Skip to main content

Feynman and His Physics - Jörg Resag ***

So much has been written about the charismatic twentieth century physicist Richard Feynman that it's hard to think of a book about him presenting anything new - so Jörg Resag needs to be congratulated for achieving just that. What's more, it's an excellent book for a particular audience - the only reason I'm giving it three stars is that this is quite a narrow audience... but for them it deserves four.

Feynman and his Physics contains relatively little biographical material: Resag makes it clear from his introduction that this isn't the main thrust of the book. What there is serves as context for Feynman's work in physics. I'd almost wish Resag had not bothered, as without a bit more depth, biography can seem a little tedious, but there was nothing tedious about Feynman's life. (There were also one or two contextual details, such as the now discarded suggestion that Wheeler devised the term 'black hole', which could do with updating.)

When it comes to the physics, Resag treads a fine line between the physics textbook and popular science. He explains the ideas with very little use of mathematics, but goes into a lot more depth than you would expect (or desire) in a popular science title. it is this depth that gives this book its unique flavour - that being case, to be honest, I wish Resag had accepted that anyone who is prepared to work through this will be at least familiar with basic calculus and so not have to (as he does) skirt around calculus with statement that tell us sort of what the integration or differentiation is doing in text, rather than simply representing it much more clearly mathematically.

So who would benefit from this treatment? A reader who is already familiar with the basics of Feynman's work, perhaps from one of the existing scientific biographies, and who wants to discover in more detail just what Feynman really contributed and how he did so. There was far more information here on what made Feynman remarkable than I've seen elsewhere (other than in, for example, the Feynman lectures) - the reader really gets a feel for his unique approach to physics and how he often saw things differently to many of his contemporaries.

Just occasionally, even for this audience (who, I'd suggest, should have at least A-level physics and maths), Resag drops something in that is never properly explained. So, for example, when talking about quantum mechanical wave equations he tells us 'such an analysis informs us that suitable pre-factors such as (example) should be included' without telling us what a pre-factor is - not a term that is likely to be familiar to the reader.

All in all, then, a really original take on Feynman's work that should be very attractive  if you should fall into the correct narrow category of potential readership.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Where are the chemistry popular science books?

by Brian Clegg
There has never been more emphasis on the importance of public engagement. We need both to encourage a deeper interest in science and to counter anti-scientific views that seem to go hand-in-hand with some types of politics. Getting the public interested in science both helps recruit new scientists of the future and spreads an understanding of why an area of scientific research deserves funding. Yet it is possible that chemistry lags behind the other sciences in outreach. As a science writer, and editor of this website, I believe that chemistry is under-represented in popular science. I'd like to establish if this is the case, if so why it is happening - and what can be done to change things. 


An easy straw poll is provided by the topic tags on the site. At the time of writing, there are 22 books under 'chemistry' as opposed to 97 maths, 126 biology and 182 physics. The distribution is inevitably influenced by editorial bias - but as the editor, I can confirm …
5 comments
Read more

Bloom - Ruth Kassinger ***

There is much fascinating material in this chunky book by Ruth Kassinger. It may be my total ignorance of biology and everyone else knows these things, but I learnt so much - for example that seaweed is algae and not a plant, about algae's role in the development of land plants, about the algae in lichen and its contribution to coral reefs.

The book is divided into four broad sections: on the origins and development of algae, on algae (and particularly seaweed) as food, on making use of algae, for example, for biofuel, and on algae and climate change, particularly the bleaching of coral and algal blooms. This is all done in a very approachable writing style, mixing descriptive material that is never over-technical with narrative often featuring visits to different locations and to talk to a range of experts from those who study to algae to those who cook them.

There are two problems though. Firstly, the book is too long at 380 pages. Each section could do with a trim, but this wa…
Post a Comment
Read more

Make, Think, Imagine - John Browne ***

When you read a politician's memoirs you know that, nine times out of ten, it won't really quite work, because the message can't carry a whole book. It's reminiscent of the old literary agent's cry of 'Is it a book, or is it an article?' It's not that there aren't a lot of words in such tomes. It's almost obligatory for these books to be quite chunky. But it's a fair amount of work getting through them, and you don't feel entirely satisfied afterwards. Unfortunately, that's rather how John Browne (former head of oil giant BP)'s book comes across.

It's not that the central thread is unimportant. It used to be the case, certainly in the UK, that science, with its roots in philosophy and the pursuit of knowledge, was considered far loftier than engineering, growing out of mechanical work and the pursuit of profit. There is, perhaps, still a whiff of this around in some circles - so Browne's message that engineering has been…
Post a Comment
Read more