Skip to main content

Seven Tales of the Pendulum – Gregory L. Baker ***

There was a time when practically every review we published of an OUP popular science book had the same complaint. What we were forced to say again and again was that this was a book with a great idea, an excellent topic, and an expert writing it. But unfortunately that expert was an academic who didn’t have a clue how to write for the general public and the result was unreadable. In the last year or so, however, things have changed. OUP has come out with a good number of titles (e.g. The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III) which have been surprisingly readable. Unfortunately, this title is a return to form. It’s a wonderful subject. It has a neat concept in the ‘seven tales’. It’s written by an expert. But it is practically impenetrable.
Things don’t start awfully well in the introduction, when Gregory L. Baker is a little condescending about producing a version of his ‘real’ book for the common herd. But he also reassures us ‘Readers may rest easy knowing that I am mindful of the warning made famous by Stephen Hawking, that every formula reduces the readership by a factor of two.’ The problem is, although it sold well, Hawking’s book has a reputation for being difficult. Yet it is vastly easier to read than this one.
This limitation is frustrating, because Baker does pack in lots of interesting stuff about pendulums. Whether it’s the basic surprise that (despite Galileo), on the whole an ordinary pendulum’s timing isn’t independent of swing size, or explorations of Foucault’s pendulum, torsion pendulums, swinging censors in cathedrals and even the Pit and the Pendulum, there is some excellent material to cover. But the writing is rarely approachable and the author simply misses the whole idea of how to write for a general audience. This is much more the sort of writing you’d find in an undergraduate physics textbook.
I opened a page at random and had a choice of at least four quotes to demonstrate this. Here’s one of them: ‘A sophisticated mathematical procedure may be used to calculate the fractal dimension for the Poincaré section of the chaotic pendulum. But our intuition can at least help demystify the result. Close examination of the Poincaré section shows that its points do not cover an area, but are really a (possibly infinite) set of closely spaced lines. Therefore the Poincaré section is more than a line and less than an area. We then expect its dimension to like between one and two. For the parameter set A(Forcing)=1.5, Q (friction)=4, ωD(forcing frequency)=0.66 the fractal dimension is found to be 1.3. In fact, it is generally true that Poincaré sections for chaotic systems have noninteger dimensions.’ That’s all right then.
The other potential quotes were more dense and impenetrable. You might excuse this because some of the terms have been explained earlier, but the problem is that the approach assumes the way to write popular science is to take a textbook and take out the maths, leaving the explanatory parts, rather than starting from scratch and putting things in terms that people will understand.
Overall, then, a useful and interesting book for physics students who want to find out more about pendulums without doing the maths, but not for the general reader.

Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
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