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.

Hardback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Comments

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein, but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...

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...

Search This Blog