Subject Grouping: Praxis

By Leon N Cooper and Dmitri Feldman (eds.)

World Scientific

Hardback: £84 $135 Paperback: £40 $65

More than 50 years after John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and Robert Schrieffer – BCS – published their now famous theory of superconductivity, and 100 years since the discovery of superconductivity, the key concepts have become the basis of a vast and ever-increasing field of investigation, both theoretical and experimental.

This exceptionally well written and edited book celebrates and reviews the state of BCS theory and experiment. The many chapters on the history and early experiments (written by Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer, as well as others) are all very clear and readily accessible to a high-energy physicist, despite containing a wealth of detail. The content continues well beyond the usual applications of BCS theory and there are extensive discussions of extensions of BCS, especially in the light of attempts to understand the new high T_c superconductors.

Experimentalists will especially enjoy the chapter by John Clarke on “SQUIDS: Then and Now”, which contains a beautiful discussion of the early development of the superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID), including some really makeshift laboratory set-ups. I particularly enjoyed his description of trying to get a thin, mechanically stable insulating film for a Josephson junction and his colleague Paul Wraight saying: “How about a blob of solder on a piece of niobium wire? Solder is a superconductor and you keep telling me that niobium has a surface oxide layer.” Remarkably this simple idea worked, with several junctions formed on the crude device. Brian Pippard quipped that it looked as though a slug had crawled through the window overnight and died, and so the term SLUG came into use for what was dubbed a “superconducting low-inductance undulatory galvanometer”. The chapter goes on to cover applications including magnetocardiography, magnetoencephalography, precision gyroscopes, geophysics, qubits, and searches for galaxy clustering and axions.

There is plenty in this book for the particle physicist: Gordon Baym covers BCS theory for atomic nuclei, neutron stars and quark matter; Yiochiro Nambu discusses mass gaps and symmetry breaking; Frank Wilczek writes on BCS theory in QCD at high densities and gives a particularly nice discussion of colour-flavour locking, as well as abelian and nonabelian anyons. In the final chapter Steven Weinberg gives a personal overview “From BCS to the LHC”.

All 23 chapters are by outstanding physicists (including many Nobel prize-winners) and all were fascinating to read. I would highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone as a wonderful review of a powerful unifying concept that covers an enormous range of phenomena.

By Wojciech Florkowski

World Scientific

Hardback: £66 $96

Wojciech Florkowski’s book on ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions appears right at the beginning of a new era in the field. In 2010, two new experimental heavy-ion programmes started at CERN. First, lead nuclei were accelerated to the highest ever energy – 1.38 TeV per nucleon – at the LHC and rich experimental results were released by the ALICE, ATLAS and CMS collaborations, even during the first data-taking period in November/December 2010. Second, in parallel, a new fixed-target heavy-ion programme at CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) was launched with the acceleration of lead beams to the lowest-ever energy in the SPS, namely 13.9 GeV per nucleon. This was to study the use of the fragment separator in producing secondary light-ion beams for the NA61/SHINE experiment. These two research programmes are perfectly complementary. The one at the LHC aims at a systematic investigation of hot and dense quark-gluon plasma. The one at the SPS, on the other hand, will search for the critical point of strongly interacting matter and study the properties of the onset of deconfinement.

This book by Florkowski is highly relevant for all participants in the new programmes at CERN. I am convinced that it may also help all non-heavy-ion physicists involved in experiments at CERN to understand the language and excitement of their heavy-ion colleagues.

Furthermore, it gives an excellent introduction to and an in-depth review of the standard theoretical framework that is used to interpret the heavy-ion data. It provides a clear, logical and unified description of statistical, hydrodynamical and kinetic models. All this is illustrated by a selection of the most relevant experimental results of the past programmes at Brookhaven’s Alternating Gradient Synchrotron and Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, as well as at the SPS. Finally, there are various exercises in each chapter for use as a textbook in a graduate course.

All in all, this book is highly recommendable both for heavy-ion and non-heavy-ion physicists.

by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder, Vintage Books. Paperback ISBN 9780099521341, £7.99. E-book ISBN 9781409076667, £8.16.

I first came to know the housekeeper, her son and the memory-impaired professor through their roles in an in-flight movie en route from Tokyo to Frankfurt. The filmmaking is beautiful and the acting sublime, but the real surprise is the subject matter. This is a story about “Euler’s identity”, and it carries it off brilliantly, leaving behind a true appreciation of the beauty of numbers. I stepped off the plane wondering if Hollywood could ever do such a thing, and so was happy to discover that at least the novel on which the film was based has an English translation, now available in paperback.

The Housekeeper and the Professor tells the story of a mathematician whose short-term memory following an accident is limited to 80 minutes. He makes his way through the day thanks to Post-it notes, but each morning is a new beginning. It’s a story of platonic affection, shared between the professor, his housekeeper and her 10-year-old son and as such is reminiscent of Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road. Where it diverges, however, is in its core theme. Rather than through a shared love of books, the protagonists’ relationship blossoms by way of mathematics.

Maths is perhaps the most difficult of sciences to popularize. Even Marcus du Sautoy, mathematician and Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, struggles to convey the beauty of numbers in his engaging BBC documentary, The Story of Maths. But where du Sautoy bravely tackles the full story, Ogawa focuses on just one of mathematics’ most remarkable equations, e^iπ+1=0, gently preparing the reader to understand why this deceptively simple collection of symbols is so extraordinary.

The key to Ogawa’s success is the pace of the story, dictated by the fact that the professor begins every day anew. Each morning starts with the same basic conversation, pointing out the significance of a particular number. “What’s your shoe size?” asks the professor, for example. “24,” comes the reply and the professor goes on to explain that this is the factorial of four. As the conversation develops, we learn that the housekeeper’s phone number is the total number of primes between one and 100 million, and a little more maths appears with each conversation.

The square root symbol makes its first appearance as early as the first page – “Root” is what the professor calls the housekeeper’s boy. “With this one little sign, we can come to know an infinite range of numbers, even those we can’t see,” he explains. And sure enough, the square root of –1 makes its introduction two pages later. For e and π, we have to wait until much later.

The maths is never overwhelming, each step being carefully introduced for the benefit of the housekeeper and Root. A shared passion for baseball proves fertile ground for mathematical conversation. We learn, for example, that Babe Ruth’s 1935 record of 714 home runs multiplied by its successor (715 set by Hank Aaron in 1974) is equal to the product of the first seven primes and that the sum of the prime factors of 714 and 715 is the same. Because consecutive numbers with this property are rare – there are only 26 such pairs up to 20,000 – they’re known as Ruth-Aaron pairs. Mathematics like this weaves its way through the story so that by the time Euler’s identity is unveiled, the shock of finding a square root on the first page has been replaced by the pleasure of playing with numbers. Euler’s identity is the breathtaking icing on the cake.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is a beautifully told and ultimately touching tale. But perhaps its greatest achievement is that it leaves the reader with a sense of awe at the beauty of numbers.

Yoko Ogawa has published more than 20 works of fiction and non-fiction and won every major Japanese literary prize, says her biography on the Macmillan Publishing website. Two of her novels and a collection of short stories are now available in English. Her non-fiction collaboration with mathematician Masahiko Fujiwara has not yet been translated. Personally, I can’t wait.