Light: A Very Short Introduction

Light: A Very Short Introduction - Ian Walmsley ***

It's fitting that light should be added as a topic to the OUP's growing range of mini-guides in 2015, as this is the International Year of Light (though, to be honest, the year seems to have been a nonstarter of an event). Light is a remarkable phenomenon and one that we rarely think about considering how big a part it plays in our lives.

Ian Walmsley begins by outlining the reasons why light is so important, over and above the mechanism of sight, and gives a very brief historical view of some of the ideas on the nature of light. I was not impressed by his characterisation of Roger Bacon as the 'mad friar of Oxford', but that apart, though fleeting, the historical section was a reasonable gallop through the topic.

For the rest of the content, Walmsley describes optics, light as particles, waves and as a duality in the form of a quantum field. He takes quite an unusual route in doing this and I think it would be easy for a non-technical reader to get somewhat lost along the way. There is quite a long section on special relativity, which, while light-related, is not really the topic of this book, but too little on some aspects of light itself, such as how its speed was first established and measured over the years before settling on the current exact figure. Given the weight that is put on the quantum field description of light, the explanation of quantum fields was too summary, given they remain outside the awareness of most readers.

So, a few key omissions and an approach that in some ways isn't ideal for an introductory guide, but still a solid little collection of material on the nature of light.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily, Introducing Artificial Intelligence is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...

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, ...

Search This Blog