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

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

How to Keep a Plane in the Sky - Alex Davies ****

If there's one big gap in the science writing sphere, it's popular engineering (you can quibble over whether engineering is science, but where else would you put popular engineering?). Alex Davies does the field a real service with this insightful introduction to the world of test engineering. The concept is simple. If we build something and sell it, we need to test it to make sure that it won't fail in a way that's dangerous to the consumer. The most obvious example is airliners, which feature at some length, but this applies to everything from cuddly toys to hair straighteners: someone needs to predict what could go wrong and to put the product through its paces to see if it will survive under any reasonable circumstances. When Davies is telling a story of test engineering in action, the book is a delight. He opens with the way that real bears are used to test if bears can get into coolers and trash cans - and the impressive ways these animals can  circumvent human in...
Post a Comment
Read more

On the Equality of All Things - Carlo Rovelli ****

There is a wide gulf between the worldviews of physicists and philosophers. Many physicists present a rather sweetly naive, child-like view of the world, where philosophers bring a distinctly more adult, cynical tone. This being the case, it can be a little worrying when a physicist dips a toe into the philosophical mire. Infamously, in The Grand Design , Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow told us that philosophy was now dead because science could deal with anything it had previously been needed for. Thankfully, Carlo Rovelli is not trying to do away with philosophy, though it has to be said that when he veers into the topic that physicist's naivety can make it feel like the philosophising of an earnest eighteen-year-old. Take the opening paragraph, which tells us 'electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies do not essentially differ in nature from one another. They are notions that illuminate each other'. I almost expected a Pink Floyd soundtr...
Post a Comment
Read more