A User's Guide To the Universe 153
alfredw writes "Have you ever wanted to buttonhole a physicist at a cocktail party? Do you have the burning desire to sit down with a professor and ask a laundry list of 'physics' questions about time travel and black holes? Do you want to know more about modern physics, but want to do it with pop culture experiments instead of mathematics? If you answered 'yes' to any of those questions, then you're in the target audience for A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty." Keep reading for the rest of alfredw's review.
A User's Guide to the Universe (hereinafter "A User's Guide") is the physicist's answer to Phil Plait's Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End.... What Goldberg and Blomquist have created is a fun, light read about interesting areas of modern physics that will entertain while it educates. The book assumes very little scientific background on the part of the reader. Those with some knowledge (this is Slashdot, after all) will find the explanations of well-known concepts (the double slit experiment, for example) lucid, direct, brief and entertaining.
A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty | |
author | Dave Goldberg, Jeff Blomquist |
pages | 304pp |
publisher | Wiley |
rating | 8 |
reviewer | alfredw |
ISBN | 9780470496510 |
summary | A fun, light read about interesting areas of modern physics that will entertain while it educates. |
A User's Guide covers topics like relativity, time travel, the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and alien life. It does so with a very tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, and footnotes that act as the authors' very own peanut gallery. While this humor lightens up what could otherwise be a few dry areas of discussion, the littering of the text with pop-culture references is bound to make the book feel a bit dated in years to come. For now (March 2010), though, A User's Guide is so fresh you might call it ripe.
Unlike Death from the Skies, this book is well illustrated. The pen-and-ink cartoons are omnipresent, and serve to both illustrate the text, and to take every opportunity for a joke (cheap or otherwise) that presents itself. Overall, I felt that the cartoons were a strong addition to the book, as they can provide a needed laugh in a serious section, or can eliminate the proverbial thousand words when describing an experiment or concept.
The chapter on time travel is a stand-out. It presents several "practical" designs for time machines, which use black holes, cosmic strings or wormholes as components. I am an avid reader of pop-sci books, and I found designs that were new to me. The discussion of the Grandfather Paradox (if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, then you were never born and could never have committed murder) and ways around it are very helpful and present a solid physical framework for thinking about these issues. When the Grandfather Paradox is reformulated using pool balls, instead of thinking humans, it becomes clear that the issues are physical and not metaphysical. Also, the authors helpfully include a chart ranking sci-fi shows and movies for their time travel savvy.
You'll also find a strong and entertaining treatment of inflationary cosmology, including discussions of the evidence behind the theory and a look at some consequences. This book avoids both a heavy technical treatment and a historical look at the development of the theory (see, for example, Alan Guth's The Inflationary Universe for that) and instead dives right in to the juiciest parts. This style is well-suited to the reader who wants the funs bits without all of the baggage.
If you're curious about quantum mechanics, the second chapter contains a one of the best introductions in the field. By asking questions like "can we build a Star Trek transporter?" the authors drive a quick and satisfying tour through the weirdness of the microscopic world. This "evil genius hands-on" approach is this book's most important contribution to pop sci literature, and its most endearing feature. You'll start by looking at Star Trek, but end with the mysteries of the double-slit experiment, wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle.
Finally, at the end of the book, the authors helpfully include two sets of references: one to the pop sci literature, and one to the technical literature. Many of the best pop physics books of the past are listed, and the bibliography could serve as useful direction to more depth for the interested.
Overall, A User's Guide accomplishes what it sets out to do. It combines a hands-on, question-driven approach to physics with a tongue-in-cheek, pop-culture-based sense of humor. And then it throws on a layer of great cartoons to make the entire package something that most science books aren't: enjoyable. This book is fine, and you may well learn something in the process.
You can purchase A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
For the record, I submitted the review without any sort of link to the publisher (per the Slashdot book review policy). The /. editors add in those links.
And no, I don't work for the publisher. I genuinely read the book and enjoyed it.
Re:Cosmos! (Score:3, Informative)
Cosmos was an amazing attempt at pop physics by an amazing guy.
It was up to date in the 1980s. It's REALLY REALLY out of date now. Especially the cosmology. In the ensuing 30 years, there has been a several-orders-of-magnitude increase in the amount of data. Cosmology isn't data starved, as it was in the early 80s.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
Every book review on Slashdot has such a link; it's been like this for at least as long as Amazon has had an affiliate policy (though I seem to recall the links used to go to Barnes & Noble, though I could be mistaken).
Re:Cosmos! (Score:4, Informative)
Cosmos is awesome, we watched some of it in physics in high school.
He has the uncanny ability to explain very complicated and abstract ideas in a way that most anybody can understand. His explanation of why it's so hard to conceptualize in the 4th dimension (and beyond) was an eye opener.
Re:Random question about light: (Score:3, Informative)
Photons do not have mass. You may be thinking of neutrinos, which were once thought to be massless, but have been found to have a very small mass. Only massless particles can travel at the speed.
Re:not an american... (Score:4, Informative)
wow (Score:3, Informative)
Judging by the comments, this review serves as an excellent Rorschach test.
Re:Random question about light: (Score:3, Informative)
That one is easy: Because it is light, whatever speed it goes is the speed of light. :-)
No, photons have exactly zero mass (well, actually all we can say for sure is that their mass is far below anything we can measure, but if they had any mass, they would not travel at the invariant speed (c), but slightly below (but still so fast that any light we have yet measured is so close to c that we can't see the difference). The big question is: If we found a photon mass, would we still call the invariant speed the speed of light?
Anyway, out theories say the photon doesn't have any mass, and the experiments don't contradict this assumption.
That's not a problem for light, because it doesn't get accelerated to that speed, but as massless particle, it goes at speed of light right from its creation up to its destruction.
Photons have no mass, but inertia. Indeed, in the direction it goes it has infinite inertia: You cannot slow it down, nor speed it up (you might object to this claim because of the lower speed of light in media, but that's the group velocity, which isn't the speed of photons). In the direction orthogonal to its direction of flight it has inertia proportional to its energy (you can change the direction in which the light flies, as every mirror proves; the light pressure shows that there's a force involved).
It can't.
Re:Cosmos! (Score:4, Informative)
I haven't read an actual book for about 8 years
Damn kids, read a fucking book! At least it doesn't seem to have made you illiterate, like so many I see on the internet who don't know there from they're or lose from loose, or when and when not to use an apostrophe. Books, unlike the internet, have editors and proofreaders.
Look into Isaac Asimov. He didn't just write science fiction, he was called "the great educator" because of all the nonfiction books he wrote. Dr. Asimov was a real scientist, researching and teaching biochemistry at (iirc) Boston University. His writing is very readable, his explanations unconfusing. One of my favorite Asimov volumes is Asimov on Numbers, which is about mathematics, always my worst subject.
You don't have to get off my lawn if you have a book in your hand.
Re:Cosmos! (Score:4, Informative)
Some of Sagan's books are quite inspiring too. Pale Blue Dot and Demon Haunted World are 2 of his best.
Re:Good thing we have you! (Score:3, Informative)
I thought it was clear I was talking about physics theories, in relation to other theories. As in, our current physics theories are orders of magnitude more accurate and comprehensive than, say, our economic theories. Rereading my post, I guess I could have been clearer.
Re:Good thing we have you! (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, you DO know that the same was true at every point in history, right?
30 years ago, the then current theories were quite simply, the most accurate and comprehensive theories mankind had ever developed. Ditto 60 years ago. And 100. And 1000. And....
And of course we all realize that for the past couple hundred years at least, these theories have been converging on greater and greater accuracy and precision, not 180 degree reversals, right?
I don't need to link Asimov [tufts.edu] again do I? Oh snap too late.