Skip to main content

The Quantum Moment - Robert P. Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber ***

This is a book that is trying to be two very different things at the same time, which I suppose, given the subject, is apt. But that doesn't necessarily make it a good idea. On the one hand we find a really quite in-depth exploration of the development of quantum theory. There are some genuinely valuable insights and explanations, with significantly more use of equations than is common in popular science book, but rarely in a way that is scary. On the other hand, it churns out all the hackneyed attempts to base art on science that inevitably are either amateurish or cringemaking - plus presenting some of the more outrageous history of science ideas that emerged from the 1960s when everything had to break the mould and be provocative, however far fetched their ideas seemed.

 I can imagine this was done to try to broaden the audience of the book. I can just see the marketing people thinking 'Popular science readers will love it, and so will arty types, so we'll sell lots more copies.' In practice, I think the reverse will happen, because a fair number of popular science enthusiasts will be put off by the wishy-washy science-as-metaphor stuff, while the arts types will find the hard core popular science tedious.

  I'm not quite sure how in touch the academic authors are with the real world either. At one point we are told that Planck's equation E=hν is 'one of the few equations recognizable by the public.' Really? They've clearly been on campus for too long and need to get out more.

 There is so much good material in the science parts that it's a real shame that the reader has to plough through pages of the hand waving to get to it. We are told at one point, with enthusiasm and no sense of criticism, about the work of Valerie Laws, who in 2002 spray painted words onto sheep, enabling the flock to spell out randomly(ish) generated phrases. Apparently a spokesperson for Northern Arts, which funded this venture, said the result was 'an exciting fusion of poetry and quantum physics.' And the artist commented 'I decided to explore randomness and some of the principles of quantum mechanics, through poetry, using the medium of sheep.' You couldn't parody this as a worse example of old-fashioned flaky linking of science and art. It's a ready-made Monty Python sketch. This had nothing to do with quantum physics.

 There is plenty of great material in here if you want to expand a basic popular science understanding of quantum physics with a bit more depth, but you will have to wade through a lot of unnecessary material to get to it. Mostly the content seems spot on, though I was slightly concerned about a certain flexibility in the history of science presented when we hear, for instance, that returning from the 1911 Solvay conference 'British scientist Ernest Rutherford brought word back to England, where he shared his excitement with an entranced young Danish visitor, Niels Bohr.' Apart from Rutherford being a New Zealander, Bohr didn't meet Rutherford until the end of 1911 and I've never seen any suggestion that Rutherford was the first to bring the early quantum theory to Bohr's attention. So, approach with caution - but if you are tolerant (possibly more tolerant than me), you might enjoy it.
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

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more