Physics – Physics Education
Scientific paper
May 2000
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000phyed..35..213l&link_type=abstract
Physics Education, Volume 35, Issue 3, pp. 213-214 (2000).
Physics
Physics Education
Scientific paper
Physics has the reputation of being a difficult and dry subject. Many books have been written in attempts to show that the difficulties are not insurmountable, even for the layman, and to convey some of the fascination it provides for those within it. In Seeking Ultimates Peter Landsberg avoids mathematics, the source of so many difficulties, entirely, and seeks to make physics comprehensible by what he terms intuition. He also emphasizes that there is almost no part of science that is completely understood; there are always areas of incompleteness and uncertainty, capable of providing exciting new results, and examples of this are highlighted throughout the book.
After an introduction Landsberg starts with macroscopic phenomena for ease of understanding, though one might question whether the chosen topic of thermodynamics is ever going to be easy. Next he looks at microscopic effects, from atomic structure to the fundamental particles of the standard model and their interactions. There follow chapters on time and entropy, on chaos theory, on quantum mechanics and then cosmology. The final chapters look at physical constants (including the anthropic principle), whether physics has room for a creator God (the conclusion is that this is not the province of science), and some thoughts on science as a human activity. The chosen topics are those which have been important in the late twentieth century and remain important. Each chapter cites an eminent scientist as a `hero', though little is made of this. There are occasional historical notes, set in boxes, and a few short poems to leaven the text.
What the book achieves is difficult to assess. Removing mathematics and adding a glossary of technical terms do not necessarily allow non-scientists to enjoy the text, as the publisher's note on the back cover suggests. The concepts can baffle the layman even more than the mathematics, and one of the most difficult of all physical concepts permeates so much of this book: entropy. It is physicists who can benefit most from discarding mathematics and seeking intuitive understanding. It is often too easy to put the numbers into a formula, with little real comprehension of the underlying physics. For layman or physicist the book is hard work. It is not a volume to be read from cover to cover; each section needs to be considered and digested, with frequent turning backwards (or sometimes forwards) to other pages. Even then the outcome may leave questions that can only be answered by access to an academic library to look up some of the copious references to original papers (which, of course, do not eschew mathematics or make concessions to conceptual difficulties).
Unfortunately the book is marred by an impression of haste and lack of care, leading to errors that should not have reached the final print. For example, a graph of increase of population with generation number is shown as and stated to be a straight line. It should be exponential. This sort of thing undermines confidence in the whole text. High temperature superconductivity may have a revolutionary effect on electrical machines in the future, but for the time being magnets for magnetic resonance imaging machines and the like still use the old superconductors. Amusing anecdotes make for interesting reading, but the one about Faraday is garbled: he had nothing to do with frogs' legs (that was Galvani), and the quip about taxing electricity one day, if not apocryphal, was made either to Peel or to Gladstone, not to the King. In at least one case a topic mentioned in the index and glossary does not appear on the stated page in the text, apparently having been cut out at a late stage.
Personally I did not find the book satisfying, but others will differ. Especially when dealing with intuitive appreciation, what is straightforward to one person may be utterly opaque to another. Making physics comprehensible and conveying its fascination is a daunting and often thankless task, but a very necessary one. The more it is attempted by those with a command of the subject, the more likely it is to be achieved.
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