Jack Klaff - The Bluffer's Guide to the Quantum Universe

Rating: 4/4

Review:
Entertaining but not wholly reliable

I had the good fortune to be sent a few of these Bluffer's Guides for review by the publisher: they are pocket-sized and only around 100 pages long and I have found them all amusing, informative and very enjoyable. The Guides are, in fact, a bluff in themselves because although they purport to be a handbook for those who simply want to bluff their way, they use this as a cover for providing lots of very sound fact, written by people who really know and love their subject while being very witty about it and often scathing about the pretence which surrounds it.

This Guide, by Jack Klaff, has rather more in the way of information and jokes (some of them very good, some less so) and rather fewer "bluffer's tips" than some others, which in a way is a strength. It is certainly an enjoyable and very entertaining read. To give a flavour of the style, speaking of Relativity he says, "Furthermore, the faster you travel, the slower your brain would run. Planes, trains and motorways are full of examples of that." It's a decent gag - provided, of course, that you know enough about Relativity in the first place to see why it's a decent gag.

I am a physicist by training and my Inner Feynman (I wish!) compels me to point out that the information here isn't as consistently sound as I would expect from a Bluffer's Guide, so the unwary reader does need to be a little careful about accepting all the physics at face value. A couple of examples:
On p. 29 the Guide says: "The nucleus is one ten-thousandth the size of the entire atom." Well...not really. It depends on the atom, but as a rough guide the nucleus has between one twenty-thousandth and one-hundred-thousandth the *radius* of the entire atom, so it's *volume* is somewhere around one million-billionth of the volume of the entire atom - a rather different matter. And rather more seriously, on p.31 we get "protons are 1836 times bigger than electrons." In fact, protons are 1836 times as *heavy* (massive) as electrons. (As far as I know, an electron is still considered a "point particle," and no-one has determined a meaningful, accurate physical "size" for it. Yet.)

Perhaps precision in these things isn't critical in a book like this, but I do think the strength of these Guides is that, beneath their jokey and apparently flippant surface, they have a really solid base of knowledge, so it is a genuine concern. Mind you, I can forgive Klaff almost everything because he quotes approvingly from the Rev. Dr. J.C. Polkinghorne KBE, FRS etc - a distinguished physicist, a truly good man and one of the finest teachers I have ever had. And, as a man who forced himself to read the whole of Baudrillard's The Gulf War Did Not Take Place while alternately muttering variations on "Oh, for heavens' sake" and laughing out loud, I very much enjoyed the debunking of bogus use of terms from quantum physics to try to make works in the Humanities seem deep.

Minor caveats aside, this is a very enjoyable and generally informative book. It is probably best suited to people with some background in physics who want an amusing read, but would do pretty well for the novice and aspiring bluffer, too.