The best science books to enjoy and to get you thinking
By Basil Mahon
Who am I?
I have always had a fascination with science. It came not from school or college, where lessons were sometimes dull, but from books about the discoveries and the people who made them. After careers as a soldier and as a government statistician I felt impelled to spread the word by writing, or at least try. After 40 rejections, my first book – about James Clerk Maxwell – was published and, to my joy, found many readers. My aim in writing is simply to share enjoyment with readers in an equal partnership. And I hope always to leave the reader feeling that he or she really knows the people I am writing about.
I wrote...
The Forgotten Genius of Oliver Heaviside: A Maverick of Electrical Science
By
Basil Mahon
What is my book about?
Oliver Heaviside, born in 1850, invented much of electrical engineering as it is practised today but his name has faded from view. This is a pity: he was not just a genius but a wonderfully eccentric character – always combative, often funny, sometimes infuriating, but never dull. At first, his ideas and methods were ridiculed and he had to fight ignorance and vested interests to get them accepted. Yet now they are so familiar that they are simply taken for granted: almost nobody wonders how they came about. Among many achievements, he showed how to analyse any circuit and how to eliminate distortion from telephone lines. He even wrote the four famous “Maxwell’s equations”. It will be our loss if we fail to revive his memory.
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The Books I Picked & Why
Men of Mathematics
By
E.T. Bell
Why this book?
First published in 1937, this lovely book is a true classic. In two volumes Bell brings to life 30 or so mathematicians, from Archimedes to Cantor. When first reading the book many years ago I had remembered some of the names from school and college, but only as labels to theorems or equations, and I felt taken into a delightful new realm of knowledge – I could now think of Fermat, Lagrange, Gauss, and Riemann as people. And I began to want to know more about the scientists whose names I had heard in school and college. Bell’s book had sparked a lifelong interest.
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The Maxwellians
By
Bruce J. Hunt
Why this book?
In telling us how four men with disparate but complementary talents came together to bring James Clerk Maxwell’s epoch-changing but hitherto obscure theory of electromagnetism to the world, Bruce Hunt somehow succeeds in combining the highest level of scholarship with a warm and engaging narrative. One gets to know Oliver Heaviside, Oliver Lodge, George Francis FitzGerald, and Heinrich Hertz, and to feel almost as though one were sharing their struggles and triumphs. I love this book.
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QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
By
Richard P. Feynman
Why this book?
How can anyone write a book on quantum electrodynamics without equations? Nobody but Richard Feynman would even have thought of attempting such a thing. Yet he manages to explain the complex behaviour of photons and electrons in a way that people without training in advanced mathematics can understand. It’s not a book for the casual browser – the reader has to think and it can be hard work. But that’s because Feynman has integrity. There’s no skimping – he gives you the full works. And you only have to read one sentence to hear the New York accent and see the grin. Marvellous.
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Theoretical Concepts in Physics: An Alternative View of Theoretical Reasoning in Physics
By
Malcolm S. Longair
Why this book?
Malcolm Longair’s book is like a course of very good lectures that get behind the equations to reveal the context of their discovery. For example, we learn how Planck, who hated Boltzmann’s statistical approach to the theory of heat, was obliged to adopt it in order to solve the problem of black body radiation, and how this led to the concept of the quantum. There are plenty of equations but each chapter tells a compelling story of people at work, and the presentation all the way through is beautifully clear, with superb illustrations.
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The Cosmic Computer: The Physics of the Perennial Philosophy
By
Gareth Timms
Why this book?
Self-published on Amazon, this book is a blast of fresh air. Bold, deep, and engagingly written, it takes an axe to received wisdom in physics. In Timms’ hypothesis, the universe we perceive is one half of a duality, its partner existing deep within atoms and inaccessible to us because of the huge amounts of energy required to probe such small scales. The partners communicate at the atomic scale, where the quantum of action becomes the currency unit of exchange. Timms makes his case elegantly and plausibly, using many quotes from authoritative sources. You may not agree with some of his propositions but it is stimulating, and enjoyable, to have one’s ideas given a good shake-up.
