I’ve been reading books on the subway too and from work. It is wonderful. I’ve been alternating between books of quality, and trashy scifi. I just finished my most recent “quality” book, and highly recommend it to all my fellow science nerds and enthusiasts.
In The Discoveries, Alan Lightman has collected the most groundbreaking scientific papers of the 20th century (with a mild bias towards physics) and has simply written an introduction to each one. It is simply fantastic to read all about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle from the man himself (that would be Herr Heisenberg) or to read Bohr figuring out what atoms are really made of. The most interesting thing to me, aside from Alan Lightman’s superb gloss of the texts, was that many of the papers were incredibly readable. If you have taken calculus, intro physics, and intro chemistry, then you should be able to follow along! Why do physics texts ever do anything besides just reprint the original papers?
The answer, for the discoveries of the last quarter of the 20th century, is that the art of readable scientific writing has been lost. Or, at the very least, clear exposition is not rewarded and is therefore largely neglected in modern research. This makes me very sad. The public has paid for this research, the least we could do is make it as accessible as possible to readers. Some things are simply difficult, and are therefore also difficult to explain, but hiding behind a veil of jargon and false modesty does nobody any favors. If you are a scientist, then you’ve probably already seen some of these, but it is still wonderful to have them all in one place. Buy this book, read it, and have your mind blown once again at the fantastic progress humankind made in the 20th century. From the discovery of the vast distances in the cosmos through the nuclear age to the dawning of biotech, it is all here, and it is all from the people who actually figured it out.
It is a rare book that explains the working of the world, provides the history and context of these discoveries, and yet still manages to reinforce Haldane’s remark that “the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
