Popular science publications

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@SFU.CA>]

At 11:39 AM -0700 12/15/00, Larry Woolf wrote:

> I have found popular books are often much better at providing
> conceptually useful understanding than technical books.  For example, I
> learned more about the interaction of light and matter by reading Craig
> Bohren's book "Clouds in a Glass of Beer" than from my optics books.  And I
> am currently involved in multilayer thin film optical design and
> fabrication at my company . For detailed calculations and mathetical
> understanding, the technical books, papers and review articles are great,
> but the popular books written by experts have great utility (often
> underappreciated) for scientists both during and after their formal
> schooling.  Feynman's QED and Greene's The Elegant Universe are other nice
> examples.

Larry's observation is right on target. Good and excellent popular
science writing is an underused resource. A hundred clones of Sears &
Zemansky* are worth far less than Feynman's lectures as resources for
conceptual physics. Those books speak valuably to even the reader who
is incapable of understanding the mathematical parts. They are real
(as opposed to pretentious) conceptual physics texts.

I was delighted to understand the Brown-Twiss effect, after years of
"not quite getting it", while reading Feynman's QED. I had tried very
hard to understand for a couple of decades before Feynman explained it
to me, in print, without a single equation. The trick to his success
is that he explained it to me first, and then, in a footnote, he told
me in effect "Oh, by the way, this is called the Brown-Twiss effect."

I had the great good fortune to know Richard Feynman and to spend time
with him discussing mathematics and physics (he knew lots of amazing
mathematics). I find his writing on the popular level, including the
famous red books, to be a great treasure he shared with us. I often
kick myself for missing one of the original lectures he gave in LA
which ultimately became the QED book. I had been invited out to dinner
by the late George Abell that same evening. Feynman gave the lectures
again in New Zealand, and I have the video tapes from that occasion.
They can be bought (for something approaching cost) through the web
site run by Ralph Leighton.

Another, much earlier, Feynman lecture series, the Messenger Lectures,
given at Cornell in the fifties, was kinescope recorded by the BBC. It
also has been preserved in book form as "The Character of Physical Law".
I recommend both, though the tapes are very expensive. We had a
complete set of the films, but somehow half were lost over the years.

I think Feynman is, perhaps, the most underappreciated popularizer of
science of this century. His legacy in that genre is as great as his
contribution to the fundamental understanding of physics.

Leigh