Quantum Physics for Poets – Leon Lederman & Christopher Hill ***

I am always suspicious when a book makes a big thing about the author being a doctor. When you see ‘The Wonder of Vitamins’ by Fred Doser M.D., you just know it’s more about selling product than information. Although not quite as bad, I was a little put off by the way the cover of this book tells us it’s not by Leon Lederman, but Leon LedermanNobel Laureate. Now don’t get me wrong, Leon Lederman, the scientist who came up with the nickname ‘God particle’ for the Higgs Boson is a real scientist, and is, indeed, a Nobel Prize winner. But I couldn’t help but find this splashing around of the fact a distraction rather than an aid. Was his Nobel Prize for explaining physics to ordinary folk? No. Does it make him any better at it? No. So why such a big thing of it?

Once you’ve got past this branding, it’s certainly an interesting title. Unlike The Cosmic Verses, this isn’t a book that’s all in rhyme, though admittedly a few poems do appear. It’s more a book that is intended to be read by people who don’t read science books like, well, poets.

It certainly manages to fulfil half the title. There’s plenty of quantum physics in here, along with a bit of Newton/Galileo style science to give the background. And Lederman & Hill don’t hold back in going into some quite hard to follow areas. They spend quite a while, for instance, on Bell’s theorem, the indirect way by which it’s proved that quantum entanglement really does involve non local effects, rather than carrying information in hidden variables. But the trouble is, I don’t get the impression that either of the authors are great communicators. Lederman’s God Particle book is significantly more readable, but I think his co-author was a writer. The fact is any poet (or anyone else not reasonably versed in science) is going to struggle to keep up with this book and having a few cartoons (which quickly die out) doesn’t transform it into effective science communication.

What you end up with, then, is not a book for poets, but rather one that gives an introduction to quantum theory for, perhaps, those who are nearing the end of school and are hoping to study physics at university. The trouble is, even that market is better covered Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw’s The Quantum Universe. If Leon Lederman had brought hosts of personal insights to the table, it would have made this book worthwhile, but there are only a couple of very short instances. It’s fine as alternative to Cox and Forshaw, but certainly isn’t for those of a poetic disposition.

Harback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Peter Spitz

Comments

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...

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...

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...

Search This Blog