By Giovanni Vignale
Oxford University Press
Hardback: £16.99 $22
Most things in life are not “invariants”. Consider two identical glasses of good wine. A thirsty person quickly drinks the first one and then complains about the ensuing headache. The other glass has its aromas and textures slowly appreciated, mixed with the whispering sounds of waves breaking on a nearby shore, dimly illuminated by the crimson shades of the late afternoon sun – still bright but so tired from the long day’s journey that its descent behind the shallow mountains can be directly followed, triggering an everlasting memory associating the wine’s flavours with a pleasant feeling. The Beautiful Invisible is a truly remarkable opus, better appreciated if read in a slow and relaxed mood, savouring each sentence, each paragraph. I wonder if I have ever read another book with so few misprints, unclear sentences, or misplaced arguments. Each word is the right word, in the right place. And yet, as if to disturb the poet Stefan Mallarmé (“We do not write poems with ideas, but with words”), the continuum of great ideas is, at least for physicists, what makes this book such a wonderful “poem”.
Giovanni Vignale, besides being a professor at the University of Missouri and a condensed-matter theorist, is a connoisseur of literature, art, theatre and cinema, and seems to have spent plenty of time in transatlantic flights to conceive this “travel guide”. It takes the interested reader through a journey of invisible fields and virtual characters, intertwined with the reality of surreal but beautiful landscapes, surpassing the most imaginative creations of the human mind. As every condensed-matter theorist knows, “more is different”, and if you dive into this book, your mind will be filled with much more than just physics. Saint-Exupery, Musil, Bulgakov, Borges, García Márquez, Elliot, Poe, Shakespeare, Magritte, Vermeer and many others will walk along with you on this path to enlightenment. Some of the scenery is impressive and breathtaking. Maxwell’s discovery of electromagnetic waves by a purely theoretical argument, Dirac’s bringing together of quantum mechanics and special relativity, and other magnificent viewpoints welcome you along this incredible journey, which connects mechanics, thermodynamics, relativity, electrodynamics and quantum mechanics and ends on superconductivity – “one of the highest achievements of the physics of the 20th century” – a natural stop for a book published in 2011.
Along the way, casually dropped here and there by the side of the path, you might find some pearls of wisdom: “we must already know what we are looking for, in order to see it”; “theory grows at the confluence of fantasy and truth”; “there is no better way to test a theory than to apply it to a scenario different from the one that initially prompted its development”. We are also reminded of the fascinating and paradoxical mysteries of quantum mechanics: “there is nothing I can say to demystify it, words attempt the task and come back defeated”. And we are given some good advice: “complex calculations often simplify dramatically when approached from the right angle”; “different representations stimulate our imagination in different ways, producing vastly different results”; certain issues are “ignorable in the limit of interest”. At the end, after almost 300 pages, the pilgrim is offered some final take-home souvenirs: “there are no final truths at the frontier, only an inexhaustible activity that creates and continuously destroys its own creations”, “the search for the truth has more value than the truth itself”.
Vignale shows, convincingly, that no one should think that physicists are any less imaginative than novelists or poets. In summary, this book is the best Christmas reading for physicists this year (even better than Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics), at least for physicists who manage to relax for a week or two. I will surely enjoy reading it again, some day. But first I would like to follow up some of the many “suggestions for further reading”. Maybe I will start by reminding myself of Le Petit Prince: “anything essential is invisible to the eye and one sees clearly only with the heart”.
