Physicists have a long history of writing books for outsiders — often to enlighten, sometimes to persuade and occasionally to assuage. Galileo’s Dialogues bypassed the conventional channels of scholarly debate and addressed the general public directly; Newton was happy for others to use his work in the public arena and to see the Newtonian “system of the world”, as outlined in his Principia, extend far beyond physics. Few people could read Newton, but everyone read about him. In a similar vein, Einstein’s public reputation rose steadily upwards, enhanced, ironically, by a reputation for his work being stratospherically difficult to comprehend. This reassured people that they really did not need to make the effort to understand it, merely know that it was very important. Even his own elegant efforts at popularization with co-author Leopold Infeld in 1938, The Evolution of Physics, were unable to sweep away this myth.
The first half of the 20th century saw a series of influential books by leading scientists like Arthur Eddington and James Jeans that raised the profile of physics and astronomy in important ways. Eddington was the most read, and his books are still commonplace today in second-hand book stores and in classic editions. With good reason, for Eddington wrote with great style and a keen eye for analogy and metaphor. He also did something else. His books wove together established knowledge with his own theory of fundamental physics and a concatenation of numerological jugglings that, he believed, could explain the numerical values of the constants of nature with no help from experiment. Even today, the genre of “crank” numerology that infests a large fraction of the letters one receives about the correspondent’s new theory of physics owes much to those widely read books of Eddington.
In the October special 20th anniversary issue of Physics World, John D Barrow examines the popular science books that have spawned over the years, including such milestones as Steven Weinberg’s The First Three Minutes, Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind and, of course, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.
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