The New Physics

Rating:
Summary: Not too light, not too heavy.
Review: For someone who doesn't have an MS in anything, this book served as a good introduction to the current thinking in physics at the time of its publishing, and provided enough of a foundation to be able to make better sense of later discoveries and theories. While not delving in to a detailed and highly technical discussion of every single aspect for modern physics, it still provides enough information to allow one to start on more technical works. For anyone who is looking to get involved in today's physics this will be a good peek at what you'd be getting yourself in to. Otherwise, it gives glimpses at a world we are just begining to understand but already challenges our basic perceptions of every aspect of the universe.

Rating:
Summary: A superb tour of current physics
Review: I thoght this was one of the best books on physics that I had ever read. As an educated layman (MS in Elec Eng) I have experienced some frustration with most "popular" tours of science. This book balanced sufficient (mathematical) detail to make me feel I had grasped some of the fundamentals with enough wonderfully clear conceptual explanation to ensure that I understood the whole. A must-read for anyone who has felt short-changed by "simple" explanations of the latest developments in our understanding of the universe

Rating:
Summary: Good articles
Review: Now that 15 years have passed since this book came out, the physics it describes is not quite so new. But it is still a very nice introduction to some of the more interesting parts of physics. Not every exciting aspect of physics is covered. But everything that is covered is a stimulating area in which plenty of noteworthy things are happening.

There's a nice section by Clifford Will on the renaissance of general relativity. And he makes the point that cosmologists have long been plagued by having their predicted ages of the Universe come out just a teeny bit less than the ages of (pick one) the Earth or the Milky Way Galaxy. Alan Guth and Paul Steinhardt have a nice article on the inflationary universe. And Stephen Hawking has some nice words about the question of whether spacetime has a boundary. Chris Isham discusses quantum gravity. All these are subjects that get us in the proper mood for the chapter I liked best, by Malcolm Longair, on the new astrophysics. This 115-page article is a wonderful introduction to the field.

Now that we've looked at something big (the universe), we study some systems that appear self-organized. We start with an article by David Thouless on condensed matter in less than three dimensions. I liked this, he even discussed "third sound" in superfluid helium, something which as an "acoustics person" I find fascinating. And there's another good article on low temperature physics, by Anthony Leggett. The next chapter in the self-organization section is by Peter Knight, on quantum optics (lasers); he has a good discussion of the generation of ultrashort optical pulses. And there is a chapter about phase transitions and critical point phenomena by Alastair Bruce and David Wallace.

Those who have studied Biology have seen the incredible amount of order in living systems. But where does this order come from? What about the order in non-Biological systems, such as the planets going around the Sun? Or, better yet, snowflakes? What forces produce such self-organization? It's nonlinear dynamics and the presence of constraints maintaining a system far from equilibrium that turn out to be the basic mechanism. We have a nice chapter by Gregoire Nicolis that discusses it. And next is a chapter on chaos. By this, we mean systems that are deterministic but unpredictable. Joseph Ford discusses systems that can make use of inputs that arrive in a random manner.

The final portion of the book deals with the ultimate structure of matter. We start with an article by Abner Shimony, which discusses the importance of the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics, showing that simple "hidden variable theories" are impossible. Frank Close explains the quark structure of matter and Abdus Salam supplies an overview of particle physics. H. M. Georgi tells us of the adventures people have had trying to use Lie Groups, especially SU(5), to come up with grand unified theories. But he explains that they predicted proton decay and never found it. And in his chapter on quantum field theories, he speculates that maybe we're making a mistake to try to guess the nature of reality for very small distances, rather than work our way down to it from what we can see at bigger distances. And there is a very readable chapter on gauge theories by John Taylor, who includes a discussion of quark confinement.

These simply aren't the topics we're used to seeing when we take high school or college physics, and it's wonderful to have them in one book so that one can see how many exciting topics there are in this field. Yes, there's been plenty of advances on all these topics since 1989, but this isn't a bad way to get started. If you are thinking of doing physics, this will show some of what many physicists have been doing for the past couple of decades. If you have a little technical training and simply want a book for the layman that has relatively little math, it's a good choice. We may need an updated version soon!