Skip to main content

Professor Povey's Perplexing Problems - Thomas Povey ****

I have a recurring nightmare where I find myself in my final year physics exam at university, but with no opportunity for revision and with practically every detail I learned forgotten. Not surprisingly it is a disaster. In fact one of the greatest moments of my life was when, on starting my first job, I realised I would never have to take another exam. So in principle this book, which is supposedly fun and according to the author ought to be entertaining, should have been my worst possible read. As I started it, I was mentally cursing Simon Singh for saying it was a cut above most popular science titles. In fact, things went rather better than expected. 

 The idea is to put the reader through the kind of brain-taxing maths-based problems that are given to physics candidates applying to Oxford University. And some of these are genuinely entertaining. In particular I found the sections on logic problems, perpetual motion machines and estimating highly enjoyable - the estimating section consists of what are often known as Fermi problems, though Thomas Povey seems not to have heard of that name. (There is a whole book of these called How Many Licks.)

 What I found myself doing was reading the problem, having a think about what the shape of the answer might be and then flicking though the answer without reading it in detail. If I'm honest - and this is probably why I never made it as a real scientist - I didn't really care what the actual answer was. That just seemed like grunt work. But thinking around the problem was genuinely stimulating.

 However, I did find a number of the topics - geometry and various areas of mechanics for instance - sufficiently dull that even getting a vague idea of the direction that should be taken was rather meh. It's a shame that there weren't more genuinely interesting topics. Now, admittedly by limiting topics to those that high school students should know there is a natural tendency to the duller subjects, but the perpetual motion section showed you could make basic mechanics and energy considerations approachable - it's just a shame there weren't more exotic interpretations like that. 

 Overall, then, I surprised myself by getting more out of the book than I thought I would, and despite expectations, I don't think I will have nightmares as a result of reading it either. I even had the delight of having recently researched one of the estimates that Povey uses in his Fermi problems, and could feel a little smug as he was almost an order of magnitude out (as long as you consider Americans rather than Brits). In the spirit of the book, I'm not going to tell you which estimate it was, or why there are special circumstances that make the answer in the book closer to correct than it should be. 

 However, this book certainly isn't for everyone who would read a conventional popular science book. I'd go as far as to say that it's not for most popular science readers. But if you fancy doing physics, maths or engineering at university - or wish you once had - it is an absolute must-have buy.

Paperback:  
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

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...
Post a Comment
Read more