Skip to main content

Beam – Jeff Hecht ***

Beam‘s subtitle is ‘the race to make the laser’ and this was a story that was crying out for a good popular scientific history. Not only is there really interesting physics behind the laser, there was a genuine tense race, strong personalities, bizarre problems with security clearances and more to make for a gripping story.
I’ve come rather late to Beam (first published in 2005) because, frankly, the book doesn’t seem to have been very visible – and I’m afraid I can understand why. Although there are all the elements of a great story there, Jeff Hecht is probably not the right person to tell it. On the physics side, while there is a lot of detail of the precise excitation processes required for masers and lasers, there isn’t really enough background on quantum physics to give it context.
As for the story itself, the book suffers from kitchen-sink-itis. Hecht seems to feel it necessary to mention ever single tiny contribution to the research, whether or not it had a direct impact on the key players. And though the story really does get interesting when, for instance, we get onto Gordon Gould’s you’d-laugh-if-you-didn’t-cry security problems that meant he wasn’t able to read his own work, much of the storytelling gets horribly bogged down and repetitive, making it hard to follow the narrative.
The final problem is limiting the book to the race to create the first laser – it would have had a wider interest if Hecht had brought in the development of the solid state lasers we all have littering our homes in CD players and the like.
All in all, there is plenty of good stuff here, and I’m not aware of anyone else who has told the story in such detail, but you have to work quite hard to get to the nuggets.

Paperback 

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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Math for English Majors - Ben Orlin *****

Ben Orlin makes the interesting observation that the majority of people give up on understanding maths at some point, from fractions or algebra all the way through to tensors. At that stage they either give up entirely or operate the maths mechanically without understanding what they are doing. In this light-hearted take, Orlin does a great job of taking on mathematical processes a step at a time, in part making parallels with the structure of language. Many popular maths books shy away from the actual mathematical representations, going instead for verbal approximations. Orlin doesn't do this, but makes use of those linguistic similes and different ways of looking at the processes involved to help understanding. He also includes self-admittedly awful (but entertaining) drawings and stories from his experience as a long-time maths teacher. To make those parallels, Orlin refers to numbers as nouns, operations as verbs (though he points out that there are some flaws in this simile) a

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on

2040 (SF) - Pedro Domingos ****

This is in many ways an excellent SF satire - Pedro Domingos never forgets that part of his job as a fiction writer is to keep the reader engaged with the plot, and it's a fascinating one. There is one fly in the ointment in the form of a step into heavy-handed humour that takes away its believability - satire should push the boundaries but not become totally ludicrous. But because the rest of it is so good, I can forgive it. The setting is the 2040 US presidential election, where one of the candidates is an AI-powered robot. The AI is the important bit - the robot is just there to give it a more human presence. This is a timely idea in its own right, but it gives Domingos an opportunity not just to include some of the limits and possibilities of generative AI, but also to take a poke at the nature of Silicon Valley startups, and of IT mega-companies and their worryingly powerful (and potentially deranged) leaders. Domingos knows his stuff on AI as a professor of computer science w