Books : How Physics Confronts Reality by Roger G Newton
Krishna
Fascinating, I thought when I started the book. It looked like this is one of those books that bring the excitement of physics alive for the lay reader. But your enthusiasm wanes pretty fast and and the book glides down to the mundane lever.
This book is all about physics and quantum theory. There are other books that we have reviewed on the same subject, but this has a different slant. For instance, the discussion of quantum here is completely unlike anything else. And there are some very interesting tidbits there too.
Quantum was proposed by Max Planck. How? First of all, he saw that a heated iron changed colours in discrete bands. He suggested that the radiation goes in specific amounts. And he supplied a constant (called Planck’s constant from then on) to account for the discrete amount. He thought he was supplying an artificial constant just to get the math right. Later quantum theory established that this is the fundamental nature of things!
Another nugget : When Einstein was 25 in 1905 and working at the Patent Office in Switzerland, he submitted three seminal papers. He considered only one of them as revolutionary. It had to do with the photoelectric effect. What about one of the remaining two papers? One was his Theory of Relativity! Imagine! (However, this paper also became important in establishing the particle nature of light which he had already called quanta in the paper, later on ).
The main issue is that it descends into heavy technology with mathematical formulae and loses you part of the way through. As soon as it climbs out of that confusing equations, and gets interesting, it drops you into another technical mumbo jumbo to the point that you lose the momentum.
Einstein was not happy with the Quantum theory and put up objections after objections with Neils Bohr deflating all of it. Finally Einstein said that even though the facts fit, there will be a ‘fuller’ theory that comes along that will set everything right and this is just a partial manifestation of that theory. Which is why he was looking for a Universal Theory that explains all for the rest of his life with no success.
A small portion of the book is interesting, and despite many other books on the same subject, informative with new perspectives. But most of the book is cryptic and heavily tilted towards mathematics that will be beyond most novices.
There are some interesting pieces like how they figured out magnetism is a wave and a force (shape of iron filings around a magnet) but this could have been made a lot more interesting with a different treatment.
The inference of muons, bosons and fermions is interesting but still complex. The of how the scientists figured out all that invisible stuff like protons, neutrinos, antiprotons etc is interesting and new but the complex explanations do not help if you, like me, are new to this world and a lay person to boot. And even if you, like me, are determined to plough through difficult subjects and not give up.
4/10
– – Krishna (Aug 2018)