Skip to main content

The Matter of Everything - Suzie Sheehy ****

It's notable how many of the superstar physicists from Newton and Einstein through to Feynman have been theoreticians. Experimental physicists - utterly essential, apart from anything else to temper the imaginations of the theoreticians (which is probably why there are so many wild theories in cosmology) - rarely penetrate the popular imagination. Because Suzie Sheehy is covering the development of experimental particle physics here, she doesn't include arguably the greatest experimental physicist of all time, Michael Faraday - but as well as, for example, Rutherford and Thomson, there are plenty of names here that will be unfamiliar, making this an important book in uncovering the practical difficulties that particularly the early experimenters faced.

Starting with the discoveries of X-rays and the electron using cathode ray tubes, we are taken through Rutherford's evidence for the atomic nucleus, cloud chambers and cosmic rays, particle accelerators, neutrinos, quarks and the Higgs boson (though that gets relatively short coverage, perhaps because it's difficult to talk about individual experimenters). At each stage, Sheehy finishes the look at a particular topic by uncovering applications. Some of these seem a bit like the painful attempts to justify NASA spending on a handful of spinoffs - surely better simply to go for science for science's sake - though there are possibly a few surprises, such as the use of cosmic rays to get information on the innards of objects too big and/or dense to use X-rays. 

It's wonderful to see the work of experimenters properly celebrated and described. On the whole, Sheehy does this at a sufficiently high level that the non-technical reader can easily follow. It helps that the more esoteric aspects of theoretical physics only get mentioned in so much as they're necessary to explain what the experiments are intended to achieve, while the big name twentieth century theoreticians, such as Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Dirac, flit through like ghosts with little more than passing mentions.

The only real issue here is that Rutherford's infamous (but arguably accurate at the time) comment that all science is either physics or stamp collecting probably should have been 'either theoretical physics or stamp collecting'. Experimental physics is about gathering facts (and building the equipment to gather those facts), or more recently producing statistics. While the practicalities are initially fascinating, particularly in the string and sealing wax era, by the time we get onto later particle accelerators, the technology starts to lack distinction, while the huge groups involved mean that the story loses the personal touch that makes popular science easier to relate to. It's not disastrous, but the second half of the book is less interesting than the first.

There are also one or two historical inaccuracies. J. J. Thomson is described as founding director of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where that role fell to the arguably much greater physicist James Clerk Maxwell. We are also told that Harriet Brooks was the first woman to study at the Cavendish laboratory in 1902. In fact, though change was painfully slow, the first women studied there in 1878. 

However, these are minor issues - the book is a useful reminder of how the experimental side of physics has been underplayed in popular science and arguably undervalued in the wider field - it would be great if Sheehy could follow up with a similar look at other aspects of experimental physics.

A quick postscript on the cover - I usually show the UK version of a book here, but for this book I was first contacted by the US publisher, hence this being the US cover.

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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more