Skip to main content

Why Does E=mc2? – Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw ****

Brian Cox is a dream for any publisher (sorry, Jeff Forshaw, but we haven’t heard of you). The media’s darling physicist at the moment, Cox is sometimes described as the popstar physicist, partly because he looks like one, but even more remarkably, because he was one. Although now Professor of Particle Physics at Manchester University (though confusingly, according to the bumf, he lives in London – that’s quite a commute), he was once part of the band D:Ream. He’s also a nice guy – I’ve done couple of gigs with him (speaking engagements, not music), and though a little over-enthusiastic about the movie world at the time, he was very friendly.
You might expect, with Cox on board, that this would follow the approach of TV science – lots of ‘gee, wow, amazing!’ but light on nuts and bolts science. But not a bit of it. In fact, if Cox and Forshaw had taken the same advice about equations as Stephen Hawking, the chances are they would have expected to have around 2 readers.
This is primarily a book about the origins of the world’s most famous equation, but rather than just give fun background, some special relativity and some handwaving, this pair plunge in and really do explain how E=mc2 is derived, something that isn’t generally done in popular science because, frankly, it’s pretty hard going. They don’t stop there either. They go into the master equation of the standard model of particle physics, explaining how it is derived from gauge symmetry, exploring the different components of the equation and giving by far the best explanation of the Higgs field/Higgs boson that I have ever seen. In this, the book is absolutely masterful.
What I was a little disappointed with, having heard Cox’s eloquent speaking, is the rather stiff writing style. Although it tries to be friendly, I felt a bit like I was… well, being talked to by a couple of professors. There’s a lovely example of this where they quote Kurt Mendelssohn’s book on Lavoisier’s widow where she is said to have led Count Rumford “a hell of a life.” Cox and Forshaw then comment: ‘the book was written in 1966, hence the quaint turn of phrase.’) You can almost see the pursed professorial lips.
I loved this book, which perhaps makes it rather surprising that I only gave it four stars. If you’ve at least a physics A level and are about to set out on a physics degree (or, like me, you’ve got a rusty physics degree), it’s phrased at just the right level. But I felt it would be hard going for a general reader without that background. I had to re-read several bits to be sure what the writers intended, and in the end there’s a reason most popular science books don’t have this level of technical detail.
So, not quite the perfect popular science book, yet certainly one of 2009’s gems.

Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more