Rating: 5/5
Review:
Readable and fascinating
I thought A Map Of The Invisible was very good indeed. Jon Butterworth is both a fine physicist and
a very engaging writer. The combination
produces something rather special here.
Butterworth's aim is to give the non-physicist an insight
into the quantum world, from the basic structure of atoms to more recent
developments like the discovery of the Higgs boson and also into more arcane
theories and theoretical methods and the current directions of thinking in
physics. He does this by an extended
analogy in which particles are envisaged as inhabitants of islands with their
"geographical" position representing the mass/energy level of the
particles and means of transport representing the mediators of the fundamental
forces. This works well – at least as
well as any other analogy I have come across.
It can get just a little wearing at times, but as a template in which to
anchor so many entities and ideas it gives the book a welcome coherent
structure.
Butterworth writes very well. His prose is readable and direct, with a very
welcome absence of gee-whizzery and often a nice humorous undertone. As a tiny example which may give you a
flavour (no quark pun intended), this footnote about wave/particle duality: "The
equation which describes these waves is the Schrödinger equation. Less famous than his cat but much more
useful." I found the style carried
me well through some pretty tough intellectual workouts and he strikes a very
good balance between providing enough technical and mathematical meat while
allowing a non-physicist to keep up.
This requires a good deal of intellectual effort; no amount
of analogy or clear writing is going to make quantum physics simple. I have a background in physics (some time
ago, now) and I still found some of it a bit of a struggle - it's just the
nature of the beast. However, this is
one of the best, clearest and easiest-to-understand guides I have found to the
state of physics in late 2017 and I can recommend it warmly.
(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)
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