Good popular science books

[Bruce Sherwood]

I've recently read three excellent popular physics books that I
strongly recommend.

Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science (available in Kindle)
Lawrence Krauss (author of The Physics of Star Trek)

None other than Freeman Dyson wrote a laudatory review of this book in
the New York Review of Books, in which he emphasized what a wonderful
job Krauss has done in describing and explaining Feynman's physics, in
a way that's probably accessible to any intelligent layman, and
certainly to any physicist. I've read and enjoyed lots of popular
science books, especially those written by scientists, and I've read a
number of scientific biographies. This is the first time I've seen the
science and the scientific thinking explained so well in a popular
science book. Krauss' book does not spend a lot of time on Feynman's
personal life, which has been widely written about. He focuses on the
physics. I learned a lot. I had not fully realized how broad Feynman's
contributions were.

The Quantum Story: A history in 40 moments (available in Kindle)
Jim Baggott

Many histories of quantum mechanics deal solely with the period
1905-1935, approximately. This one continues to the present day.
Almost all of it is accessible to the intelligent reader, except for a
chapter where he gets carried away with SU(3) etc. Although much of
the story was familiar, I nevertheless learned quite a lot. There's an
almost eerie episode involving Bohr and Rutherford, about which I'd
not heard. Bohr had his great idea for explaining the hydrogen atom,
based on Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus. Before publishing,
Bohr went to talk with Rutherford about his ideas (Bohr had previously
spent some time in Rutherford's lab). As I understand it, Rutherford
liked to portray himself as just a New Zealand country bumpkin, but
wow.... Rutherford said, "If the atom is in a multiply excited state,
and it can decay to one of several lower-energy states, what about
causality? How does it choose?" I was just blown away to read this
earliest (and quick) realization that the atomic world is
probabilistic.

The Dance of the Photons
Anton Zeilinger

Zeilinger heads a powerful experimental quantum mechanics group in
Vienna that has made stunning advances in our understanding of the
nature of reality in the context of quantum mechanics. In this book he
makes the ideas come alive. The book includes detailed discussions of
Bell's inequality and much else. It seems highly likely that Zeilinger
will get the Nobel Prize for the work he and his group have done. A
charming feature of the book is that Zeilinger is very generous in
giving credit to many others working in this fascinating field.
(Incidentally, there is some movement in the physics community to
bring contemporary quantum mechanics into the physics major's
curriculum, which in the past has been dominated by stuff from the
1920s.)

Bruce

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