Skip to main content

Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe – Leon Lederman & Christopher Hill ****

Although it won’t appeal to everyone, as I will explain in a moment, I think it’s fair to say this is one of most valuable popular science books I have ever read. Symmetry is at the heart of much modern physics, but it is generally concealed under the surface, and when it has to emerge, for example when talking about the standard model of particle physics, every book I have ever read on the subject fails to explain the subject properly. This book doesn’t quite make it, but it is by far the closest I have ever seen to a comprehensible explanation.
Nobel laureate Leon Lederman (the man behind the dreaded ‘God particle’ term) and his usual co-author Christopher Hill pack a huge amount of information into this slim paperback. We begin with an exploration of symmetry itself, bring in the laws of physics, meet Emmy Noether in some detail and specifically her concept that each of the conservation laws corresponds to an underlying symmetry. From there Lederman and Hill bring in classical physics, and particularly inertia, relativity, broken symmetry, quantum physics, local gauge invariance and QED, quarks and QCD, the standard model and the Higgs field. It is a huge achievement just how much of this they get in, and how approachable most of it is with a bit of work.
As that suggests, there is a price to pay for the reader. If you are totally equation averse, you will have problems because there are a lot of them. They are always relatively simple and well explained, but the pages are littered with them (which presents a different problem, as we will discover in a moment). This is a book you will have to work a little bit to read, perhaps occasionally re-reading a section to get the full meaning, but it will be so well worth it.
I just have two issues with the book. Although Lederman and Hill almost make the application of symmetry and gauge theories comprehensible there is one huge gap, where the authors say ‘let’s change something to randomly to have any value as we move through time and space.’ They build the whole explanation of gauge theory on this (this is the first book, by the way, I’ve seen that properly explains where that word ‘gauge’ comes in) – yet as presented it makes no sense. They give no reason why we are asked to choose random values, rather than sticking with a smoothly changing value, or making some other arbitrary decision. Because of this there’s a feeling that your understanding is built on sand. There is also a certain weakness in their historical content – they reproduce the myth that Bruno was burned for his scientific beliefs unquestioningly, for instance.
The other issue is the quality of the physical book itself. I am very careful with books when I read them – paperbacks usually still look brand new with no creases etc. But by the time I had reached the end, half the pages had come away from the spine. I can live with that, but worse still, the book seemed not to have been proof read. Any book has a few typos or small errors that slip through. You can’t spot everything. But page after page there were equations where a character (often the multiply sign, or the Greek letter phi) was replaced with a question mark. It made them much harder to read, the last thing you need with equations in a popular science book. I can’t understand how the publisher or the authors could fail to spot such a glaring error at the proof stage.
Nonetheless an important and hugely informative book on a subject that is at the heart of modern physics but has rarely been comprehensibly explained. Recommended.

Paperback:  

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