the mechanisms of the brain. In the book we see this from two directions
Post a comment
Read more

The Ten Equations that Rule the World - David Sumpter ****

David Sumpter makes it clear in this book that a couple of handfuls of equations have a huge influence on our everyday lives. I needed an equation too to give this book a star rating - I’ve never had one where there was such a divergence of feeling about it. I wanted to give it five stars for the exposition of the power and importance of these equations and just two stars for an aspect of the way that Sumpter did it. The fact that the outcome of applying my star balancing equation was four stars emphasises how good the content is. What we have here is ten key equations from applied mathematics. (Strictly, nine, as the tenth isn’t really an equation, it’s the programmer’s favourite ‘If… then…’ - though as a programmer I was always more an ‘If… then… else…’ fan.) Those equations range from the magnificent one behind Bayesian statistics and the predictive power of logistic regression to the method of determining confidence intervals and the kind of influencer matrix so beloved of social m
Post a comment
Read more

Grace Lindsay - Four Way Interview

Grace Lindsay is a computational neuroscientist currently based at University College, London. She completed her PhD at the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University, where her research focused on building mathematical models of how the brain controls its own sensory processing. Before that, she earned a bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh and received a research fellowship to study at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Freiburg, Germany. She was awarded a Google PhD Fellowship in Computational Neuroscience in 2016 and has spoken at several international conferences. She is also the producer and co-host of Unsupervised Thinking , a podcast covering topics in neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Her first book is Models of the Mind . Why science? I started my undergraduate degree as a neuroscience and philosophy double major and I think what drew me to both topics was the idea that if we just think rigorously enou
Post a comment
Read more