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Physics for the Rest of Us by Roger S. Jones, Contemporary Books, pp
368, $21.95

This is a very ambitious book that aims to return physics ‘to its rightful
place among the liberal arts’. The estimable desire to widen both knowledge
and understanding of 20th-century physics contrasts well with the attitude
attributed to one of the former illuminati. The remark, perhaps apocryphal,
was that ‘There is only physics – everything else is just philately’. This
lofty disdain was reserved for other professional scientists working in
different disciplines. That the general public should show an informed
interest in physics was clearly not thought important. Roger Jones intends
a much wider audience for his explication of ten major concepts of modern
physics. The structure he has chosen for the book interpolates a ‘running
Talmudic commentary’ concerning the wider meaning of the concepts, as well
as their implications. While this commentary is both novel and cerebral,
it suffers from a compression of ideas and theories from disparate non-scientific
sources. The use of Immanuel Kant’s ideas to support one idea, occupying
about ten lines, produces obfuscation rather than illumination. Although
many questions are formulated throughout the text, footnotes refer the enthusiastic
reader to other sources. This is one very good feature of the book. If you
were to follow up all the cross-references there would be little time left
in life for anything else.

The misunderstandings and distortions of the meaning of relativity theory
provide the focus for the first few chapters of the book. The vain attempt
by Einstein to rename it as invariance theory might have helped stem the
misinformation, had he been successful. But such crass ideas as ‘everything
is relative’ have now been ineradicably absorbed into public consciousness.
The examples used to illustrate the special theory of relativity are accessible
and the case is clearly argued.

By chapter five, which considers a mechanistic world-view, the wisdom
of the book’s basic design seems open to doubt. The commentary chapters
are beginning to appear as interruptions to the fundamental concepts of
physics. This raises the question of who exactly the ‘rest of us’ of the
book’s title are meant to be. The eclecticism of the commentaries guarantees
that there is something for everyone but does slow the pace of the book’s
exegesis.

Another major theme is that of quantum theory. The puzzling nature of
the theory is underlined from its earliest development, especially its counter-intuitive
aspects. Some striking analogies are drawn to explain the idea of quantisation.
That a piano is necessarily quantised whereas a violin is not is an elegant
model that stays in the mind. One of Roger Jones’ strengths when writing
about physics is this use of memorable and illuminating analogies. Again,
when discussing the problem of particle-wave duality, he writes that ‘it
isn’t the absolute size that allows us to treat an object as a particle
but its size relative to its environment’. On such a basis the Earth is
a particle in the Solar System and the electron in an atom.

No attempt is made to avoid the problems that a non-physicist will have
in tackling quantum theory. ‘Quantum theory claims that science can provide
no pictures of the inner workings of nature.’ He emphasises that the theory
is both peculiar and unfamiliar. When we read that for an electron transition
‘the word ‘jump’ must be interpreted as a nonspatial transition from one
quantum state to another’ the intrinsic peculiarity is evident. There is
a curious contrast between the need for analogies to help the non-specialist
reader and the admitted existence of electrons in a ‘nonpictureable quantised
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The book does make considerable assumptions about the prior knowledge
of the reader. The three pages that relate quantum states to the periodic
table of the elements would be incomprehensible without significant chemical
knowledge.

The latter part of Physics for the Rest of Us concentrates rather less
on physics and more on ethical, aesthetic and political concerns. Topics
such as physics and consciousness, atomic energy and the bomb, and physics
as art are all included. In ‘Science versus the Humanities’, the author
does avoid a recapitulation of C. P. Snow’s approach to the Two Cultures,
but makes some questionable claims of his own. This is a stimulating and
provocative book but might have been more successful with rather less of
the Talmudic commentary.

Ray Oliver is a teacher in a London comprehensive school.