Subject Grouping: Praxis

by David Kaiser, University of Chicago Press. Hardback ISBN 0226422666, ($80). Paperback ISBN 0226422674, ($30).

With the use of rich archival materials, interviews, and more than 500 scientific articles from the period, the author uses Feynman diagrams as a means to explore the development of American postwar physics. By focusing on the ways that young physicists learned new calculational skills, the story is framed around the crafting and stabilizing of the basic tools in the physicist’s kit, thus offering the first book to follow the diagrams once they left Feynman’s hands and entered the physics vernacular.

by Jeremy Bernstein, Springer Science. Hardback ISBN 0387260056, €19.95 ($25).

Henri Poincaré and Relativity Theory by A A Logunov, Nauka. Hardback ISBN 5020339644.

Bernstein’s book is wonderful and, as far as I can judge as a professional physicist, very pedagogical for non-specialists. My only complaint is the title, which I came to understand only on page 163. For me, the “Old One” was Albert Einstein himself and the “secrets” were about his love affairs, including the one with the Russian girl who tried to extract atomic secrets from him (Einstein knew nothing). However, Bernstein gives only a relatively brief account of Einstein’s life; on this subject there are many other more complete books available. What the author does instead is to delve into the past, as far as antiquity if necessary, and give the background to the three fundamental papers Einstein published in 1905 – special relativity, Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect – and, in fact, beyond, since general relativity is also mentioned.

In the course of the book Bernstein gives a wonderful lecture on the history of physics and chemistry, with colourful details about the main contributors: Epicurus, Lucretius, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Bernoulli (one of them), Dalton, Avogadro, Maxwell, Smoluchowski, Perrin, Michelson, Lorentz, Poincaré and so on.

This brings me to Logunov’s book about Henri Poincaré and relativity. The author claims that the role of Poincaré in the advent of relativity was much more important than is generally believed. This does not contradict Bernstein; he is also full of admiration for Poincaré in general and for his contribution to the genesis of relativity theory in particular. Max Born once said, “The theory of relativity resulted from the joint efforts of a group of great researchers: Lorentz, Poincaré, Einstein, and Minkowski.”

Einstein never mentioned the contribution of Poincaré, which was slightly anterior and when, says Bernstein, Abraham Pais lent the text of Poincaré to Einstein, the latter returned it later without a word. Somehow it looks as though Einstein had decided to ignore Poincaré, which is difficult to understand when you see them both less than a metre apart at the 1911 Solvay Congress. However it is unclear whether Poincaré made the “big jump”, while Einstein certainly did. In a text quoted by Logunov, Poincaré says “If we are to accept the relativity principle…”, that is, there is an “if”. It should be said, however, that according to Bernstein, Poincaré also ignored the work of Einstein, although he did write a letter of recommendation for Einstein to obtain a position at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 1909. In this letter Poincaré does not mention the word “relativity” once.

The question will remain forever open. Can we blame Einstein for ignoring Poincaré? No more than we can blame Bach for copying Vivaldi’s concerto for four violins to transform it into the concerto for four pianos.

Where I cannot follow Logunov is the part in which he claims that Einstein’s theory of general relativity is useless and wrong. Logunov presents explanations of the twin paradox and the Sagnac effect using only Poincaré’s relativistic mechanics, but he does not seem to realize that we now have extremely refined tests of general relativity, and that the global positioning system could not work without relativistic corrections.

To conclude, I would say that, since the paternity of the Brownian motion theory is also controversial (what was the role of Marian Smoluchowski?), and since the importance of the 1917 paper on induced radiation was only realized later with the invention of the laser, I believe that the Swedish Academy, contrary to what I thought when I was young, was very wise in awarding Einstein’s Nobel prize “for services in theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of photoelectric effect”. For this Einstein had no competitor. Ironically this work led to quantum mechanics, with which Einstein was so unhappy: “the Old One [God] does not play dice”.

by Chen Ning Yang, World Scientific. Hardback ISBN 9812563679, £29 ($48).

First published more than 20 years ago, this collection of Chen Ning Yang’s personally selected papers has been reprinted with the edition of two further articles published in 2003 and 2005. Supplemented with Yang’s insightful commentaries, the book provides a valuable window on research in physics from the end of the Second World War to the beginning of the 1980s. It includes the seminal work with T D Lee on the non-conservation of parity and the work with R L Mills that led to modern gauge theories.

by A C C Coolen, R Kühn and P Sollich, Oxford University Press. Hardback ISBN 0198530234, £75 ($154.40). Paperback ISBN 0198530242, £30 ($64.50).

Presenting an explicit, coherent and up-to-date account of the modern theory of neural information-processing systems, this book has been developed for graduate students from any quantitative discipline, including physics and computer science. It has been class-tested by the authors over eight years and includes exercises, notes on historical background and further reading. Appendices provide further background, including probability theory, linear algebra and stochastic processes.

by Laurie M Brown (ed.), World Scientific. Hardback ISBN 9812563660, £17 ($28). Paperback ISBN 9812563806, £9 ($14).

The title pretty much sums up this interesting short book, the latest Feynman work to be published since his death in 1988. It reproduces, in modern typeset, Feynman’s PhD thesis entitled “The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics”. In it Feynman outlined his brilliant reformulation of quantum mechanics in terms of the path integrals that now bear his name, together with two supporting papers and a preface.

Historians and physicists alike will enjoy this easy-to-read little book (119 pages plus the preface). Supplementing the thesis itself, which is just 69 pages long (if only all theses said so much in so little space), are reprints of Feynman’s “Space-Time Approach to Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics”, which was published in Reviews of Modern Physics in 1948 and Paul Dirac’s “The Lagrangian in Quantum Mechanics”. Dirac’s paper is a little harder to find since it’s from the Physikalische Zeitschrift der Sowjetunion and dates back to 1933. These provide excellent supporting material and in many ways bracket the thesis. Dirac’s paper is not as widely read as it should be, and is of great importance as it provided much of the initial impetus for Feynman’s work, making quite explicit the role of exp(iLdt/ħ) as a transition amplitude between states separated by an infinitesimal time dt, and its connection to the classical principle of least action. Feynman’s article is certainly well known and is perhaps rather more formal than the thesis itself, and therein lies much of charm of this book.

Brown also provides a 16 page introduction that essentially walks the reader through reading the thesis, summarizing the content of each section and adding many interesting historical anecdotes and quotations.

The thesis itself is a masterpiece of clear exposition. While there is little in the thesis that is likely to surprise most physicists, it is written in Feynman’s uniquely chatty style, and reminiscent of the famous Feynman lectures. It is a delight to read and is likely to offer an insight, even to non-physicists, into both physics and the workings of Feynman’s mind. I would not hesitate to recommend the book to anyone – working physicists, historians, philosophers and even “curious fellows” who would like to “peek over the shoulder” of one of the 20th century’s great physicists at work.

by Ken McMullen (dir.), University of the Arts London and The Arts Council. DVD ISBN 072871096X, £14.99.

Where do art and physics meet, and what kind of interaction might they enjoy? In this hour-long film, CERN physicists Michael Doser (anti-hydrogen experimenter) and John March-Russell (theorist) talk to author and artist John Berger (best-known for his 1972 book Ways of Seeing) and Ken McMullen, artist and director of the film.

Their discussion is interspersed with sequences of sculptures, installations and other artworks inspired by particle physics – most from the Signatures of the Invisible exhibition of 2000-2001. I particularly liked Paola Pivi’s Prototype 3 installation of needles on wires performing a kind of synchronized dance and McMullen’s work, Lumen de Lumine, featuring two women (or perhaps one woman, mirrored) whirling balls of light round and round in unison. There are also brief close-ups of famous physics equations being written on a whiteboard, for instance Paul Dirac’s dynamics of spin 1/2 fermions (which led him to predict the existence of antimatter).

The core of the film is the frequently thought-provoking discussion between the scientists and artists. Subjects covered include the symmetry of physics equations versus the arrow of time; what Berger calls “the banal question” of how the huge costs of particle physics can be justified (to which Doser replies that, first, both art and science go beyond the everyday to give meaning to life and, second, pure research can give rise to wholly new types of technology, not just incremental improvements); the contrast between “risky” experiments that hope to gain fundamental insights and “safe” ones that accumulate data; classical versus probabilistic physics (“Where does necessity come into the quantum world?” Berger asks); the search for authenticity in art and for purity in science; and the mesmerizing quality that equations can hold for a physicist, even when they may be used to develop something like the H-bomb.

It is notable that the artists are asking the questions, and the physicists are providing answers. The flow of influence seems to be one way. The profound, often counter-intuitive ideas that science in general, and physics in particular, throw up – quantum theory, antimatter, chaos theory, multiple dimensions – provide non-standard concepts and metaphors to inspire artistic work.

How art might inspire or influence physics is less obvious. In the film, Doser and March-Russell don’t ask Berger or McMullen about their techniques, purposes, or productions. But perhaps the art/science interaction is asymmetric. The general culture that art helps to shape is the pond in which the working physicist swims. And it’s not just pure science that takes time – sometimes more than a century, as Doser points out – to be absorbed into the general culture; the same is true of radically new art.

Interactions of art and physics such as this film can play an important part in making scientific ideas more widely assimilated. Much work and funding go into sometimes rather patronizing efforts to increase the “public understanding of science” – as if bombarding children (and adults) with enough gee-whizzery is bound, sooner or later, to make them interested. This film, like the Signatures of the Invisible exhibition, stands for a more sophisticated and long-term approach, in which science, via art in this case, feeds ideas and inspiration to the broader culture.

• The DVD includes a number of additional items: extracts from the discussion not included in the main feature; a 15 minute film about the manufacture in a CERN workshop of McMullen’s sculpture In Puris Naturalibus; and a reading and discussion of Simon Weil’s poem, “Chance”.