Introducing Particle Physics – Tom Whyntie & Oliver Pugh ***

I’ve long been a fan of the massive ‘Introducing’ series of graphic guides and even contributed one (Introducing Infinity) with the excellent Oliver Pugh. They provide an easy-to-digest overview of a topic, using pages that are dominated by illustrations that often remind me of Terry Gilliam’s work on Monty Python, combined with speech bubbles and small chunks of text to get the message across.

Some work better than others and for me, Introducing Particle Physics was a mixed experience. I don’t doubt that Tom Whyntie had a huge challenge to face. Whole chunks of particle physics are, frankly rather dull, while other parts are amongst the most difficult to explain in all of physics. Really making symmetry breaking and the whole Higgs business comprehensible (rather than putting it across at the trite level the news correspondents managed) is very difficult, and I’m not sure that Whyntie manages it. I suspect as someone working in the field he is too close to it to really understand why everyone else finds it so daunting.

The other problem I had was that I found the text rather too dense and not hugely readable in places. But having said all that, given the problems of getting across this subject there is no doubt at all that this format makes for one of the most approachable attempts I’ve seen. Bearing in mind that to explain particle physics, Whyntie also has to pull in chunks of quantum physics and nuclear physics it’s quite a tour-de-force that this book was ever written at all. So don’t expect everything about particle physics to suddenly become crystal clear – but this will certainly help fill in a lot of the background before, perhaps, reading a more detailed book on the subject.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

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 Giant Leap - Caleb Scharf ****

This is surely Caleb Scharf's most personal work - and certainly quite different from some of his earlier output, such as his excellent Gravity's Engines. In part this is a technological exploration of space travel, not unlike Final Frontier , but it is also about the future of humanity, more reminiscent of The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire , but with a more positive outlook. Overall, it was fascinating reading. Let's take those two aspects separately. As always, Scharf gives us plenty of meat in an approachable fashion, whether it's delving into the rocket equation, considering the pros and considerable limitations of Mars as a destination for humans (the chapter is pointedly called The Red Siren), or taking on the possibilities of asteroids. And even in the semi-technical aspect of the first Moon landing we get some more personal detail - I hadn't realised until reading this that Scharf was English by birth (being bathed in a sink at a key moment). Althou...

Search This Blog