Skip to main content

Science: a history in 100 experiments - John and Mary Gribbin ***

What you might call list books - 100 best this, 50 ideas on that - are not my favourite reading (in my experience they tend to be things publishers like because they get lots of translations), but anything John and Mary Gribbin are involved in is bound to have good written content, and that is true here.

 Unlike some such books, where the illustrations dominate, here there is a good mix between the text, which isn't constrained to be an exact two-page spread, and the images. Though the text is never overwhelmed, those images are often excellent and this is a classy enough production to have good quality colour photographs (though this is reflected in the price).

 Along the way through our 100 experiments, we see some of the best of the best. (There are actually 101, explained as being like the US 'Physics 101' type courses, but more likely added afterwards to encompass the LIGO gravitational wave experiment.) It is remarkable to see both the crudeness of some early experiments that achieved so much, and the effort and thinking that has gone in to the ways that we have opened up knowledge on the universe, the Earth, biology, matter and more. The Gribbins aren't unnecessarily fussy about what counts as an experiment, which is excellent, so include, for example, the invention of the steam engine and the fascinating folly that was the almost unusable giant telescope, the Leviathan of Parsonstown.

 We discover the way that very small ideas can spark a wider scientific endeavour - for instance Kekulé's self-eating snake dream, leading to an understanding of the benzene ring, so important to organic chemistry. And how sometimes it is the absence of something that makes the difference, such as when the ability to create a near-vacuum led to more understanding of subatomic particles and the development of electronics. Usually in the history of science we see a neat (if humanly flawed) chronological procession. By taking us from Archimedes in his bath to the satellites mapping the cosmic microwave background radiation we get a better understanding of the breadth of scientific endeavour.

Infrequently, the need to condense an experiment and its implications into a brief article can result in compaction that comes close to being misleading. For instance, in Newton's famous experiments on light we are told that in the second part of the experiment a second prism 'combined the seven colours back into a single spot of white light.' In reality, while Newton did use a second prism this way, he doesn't mention its effect on colour, only shape. His actual 'Experimentum Crucis' used two boards to separate off a small section of the spectrum and the second prism was used to show that different colours bent at different angles. Where Newton did actually make something of recombining the colours, he used a lens, rather than a prism. Similarly the entry on masers and lasers only details the maser work, not even naming the person who created the (far more useful) first laser or the person who had the patent on it.

 Even so, the vast majority of the entries remain informative and concise. I'm only left with my usual bafflement with this kind of book as to what they are for. Only scientific stamp collectors are going to want to read through end to end (I admit to skimming through and dipping in to read the articles that caught my eye for various reasons). There's not the satisfaction of a narrative-based read that comes in a good popular science book. My suspicion is that apart from the translation opportunities, the main target may be libraries - the book is expensive for a personal buy, but I can imagine it being popular in both public and school libraries. So it remains part of a category I don't really understand as a reader... but it undoubtedly should win 'best in class'.

 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

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more