If death and taxes are the only things that we can be certain about in this world, as Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1789, it must be almost certain that most people will pass away without having read many of the books they wanted to read, not to mention all the books they felt they should have read. Books not read feature twice in our Christmas Books section this month: The Book Nobody Read by Owen Gingerich is the subject of the first (p35), while a leading theoretical physicist admits that he has only read a few pages of A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (see Shelf life: Lee Smolin (p43)).
In his book about a book, Gingerich tells the story of his attempts to track down early copies of De Revolutionibus, the book in which Nicolaus Copernicus proposed that it is the Sun, not the Earth, that is the centre of the solar system. In particular Gingerich investigates claims that no-one actually read De Revolutionibus and finds these claims to be without foundation. Indeed, it seems as if anyone who was anyone in astronomy at the time – Tycho Brahe, Galileo and Kepler – read Copernicus’s classic.
Although few of us would feel the need to read De Revolutionibus today, there is a vast and ever-increasing number of popular or semi-popular books aimed at both scientists and non-scientists – books that the enlightened reader might feel they should at least buy or borrow and, if time permits, actually read. This writer’s shelves are full of such volumes.
When selecting books for review in Physics World we try to avoid titles that will only be of interest to a minority of readers, which means that we tend towards popular, biographical and historical books, and away from monographs and specialist titles. Even then there are more suitable titles than we have pages to review, so we have introduced a new column called “Between the lines” to bring these books to the attention of readers. Also new is “Shelf life”, a column where leading physicists tell us what they have and have not been reading.
Publishers are notoriously secretive about the sales figures for their books so it is difficult to know whether the growing numbers of popular-science books are indeed popular, although a group of statistical physicists has recently reached some interesting conclusions about the sales of books by analysing data from Amazon.com (Sornette et al. 2004 Phys. Rev. Lett. at press). One wonders if there really can be a demand for yet another popular book with an astronomical theme or another collection of essays about breakthroughs and disputes in modern science. However, there are certainly plenty of these books on sale in high-street bookshops and one must assume that publishers know what the public is likely to buy.
Often the challenge for the physicist-reader is finding a popular book that contains enough new material. By necessity popular books about the very latest breakthroughs must include enough background material for the layreader, but one can only read about the basics of quantum mechanics or special relativity so many times. The best of these books also manage to go behind the scenes and reveal the personalities and motivations of those involved, and ensure that they end up being read rather than gathering dust on the shelf.
