I have a gripe with a certain kind of popular science book about physics, maths and, occasionally, chemistry. They seem to be written for people who don’t really want to encounter any physics, maths or chemistry at all. Numbers are whisked away.
Probabilities, vectors and fields are mentioned only when absolutely unavoidable. And readers are kept safe from a notion they would rather forget: that these ideas really can be understood by almost anyone, but the price of admission is effort. It is the bane of any physics editor.
It is why people like me so often resort to metaphor instead of explanation. Don’t fret, we say, space-time is just a rubber sheet sagging beneath a bowling ball. Entropy is a sandcastle gradually crumbling away.
Well, imagine everything wading through sticky honey. It betrays a lack of confidence not only in science’s ability to enthral, but in the writer’s ability to explain it with clarity and conviction. I am guilty of all this, and will have to live with the shame.
I am convinced that the only sinless science writer is Martin Gardner. The prolific writer behind Scientific American’s Mathematical Games column was quite happy to make his readers work, and nowhere is that clearer than in his masterpiece: The Ambidextrous Universe (1964). Fermat’s Last Theorem: still a must-read about a 350-year maths secret In a sentence, this is a book about left and right.
More precisely, it is about a property of mathematical and physical systems known as handedness, or chirality. By chipping away at that one apparently simple idea, Gardner leads us into a breathless range of science. There are molecules built from the same atoms but arranged as mirror images, sometimes with dramatically different biological effects.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
