Too Big for a Single Mind - Tobias Hürter ****

The standard version of the old saying 'You shouldn't judge a book by its cover' misses a final few words: 'but most people do.' And in the case of this book it's a shame - because the cover is pretty awful and really doesn't do the book justice. The feeling from the cover is that this is going to be the worthy, laboured tome of an academic - probably a touch amateurish in its writing style. In practice, it's a slick piece of popular science writing.

Tobias Hürter is apparently a well-known German science writer, here translated by David Shaw. This is a book in the peculiarly American style of pop science - extremely focused on narrative and giving details in the manner of a docu-drama - so, for instance, we read that 'a young man in a checked suit hurtles down the steep, narrow stairway from the second floor of the house at Kramgasse 49, along the cobbled streets and through the covered medieval arcades. In his hand, he clutches an envelope. Passersby may be astonished to notice his footwear: worn green slippers, embroidered with flowers. But the young man pays no need to their surprised glances.' It's an engaging view, in this case a peek into the life of a young Albert Einstein.

In 53 short chapters, Hürter hurtles through the lives and contributions of the big names in quantum physics from Curie and Planck to Dirac and Pauli. We get a good dose of biographical context (if anything too much) and an interesting interlacing of the different contributions. Unusually, and effectively, Hürter includes short one to two page chapters giving some historical context in the wider world. So one of these, for example, entitled 'A Painter Moves to Munich', tells of Hitler avoiding the draft in Austria shortly before the First World War by escaping to Germany. These contextual chapters are very effective in situating the scientific developments alongside the political developments in Europe that were very much the setting for the evolution of quantum physics.

I did find some aspects of the style a little wearing. The book is almost entirely written in the present tense, which makes it feel a bit tacky to me. Hürter sits at the shallow end of presenting the science - I like a bit more meat on my popular science, but here we don't learn a huge amount about the detail, rather skimming the surface to move on to the next story. However, this is an interesting approach, particularly with the interlaced short historical chapters, giving an overview of a large chunk of the development of quantum physics. If you enjoy the somewhat breathless narrative style, it's definitely worth giving it a try.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

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