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50books_poc48. The Secret Life of Quanta by M.Y. Han
Wow, this is a singularly unique pop science book, to my eyes. Most science writers these days write under the banner of this Brian Greene op-ed, believing that the right approach to accessible science writing is to steer clear of the math and focus on the "Wow moments", especially those provoked by the unintuitive results of cosmology and quantum mechanics. Popular science writing is too often written as if the goal is to make pot-smokers have things to discuss when they're high.
Han takes an utterly different approach. He focuses on applications and he's not afraid to dip into a little bit of simple math if it's the best way to explain why something works. The book's focus is on getting the reader to have a deep enough understanding of quantum mechanics to understand why a laser works, why an integrated circuit works, and why we think a high temperature superconductor works. I found it totally refreshing.
I found the math elementary (I'm an engineer. I've had most of this stuff several times at a much higher level), but I liked that his explanations were clear and focused on putting it in language that someone without any mathematical background could understand. He repeatedly came up with tremendously insightful metaphors and showed good restraint in not overextending his metaphors.
49. Hyperspace by Michio Kaku
I've heard so much good about Kaku that I was disappointed by this book. It comes across as an over-the-top parody of the kind of science writing I mentioned in my first paragraph.
Admittedly, it's a book on superstring theory, which poses two problems. First, the math itself is really, really hard. You can't do n-dimensional topology with a high school math education. Second, there is no experimental verification for any component of the theory, no exciting experiments to explain. So Kaku's in a difficult position as far as science writing goes. Here's this theory that has dominated the scientific establishment for two decades, and the established mechanisms for discussing a scientific paradigm with the public are not practical.
But Kaku, out of desperation or misguided enthusiasm or something, goes too far the other way. The text reads theological a lot of the time, which is not uncommon in contemporary physics writing, but which is deeply unfortunate. Some of his passages are messianic, as when he promises that knowledge of the higher dimensions may offer humanity an escape hatch for the entropic heat death of the universe. (Note that the key word is 'may'. There is equal probability that nothing of the sort will happen.) When I want theology, I um... go to religion.
He spends a lot of time developing a metaphor to Abbott's Flatland, but leaves the actual connective tissue of the metaphor missing. All of his metaphors lack a key phrase Han avails himself of again and again: "This is just a metaphor." Many of his metaphors have obvious objections that collapse them easily into meaninglessness, but he doesn't even bother to qualify them or delimit them. I'm not sure if it's laziness, carelessness, or something more conscious and guided, but it's not good science writing.
And then there's the catastrophic description of the Standard Model of particle physics. "The details of the Standard Model are boring and not very important," Kaku writes, and my jaw dropped. That is a sentence that should never appear in a serious work of science writing. It made me rage with fury one night while a friend looked at me and said, "Wow, you never get this angry."
The book's conclusion, a place I hoped for some sort of synthesis of the scattered ideas the book covers, instead is filled with unconnected musings on the intersection of science and philosophy. It's not immediately clear to me what the connection is, except that sadly I think I know what it is: Kaku's paean to string theory is about the merger of philosophy and scientific reasoning rather than the triumph of empiricist dogma he rotely salutes at various points. He is interested in string theory not because it works (at present it doesn't), but because it is beautiful in and of itself. He suggests a few pages from the end that even if it proves undescriptive, mathematicians may find value in the work done by superstring theorists. And that backwards reasoning I find shocking and depressing.
Wow, this is a singularly unique pop science book, to my eyes. Most science writers these days write under the banner of this Brian Greene op-ed, believing that the right approach to accessible science writing is to steer clear of the math and focus on the "Wow moments", especially those provoked by the unintuitive results of cosmology and quantum mechanics. Popular science writing is too often written as if the goal is to make pot-smokers have things to discuss when they're high.
Han takes an utterly different approach. He focuses on applications and he's not afraid to dip into a little bit of simple math if it's the best way to explain why something works. The book's focus is on getting the reader to have a deep enough understanding of quantum mechanics to understand why a laser works, why an integrated circuit works, and why we think a high temperature superconductor works. I found it totally refreshing.
I found the math elementary (I'm an engineer. I've had most of this stuff several times at a much higher level), but I liked that his explanations were clear and focused on putting it in language that someone without any mathematical background could understand. He repeatedly came up with tremendously insightful metaphors and showed good restraint in not overextending his metaphors.
49. Hyperspace by Michio Kaku
I've heard so much good about Kaku that I was disappointed by this book. It comes across as an over-the-top parody of the kind of science writing I mentioned in my first paragraph.
Admittedly, it's a book on superstring theory, which poses two problems. First, the math itself is really, really hard. You can't do n-dimensional topology with a high school math education. Second, there is no experimental verification for any component of the theory, no exciting experiments to explain. So Kaku's in a difficult position as far as science writing goes. Here's this theory that has dominated the scientific establishment for two decades, and the established mechanisms for discussing a scientific paradigm with the public are not practical.
But Kaku, out of desperation or misguided enthusiasm or something, goes too far the other way. The text reads theological a lot of the time, which is not uncommon in contemporary physics writing, but which is deeply unfortunate. Some of his passages are messianic, as when he promises that knowledge of the higher dimensions may offer humanity an escape hatch for the entropic heat death of the universe. (Note that the key word is 'may'. There is equal probability that nothing of the sort will happen.) When I want theology, I um... go to religion.
He spends a lot of time developing a metaphor to Abbott's Flatland, but leaves the actual connective tissue of the metaphor missing. All of his metaphors lack a key phrase Han avails himself of again and again: "This is just a metaphor." Many of his metaphors have obvious objections that collapse them easily into meaninglessness, but he doesn't even bother to qualify them or delimit them. I'm not sure if it's laziness, carelessness, or something more conscious and guided, but it's not good science writing.
And then there's the catastrophic description of the Standard Model of particle physics. "The details of the Standard Model are boring and not very important," Kaku writes, and my jaw dropped. That is a sentence that should never appear in a serious work of science writing. It made me rage with fury one night while a friend looked at me and said, "Wow, you never get this angry."
The book's conclusion, a place I hoped for some sort of synthesis of the scattered ideas the book covers, instead is filled with unconnected musings on the intersection of science and philosophy. It's not immediately clear to me what the connection is, except that sadly I think I know what it is: Kaku's paean to string theory is about the merger of philosophy and scientific reasoning rather than the triumph of empiricist dogma he rotely salutes at various points. He is interested in string theory not because it works (at present it doesn't), but because it is beautiful in and of itself. He suggests a few pages from the end that even if it proves undescriptive, mathematicians may find value in the work done by superstring theorists. And that backwards reasoning I find shocking and depressing.
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Date: 2011-01-22 12:27 am (UTC)Yay! Oh, please let the library have this!
And I'm as interested in how he handles the math as in the physics itself: all the math I've used in quantum applications was four-dimensional, which is hard to make accessible.
:: ...even if it proves undescriptive, mathematicians may find value in the work done by superstring theorists. ::
Bwahahahaha! I'm sorry, I should be more sympathetic, but-- Bwahahahaha!
For years now, I've been wondering how, exactly, string theory is considered physics. Because what they seem to be doing is what mathematicians do: "Oh, these theoretical constructs are so pretty! Let me poke at it more, and see what other pretty falls out!" Which, yanno, is what people are expecting you to do, if they're funding your mathematical research, so that's okay. (Well, it depends on who's doing the funding, how okay they are with that, but it is certainly what we would call a known risk: all pretty and no application.)
But to hear a physicist baldly admitting that yo, he's in this for the math, not for the physics? I am very amused. :-)
no subject
Date: 2011-01-23 04:55 am (UTC)How can you write a text on contemporary physics for a broad lay audience and say something like Kaku's description of the SM? It's a total contempt for important, workmanlike science that actually advances our understanding of the world but isn't attractive mathematically. It's a desperate and pathetic attempt to invent the next paradigm shift before we have actual empirical results to underpin it, to wish the universe they want into existence.
Based on my understanding of where your interests lie, I think you'll probably find the math in the Han book a bit boring and simple, but I think you'll enjoy the book anyway. It's so hard to find books like that. The chapter on transistors was my favorite.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-23 05:39 pm (UTC)I'm from a theoretical math background. I've spent loads of time around departments full of people who feel that contempt, and yet science is still proceeding somehow. That a nominal physicist is showing that contempt is new and amusing to me, but I have faith that someone, somewhere, will be taking up the important, workmanlike, practical advances, because humans tend to be like that. Part of the experience I'm drawing on, mind you, is the way that mathematics has splintered and resplintered because someones felt the need to do something unrespectably practical and workmanlike. So even though physics has been dinking around with string theory for a good long while now, I am confident still that the breakthrough will happen -- it just may not be the physics department that gets credit this go around.
(Well, unless we've gotten to the "chimpanzee" threshold that De Grasse Tyson worries about -- that we've just hit our hard-wired cognitive limit to conceptualize the universe. But if that's the case...)
:: I think you'll probably find the math in the Han book a bit boring and simple... ::
I like boring and simple math. It makes me feel smart. ;-)
Also, one of my interests is how to effectively get math across to lay people, so even if the math itself isn't interesting, I will be interested in how he handles it for a popsci audience.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-23 06:17 pm (UTC)I know my science history. It will be the physics department that gets credit. Remember, a meteorologist discovered chaos theory, but people forget that and think of it as a physics breakthrough because the physicists, when they finally clued in, piled on.
And part of my experience is the number of my agemates who grew up with popular science writing/communication built around string theory and the "ooh, pretty" mindset I spoke about in my original post, and I've seen these people become disillusioned in grad school when they realized that research was actually hard work with little immediate reward and little in the way of "ooh pretty". And I've seen people who would have made important contributions to science driven away because it wasn't what they were promised when they were growing up.