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

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more