Deep Down Things – Bruce A. Schumm ***

I was looking forward to reading this, as it’s difficult to find a treatment of the Standard Model of particle physics that is both thorough and accessible, and this is exactly what Bruce Schumm aims to provide in Deep Down Things. Unfortunately, it ends up being a little too technical in parts, and ultimately I don’t think I can justify giving it more than three stars. But I do like this book, and it’s definitely worth a look.

Schumm builds up to a long discussion of gauge theory, and since this is rarely touched on in popular science books, the coverage is useful. The amount of detail Schumm goes into here, however, makes it necessary for him to first give the reader a detailed grounding in the Schrödinger wave equation, internal symmetry spaces and Lie groups. Schumm is quite good in these earlier sections at defining the important ideas and concepts. But the level of understanding he then encourages the reader to reach means that it can be easy to get lost amongst the specialist language, and it’s sometimes difficult to follow the explanations. The chapter on group theory is the best example of this. It is intended to introduce the main aspects of the theory to those who haven’t come across it before, but unless the reader is already fairly familiar with the material, they are likely to have to read through everything twice or three times before being able to move on.

This is a shame, because there are other parts of the book where Schumm’s style of writing is incredibly approachable and where he is quite funny. At points, he gives the reader very useful analogies and exercises to carry out that give a good feel for some of the trickier concepts. And the Feynman diagrams used a lot are generally very useful and help clarify what’s being talked about.

Unfortunately, there’s little on the people involved in developing the ideas underpinning the Standard Model, and given that the science is often quite challenging, it would have been good to be able to have a break from it here and there. I would have liked to read a lot more about Emmy Noether, for instance, a German mathematician whose theorem is relevant to the section on symmetries. As Schumm explains, she ended up being one of the greatest mathematicians in history, but only after having to fight hard against the prejudices of her misogynistic contemporaries.

All in all, however, though this is probably best for physics undergraduates, it would be a shame if no-one else read it. If you like a challenge and you are willing to persevere with this, you’re likely to get a lot out of it and be rewarded with a good understanding of the Standard Model at the end. Just be aware that it can be a struggle in parts.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Matt Chorley

Comments

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question. Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book

The Genetic Book of the Dead: Richard Dawkins ****

When someone came up with the title for this book they were probably thinking deep cultural echoes - I suspect I'm not the only Robert Rankin fan in whom it raised a smile instead, thinking of The Suburban Book of the Dead . That aside, this is a glossy and engaging book showing how physical makeup (phenotype), behaviour and more tell us about the past, with the messenger being (inevitably, this being Richard Dawkins) the genes. Worthy of comment straight away are the illustrations - this is one of the best illustrated science books I've ever come across. Generally illustrations are either an afterthought, or the book is heavily illustrated and the text is really just an accompaniment to the pictures. Here the full colour images tie in directly to the text. They are not asides, but are 'read' with the text by placing them strategically so the picture is directly with the text that refers to it. Many are photographs, though some are effective paintings by Jana Lenzová. T

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on

Search This Blog