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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work - Roger Highfield ****

It is easy to suspect that a biographical book from highly-illustrated publisher Dorling Kindersley would be mostly high level fluff, so I was pleasantly surprised at the depth Roger Highfield has worked into this large-format title. Yes, we get some of the ephemera so beloved of such books, such as a whole page dedicated to Hawking's coxing blazer - but there is plenty on Hawking's scientific life and particularly on his many scientific ideas. I've read a couple of biographies of Hawking, but I still came across aspects of his lesser fields here that I didn't remember, as well as the inevitable topics, ranging from Hawking radiation to his attempts to quell the out-of-control nature of the possible string theory universes. We also get plenty of coverage of what could be classified as Hawking the celebrity, whether it be a photograph with the Obamas in the White House, his appearances on Star Trek TNG and The Big Bang Theory or representations of him in the Simpsons. Ha

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur