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Popular Physics Wants it All

Writer's picture: Mishkat BhattacharyaMishkat Bhattacharya

Introduction


This post is about the heavy demand, for the past few years, for popular physics books that purport to answer or tackle the biggest questions: why are we here in the universe? Is there a multiverse? How is there something from nothing? What is the future of the planet, of the universe? What is the meaning of life?


While these are of course important questions about which physics has a bunch of interesting things to say (not too many of them definitive), in the author's opinion they are cornering an excessive amount of the market share in popular physics writing.


They leave little room for other interesting topics, other amazing things from areas of physics other than astronomy or high energy physics: condensed matter physics, or optics, or fluid dynamics, for example.


Some examples of Big Picture books/podcasts/articles:


i) The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

ii) The Big Picture: Reflections on Science, Humanity, and a Quickly Changing Planet

iii) Big Picture Science (podcast)

v) The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity’s Future

vii) Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity

viii) The True Science of Parallel Universes; Are We Living in a Simulation; Does Time Exist? (Topics from the site TedEd with tens of millions of reads)

...


This preponderance is not a coincidence; for example, several editors I spoke to at the big publishing houses told me they had explicitly been told to try and publish such titles.


Some examples of neglected topics:


i) Turbulence: This is one of the biggest unsolved problems in physics, one of the remaining grand challenges in classical physics (quantum turbulence is actually also now a hot research topic). There is no popular science book on it; not even a popular biography of the great Kolmogorov.

ii) Cybernetics: There are few contemporary popular books on cybernetics, the science of communication, especially with machines; no popular biography of its originator, the famous and idiosyncratic mathematician Norbert Wiener. Would seem timely in the age of AI.

iii) Metamaterials: There is hardly any popular book on the revolution introduced by these amazing new materials, some of which have a negative refractive index; the only exception I know is the book on cloaking and invisibility by Greg Gbur.

iv) Large scale atmospheric motion: The discoveries of the jet stream, Rossby waves, and polar fronts, the contributions of the Bergen School of Meteorology; these are crucial to air travel, weather forecasting, and agriculture.

v) Hi-fi stereo: The revolution in acoustics introduced by Amar Bose, which all of us enjoy today. The man himself is fascinating and needs a popular biography too. Incidentally, one of his thesis advisors was Norbert Wiener. Bose talks about himself and Wiener in this talk.

...


Conclusions:


Big questions are natural and fascinating to ask. We see this even among the physics students, who mostly want to work in high energy physics or astronomy. (The professors are well aware of this, of course - I once suggested hiring a string theorist in the department to even out the disciplines a bit, and was met with instant opposition from several colleagues who said we will lose all our students if we did that).


But the answers to the big questions are far from settled - for the most part they are rather speculative. It's important, I think, to cultivate the taste of the public with more concrete, but no less wonderful, examples of stories from the rest of science, about discoveries that are related to the big, though not the biggest, questions.


So I don't think the public can be blamed for its appetite; but maybe as science educators and popularizers, we can can try to prescribe them a balanced diet.


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