Between the lines

A guide to music physics

Authors of books on “the physics of x” have some tough choices to make. If their physics explanations are too technical, they risk alienating experts on x. Assume too much foreknowledge of x, though, and physicist readers will stay away in droves. The safest approach is probably that taken by John Powell, a classically trained composer and Nottingham University laser physicist whose book How Music Works is aimed squarely at people who are neither musicians nor physicists. Aside from an appendix entitled “Fiddly details”, there are no equations. Instead, the physical aspects of vibrations and harmonics are explained using simple diagrams and thought experiments. Powell also claims that readers need no musical talent beyond an ability to hum the first four notes of “Baa Baa Black Sheep”. However, he wisely suggests reading the book in close proximity to a music library (YouTube will do in a pinch), as he frequently mentions specific songs as examples of one principle or another. Writing with plenty of self-deprecatory humour, Powell is refreshingly unfussy about such music-geek minutiae as the purported difference in sound quality produced by vinyl records and CDs. Better still, his taste in music is remarkably catholic: there cannot be many books that reference Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Wheatus’ indie-pop song “Teenage Dirtbag” in consecutive paragraphs. About the only thing Powell does not like about music, it seems, is the decibel system, which he blames on “a committee of drunken electrical engineers who wanted to take revenge on the world for their total lack of dancing partners”. Touché.

• 2010 Particular Books £12.99 pb 272pp

New horizons for Pluto research

We don’t know much about Pluto. However, we know more than we used to, and we will learn still more when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flies past it and its medium-sized moon Charon in 2015. Such is the message of Pluto: Sentinel of the Outer Solar System, in which Open University astronomer Barrie Jones describes how everybody’s favourite not-quite-planet fits into our picture of the solar system. Despite the relative paucity of information available about Pluto, there is still quite a bit to discuss. Studies of light reflected off Pluto’s surface, for example, have told us that this distant body is reddish in colour, while the discovery of Charon in 1978 helped refine our estimates of its mass. Quite often, the “how” of such findings is more interesting than the finding itself. Clyde Tombaugh’s use of a “blink comparator” to discover Pluto in the 1930s was amazing enough, but even in an era of giant space telescopes, it seems that imaging an icy rock from a vantage point almost 40 astronomical units away is actually rather difficult. Unfortunately, despite being written for an audience with a very basic level of physics knowledge (there are separate boxes intended “for those comfortable with algebra”), Pluto is not always an easy read. It is repetitive in places – the term “albedo”, meaning reflection, is defined at least three times – and an uneven chronological structure makes it hard to keep track of who discovered what and when. Still, for those with the patience to follow it, Jones’ slim primer offers a useful distillation of eight decades of research into Pluto, and an intriguing preview of more findings to come.

• 2010 Cambridge University Press £25.00/$35.99 hb 244pp

A noble story

William Ramsey, who won the 1904 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on the noble gases, is almost certainly the only laureate to thank his own thumb in his acceptance speech. Yet his unusual tribute was at least partially justified. As author David Fisher notes in Much Ado About (Practically) Nothing: The History of the Noble Gases, Ramsey’s large, flat thumb made an excellent impromptu vacuum-tube seal, and this “equipment” proved invaluable in his efforts to isolate the noble gases. Anecdotes such as this are ten a penny in Fisher’s irreverent book, which also features a balloon-borne dust collector known as the “vacuum monster” and a practical joke that involved swapping a priceless meteorite for some rusty iron filings. Yet to call the book a history is a misnomer. Although it contains some information about applications of noble gases – describing how argon is used in neutrino detectors, and how radioactive xenon helps diagnose pulmonary embolisms – it is really more like a memoir, since it draws half of its material from the author’s own career. The combination does not always work, especially when Fisher gives in to the memoirist’s penchant for settling scores and rehashing old gossip. Yet conflicting personalities and dead ends are also part of science, and to be fair to the author, he would be the first to admit as much. At one point, Fisher even describes a particular chapter as “a tale of things gone wrong and ideas that didn’t pan out”, and advises readers to skip it if they just want to learn about the universe. As a history, this book is uneven, but as an account of one scientist’s stormy love affair with noble-gas research, it is worth a second look.

• 2010 Oxford University Press £15.99/$24.95 hb 288pp