BOOK
$25
Looks like math, reads like poetry
"Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales," writes Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. If Hawking's source is correct, the brave souls behind It Must Be Beautiful are tempting fate. This collection of essays - an unabashed celebration of ugly-looking beasties made of cross-products, derivatives, and tensor algebras - contains more equations than you can shake a slide rule at. That's what makes it such a good read.
Admittedly, an expression like [equation here] is enough to give even a mathematician a brief case of the willies. Yet physicist Frank Wilczek's essay turns it into a thing of wonder. That 1928 equation - an attempt to explain the behavior of electrons - is the brainchild of physicist Paul Dirac, who found the formula particularly elegant and beautiful. And he clung to it in spite of his colleagues' distaste: Wolfgang Pauli called Dirac's work "the saddest chapter of modern physics." The Dirac equation led to what were then considered ridiculous consequences, such as the idea that empty space seethes with negative-energy electrons and that one can punch a hole in the nothingness of the vacuum. Amazingly, the equation beat out common sense. In 1932, a physicist found the telltale track of such a hole. We now know it as a positron, the antimatter doppelgänger of the electron.
It's surprising that some of the best essays assembled here were penned by scientists rather than writers. Roger Penrose, a physicist and mathematician at Oxford, provides as succinct and eloquent an introduction to general relativity as I have seen in print. But some of the subject matter could only have been tackled by outsiders. Oliver Morton, a Wired contributing editor and former editor of The Economist's bet365体育赛事 & Technology section, uses the Drake equation (an expression for calculating the probability of communicating with an extraterrestrial civilization) to dissect the personalities and passions that spawned the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence movement. If a SETI scientist had submitted such a candid history, he would have been strung up by his thumbs.
Not all pieces are of such stellar quality. Engineer Igor Aleksander, for example, gives a workmanlike explanation of the equations behind information theory, missing much of its wonder. He provides no hint of the links between information, thermodynamics, and the nature of matter.
Nonetheless, It Must Be Beautiful's successes far outweigh its failures. Just don't flip out when you see a partial differential equation or two.
Granta Books: www.granta.com.
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