A World Treasury of Science

This post is a review of The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics (859 pages). The book came out a while ago, in 1991. Since science moves on, one might expect that the material is quite dated (the classic advice is to read the latest in science and the oldest in literature). But I think the volume, which is a collection of essays and popular writing (all reprints) on the topics mentioned above, has merits which keep it relevant and valuable even today.

For me, the book appealed on several fronts.

1. The giants explain themselves: One of the attractions of the book is the large number of articles penned by the giants themselves who made the discoveries: we have Einstein writing on relativity, Planck writing on thermodynamics, Feynman writing on quantum mechanics, Pierre Curie writing on radioactivity, Dirac writing on electrons, Penrose and Hawking writing on black holes, Weinberg and Lemaitre and Hubble writing on cosmology, von Neumann and Turing writing on computers...and many more.

   
   

   While of course, the scientific material is contained in their published papers, it is revealing to see in these simplified and largely nontechnical accounts how these pioneers thought about the problems they were tackling, how they regarded the advances they themselves had made. This is the stuff that gets weeded out of the formal papers, but is of interest to anyone who wishes to attain a deeper understanding of the intellectual process and circumstances involved.

   
   

2. The giants talk about the work of other giants: It is also curious to see what distinguished scientists thought of an area in which they are not the leaders, or even active workers (Bertrand Russell commenting on relativity; a panoramic perspective by Freeman Dyson on everything from superstrings to butterflies) ; or their philosophical stances towards their own domain of knowledge (Wigner with his famous essay on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics, or Hardy with an extract from his classic book on what it means to do mathematics).

   
   

   I should mention that there are articles by lesser known scientists which are also very penetrating and useful. An example is the outstanding article on the nature of mathematics by J. D. Barrow. It has the best treatment I have seen of the question: do mathematicians make inventions or discoveries? I also enjoyed Alfred Adler's pungent essay on the culture of mathematics ("One good definition is worth three theorems") originally written for the New Yorker in 1972; and a prescient essay about AI by the medical doctor Lewis Thomas.

3. The giants talk about the lives of other giants: There are some classics here, such as Einstein's obituary for Planck and Schwinger's eulogy for Tomonaga. Also some well known writers (but not scientific giants) writing about great scientists (C.P. Snow's sensitive obituary of Rutherford, Jagdish Mehra's anecdote about Dirac, Halmos writing on von Neumann, Lee Dembert on Erdos, Nigel Calder on Abdus Salam).

4. The giants talk poetry and philosophy: The penultimate section in the book contains poems about physics, astronomy and mathematics. I encountered familiar gems by James Clerk Maxwell (writing on molecular dynamics), John Updike (neutrinos) but also discovered for the first time pieces by Goethe (physics), Wallace Stevens (chaos) and Rilke (machines).

   
   

   The last section in the book includes pieces that address the role of philosophy, creativity and belief in physics, mathematics and astronomy. Asimov has an entry, as do Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper and Jacob Bronowski; Heisenberg and Einstein also pitch in, among others.

Summary

Overall a great collection. Good as entertainment, as reference, and as a gateway to further reading. A complaint: I thought there were too few articles by and about women (though Vivian Gornick's penetrating article on Alma Norovsky is wonderfully revealing, and it's reassuring to see a poem by the great Emily Dickinson in the collection). It would have been great to hear Marie Curie's voice, read something Emmy Noether wrote, or C. S. Wu's view of her motivations for doing her pioneering experiments.