Subject Grouping: Praxis

By A Zichichi and R Ragani (eds)
World Scientific
Hardback: £98
E-book: £74

The 46th Session of the International Seminars on Nuclear War and Planetary Emergencies, held in Erice, Sicily, gathered again, in 2013, more than 100 scientists from 43 countries. This is the latest output from an interdisciplinary effort that has been going on for the past 32 years, to examine and analyse planetary problems that are followed up, throughout the year, by the World Federation of Scientists’ Permanent Monitoring Panels.

By Sidney Yip
World Scientific
Hardback: £49

Based on a first-year graduate-level course that the author taught in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, this book differs from traditional nuclear-physics texts for a nuclear-engineering curriculum by emphasizing the understanding of nuclear radiations and their interactions with matter. In generating nuclear radiations and using them for beneficial purposes, scientists and engineers must understand the properties of the radiations and how they interact with their surroundings. Hence, radiation interaction is the essence of this book.

By Freeman J Dyson
World Scientific
Hardback: £38
Paperback: £18

Birds and Frogs is a wonderful collection of essays and papers by Freeman Dyson from 1990 to 2014, and a sequel to a volume of earlier papers. It consists of a short introductory section followed by four more: “Talks about Science”, “Memoirs”, “Politics and History” and “Technical Papers”.

The book takes its title from one of the “Talks about Science”, in which Dyson classifies mathematicians – and, I would add, physicists – as either “birds” or “frogs”. He writes: “Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time. I happen to be a frog, but many of my best friends are birds.” This section contains a wealth of fascinating thoughts on, for example, the origins of life, resistance to new ideas in physics, and the nature of computation in the human brain.

Despite his claim to be a frog, much of the book is written with a bird’s-eye view. Dyson is perhaps uniquely placed among living scientists in having been privy to much that went on in the early days of quantum field theory, and to have met and be able to write about personal experiences with many of our modern-day heroes. In the “Memoirs” section, and elsewhere, he offers insights not only into their work, but also their lives and beliefs.

“Politics and History” ranges from science and religion to ethics, and education from the points of view of Tolstoy and Napoleon. His recollections and observations about the Second World War are as unique as they are fascinating. Ultimately, he shares spectacular and optimistic visions for our future as a species that can spread life throughout the universe.

It is the section on “Technical Papers” that shows Dyson the frog. Here, number theory, bounds on variation of the fine structure constant, detectability of gravitons and game theory all appear.

Whether you’re a frog or a bird or neither – Dyson has a penchant for classifying things into a small number of categories, often just two – you are certain to find much to delight you in this eclectic and yet somehow unified collection.

By Omar Tibolla et al. (eds)
Elsevier
Nuclear Physics B (Proc. Suppl.) 256–257 (2014)

Where do cosmic rays, discovered more than a century ago, come from? The standard model of their origin points to natural particle accelerators in the form of shock waves in supernova remnants, but there is mounting experimental evidence that there are other sources. This conference brought together a range of experts to examine the evidence and to consider some of the key questions. What other sources might there be in the Galaxy? What causes the knee? Where (in energy) is the transition to an extragalactic component? What extragalactic sources are conceivable?

By A R P Rau
Oxford University Press
Hardback: £25
Also available as an e-book

By Caroline van den Brul
Imperial College Press
Hardback: £35
Paperback: £15
E-book: £11

The introduction of Crackle and Fizz sets out a trope that may sound familiar: a decade-old social faux pas between scientists and journalists at a dinner party, where the speed-dating format for presenting science was met with ire, derision and altogether not having a nice time. The claim is made that this could have been a chance to start over, to reframe science communication and realign the expectations of those involved. To do so misses out on the past few decades of development in the science-communication field, which is now reaching a reflective maturity and presence between academia, industry and media. Unfortunately, the same erasure is a leitmotif in many of the chapters that follow.

Caroline van den Brul’s credentials are impressive, with years at the helm of BBC productions and engagement workshops. This history forms the backbone of the book, setting an anecdote-per-chapter rate that reads more like an autobiography than an attempt to impart any lessons or experience to the reader. The remaining space is given over to consideration of narrative devices useful in contextualizing topics and engagement from a practitioner’s perspective. However, these are only superficially explored and offer little in variation. After many pages promoting the importance of clarity, the titular “Crackle” is eventually revealed in the final chapter to be a (somewhat forced) acronym that summarizes and distils all preceding guidance. Had this been the starting point from which each aspect was explored in depth, the tone and flow of the book may have made for a more compelling read. When used as the conclusion, it feels condescendingly simplified. It’s a shame that, considering van den Brul’s history, the final chapter is the main one worth reading.

Overall, the book feels less like the anticipated dive into years of experience, and more like a pre-lunch conference workshop. If you are in the first stages of incorporating engagement and communication into your current practice, working through each chapter’s closing questions could be of some use. Or, should you feel like refreshing your current framework, they might give you a moment’s pause and adjustment, but no more than any other evaluation.

By Jeremy Bernstein
World Scientific
Hardback: £25
E-book: £19

In this volume of essays, written across a decade, Bernstein covers a breadth of subject matter. The first part, on the foundations of quantum theory, reflects the author’s conversations with the late John Bell, who persuaded him that there is still no satisfactory interpretation of the theory. The second part deals with nuclear weapons, and includes an essay on the creation of the modern gas centrifuge by German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. Two shorter sections follow: the first on financial engineering, with a profile of Louis Bachelier, the French mathematician who created the subject at the beginning of the 20th century; the second and final part is on the Higgs boson, and how it is used for generating mass.

By Steven Weinberg
Harper Collins/Allen Lane
Hardback: £20 $28.99
Also available at the CERN bookshop

Steven Weinberg’s most recent effort is neither a treatise on the history of science nor a philosophical essay. The author presents instead his own panoramic view of the meandering roads leading to the Newtonian synthesis between terrestrial and celestial physics, rightfully considered as the beginning of a qualitatively new era in the development of basic science.

The first and second parts of the book deal, respectively, with Greek physics and astronomy. The remaining two parts are dedicated to the Middle Ages and to the scientific revolution of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. The aim is to distil those elements that are germane to the development of modern science. The style is more persuasive than assertive: excerpts of philosophers, poets and historians are abundantly quoted and reproduced, with the aim of corroborating the specific viewpoints conveyed in the text. A similar strategy is employed when dealing with the scientific concepts involved in the discussion. More than a third of the 416 pages of the book contain a series of 35 “technical notes” – a quick reminder of a variety of geometric, physical and astronomical themes (the Thales theorem, the careful explanation of epicycles for inner and outer planets, the theory of rainbows and various other topics relevant to the main discussion of the text).

Passing before you through the pages, you will see not only Plato and Aristotle, but also Omar Khayyam, Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste and many other progenitors of modern scientists. Nearly 2000 years separate the natural philosophy of the “Timaeus” from the birth of the scientific method. Many elements contributed serendipitously to the evolution leading from Plato to Galileo and Newton: the development of algebra and geometry, the divorce between science and religion, and an improved attitude of abstract thinkers towards technology. All of these aspects have certainly been important for the tortuous emergence of modern science. But are they sufficient to explain it? Scientists, historians and laymen will be able to draw their own lessons from the past as presented here, and this is just one of the intriguing aspects of this interdisciplinary book.

After reading this book quietly, you might be led to conclude that good scientific ideas and daring conjectures take a long time to mature. It has been an essential feature of scientific progress to understand which problems are ripe to study and which are not. No one could have made progress in understanding the nature of the electron, before the advent of quantum mechanics. The plans for tomorrow require not only boldness and fantasy, but also a certain realism that can be trained by looking at the lessons of the past. Today’s most interesting questions may not be scientifically answerable tomorrow, and lasting progress does not come by looking along a single line of sight, but all around, where there are mature phenomena to be scrutinized. This seems to be true for science as a whole, and in particular for physics.

•