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Culture, history and society

Culture, history and society

Shelf life: Frank Wilczek

03 Nov 2004

What books do physicists like to read? That's the question we hope to answer in this new column, which this month features Frank Wilczek from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Physics, along with David Gross and David Politzer, for his work on the theory of the strong force.


What are the three best popular-science books?

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo, which is brilliant and very amusing as literature, even leaving aside its scientific and historical importance. It is the book that got Galileo into trouble. We should be grateful for his courageous willingness to engage questions that really cut into people’s prejudices and upset their world-views in ways they found disturbing.

Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin. It is not just a popularization, of course, but it is self-contained, written in simple prose, and is accessible to the general reader.

Chemical History of a Candle by Michael Faraday. This is one of his Christmas lectures that he gave at the Royal Institution. It is a wonderful laying-bare of surprising facts and intricate structure in a (superficially) familiar process – the burning of a candle. I think it exhibits a marvellously creative mind at work on its home ground, poking into details and following peculiarities to their root with carefully crafted experiments.

If I could, I would also mention the scientific writings of Benjamin Franklin, especially his letters to Collinson on electricity, as well as Erwin Schrödinger’s What is Life?.

What popular-science books are you currently reading?

I am currently about a fifth of the way through Roger Penrose’s new book The Road to Reality. It is huge – over 1000 pages long – but very interesting. I also enjoyed John Derbyshire’s Prime Obsession, which is about the solving of the Riemann hypothesis.

Which popular-science book have you never read, but feel you ought to have tackled?

I can’t say that I feel the least bit guilty about not having read any particular popular-science book. I tend to read at least “one level up” from what you would call truly popular science – books such as Edward Wilson’s Sociobiology, and John Gerhart and Marc Kirschner’s Cells, Embryos, and Evolution. I also read in fields that are closer to theoretical physics or where I have a special interest (such as computation and neurobiology) that is much higher.

The exception is older books; I very much enjoy reading the old masters, although obsolete technical terminology and notation can get in the way and much of the material goes in directions that have not proved so fruitful. I therefore wind up looking at the less intimidating, more reflective portions, such as the “Optics” and the “Scholia” in Newton’s Principia.

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