The Atom and the Apple – Sebastien Balibar ****

At the heart of this slim hardback are a series of personal stories. In the very acceptable translation from Sebastien Balibar’s original French (it’s perhaps ironic that one of the chapters is about the importance of the French running international conferences and journals in English), these are charming and really give a sense of having a chat with this engaging physicist.

The book starts very strong with the chapters titled ‘Black Night’, ‘My Cousin the Leek’ and ‘I am radioactive’, sags a bit n the middle, and recovers strongly at the end. Based on those first few chapters I had been going to give it a five star rating, but it didn’t quite keep up the impetus. Balibar works in low temperature physics, and it’s good to see some exposure for this rarely described aspect of science, though he also covers many different topics along the way.

There are a few minor flaws. Balibar’s knowledge of history of science might not be quite as polished as his expertise in the science itself. For instance, he says ‘What made Hubble come up with the idea that the Universe had been flying off in all directions since the initial explosion?’ Hubble didn’t – he very explicitly didn’t speculate as to why the universe was expanding, merely presented the data. It’s also the case that because he’s flitting about quite quickly between different subjects, he can sometimes be rather summary – but I only found this frustrating in topics which I already knew quite a lot about, so this may be less of a problem if the whole works is new to you.

Overall, then, a pleasantly personal view on some key scientific issues, life, the universe and everything.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically? Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life. To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...

Search This Blog