Skip to main content

Ten Days in Physics that Shook the World - Brian Clegg **** 

Updated for paperback
Joining the host of books with a number in the title, Brian Clegg's Ten Days identifies key dates in history when a theoretical or practical breakthrough in physics would lead to developments with a significant impact on our lives. It's a nice format as it gives an opportunity to put the idea into context - for example, providing other world events that happened in the same year - and it gives the reader a chance to discover more about the individual(s) involved as human beings, not just as scientists.

There is a good mix of familiar names - Newton, Faraday, Curie and Einstein, for example - and of more obscure contributors, like Clausius, Kamerlingh Onnes, James Biard and Vint Cerf. Of course, like any other 'best of' type of selection, it's possible to argue about what should and shouldn't be included. We don't get the origin of quantum physics, for example, although there are several 'days' where the discovery is quantum related, so perhaps that is a reasonable balance.

The book ends with speculation on the 'eleventh day'. This is particularly significant as the most recent date in the book 1 October 1969 (first link of the internet initiated). Clegg argues convincingly that physics developments since then may have been dramatic - black holes, for example, or the Higgs boson - but have not had a significant impact on our lives. He offers suggestions from artificial intelligence to the long-awaited arrival of practical nuclear fusion (Of course the key 'day' for these will already have happened, but we need a retrospective view to know what it was, and how much it has or will really change our lives.)

Clegg is a skilled wordsmith and this is a light, easy read, filled with intriguing details, such as Kamerlingh Onnes's near-indecipherable lab notebook or the programming error that crashed the computer on the first attempt to use the internet's predecessor the ARPAnet. Inevitably, the structure makes it a little formulaic, but that doesn't get in the way of it providing a good balance between history and science.

External reviews prior to paperback:
Connecting the world of scientific research with that of the every day is a difficult task but Brian Clegg’s Ten Days in Physics that Shook the World manages to strike a delicate balance between the two. Marking each of the ten days with its own scientific figurehead, Clegg takes us through the defining eras of science. Presented in digestible and compact chapters, we are able to weave between each era as we please. We visit Newton as he establishes his three laws of motion, jump forwards to the 19th century to observe Curie making history as the first female recipient of the Nobel Prize, and peer at the possibilities ahead for a future day eleven. 

Those in search of a well-written account of the world of science should look no further. Whether it’s radioactivity or relativity, superconductivity or supercomputers, Clegg’s Ten Days covers it. Those with prior scientific knowledge stand to learn more about the historical and social context of the discoveries that lead their studies, while those taking their first steps into science can do so steadily – avoiding a bombardment of mathematical formulae. Ten Days in Physics That Shook the World succeeds where much of science writing fails, by creating a clear path between pivotal moments in scientific history and the world as we know it today. Lily Pagano, Reaction

Clegg writes well in an informative and accessible way. Physics can of course get complex very quickly, and also the maths associated with many of the cutting edge insights, this book however remains readable and a really good potential entry point for younger readers looking to have a big picture view on what physics is, and how our best and brightest have gradually learned more about it. A nice book, well written, and hopefully it will find a receptive audience for its positive interpretation of why physics remains invaluable to our lives. Simon Cocking, Irish Tech News

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Peet Morris
Please note, this title is written by the editor of the Popular Science website. Our review is still an honest opinion – and we could hardly omit the book – but do want to make the connection clear.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero Degrees of Empathy [The Science of Evil] – Simon Baron-Cohen ***

I’ve been a real fan of previous books by Simon Baron-Cohen like  The Essential Difference , so opening this was one was a pleasant prospect. What I found was a book that wasn’t  bad … but that could have been a lot better. I got the impression of a book that had been rushed out without a lot of work going into it. The thesis at the heart of the book – that one of the important ‘circuits’ of the brain is the one dealing with empathy, and that individuals sit on an empathy spectrum, with some residing at zero degrees of empathy – is an interesting one. Baron-Cohen introduces us to three key personality types he defines as ‘zero-negative’ including psychopaths, plus types that are ‘zero-positive’ like those with Asperger’s. In a way both of these definitions are odd, in that his zero-negatives can actually have a lot of the kind of empathy that involves being able to read another person’s emotional state, and his zero-negatives can have a lot of the kind of empathy i...
Post a Comment
Read more