Words

The annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is always a great event, I highly recommend it to anyone in the area. This year’s edition is on April 20-21. I have a special honor, which really should be reserved for someone older and more distinguished but there you have it: I’ll be presenting the prize for science/technology book of the year. The real honor would be to win the prize, but I’ll take what I can get.

There was no prospect of winning the prize, even though I did write a book, for the sensible reason that my lovely wife was serving on the panel of judges. That’s the bad news; the good news is that, as the spouse of a judge, you benefit from the constant stream of new books arriving on your doorstep. At least you benefit for a little while. Once the number of new science books from the year hits the triple digits, your response is closer to despair. There are a lot of good books out there. Great if you’re a reader, sobering if you’re an author. It’s kind of shocking that anyone found my humble little book at all.

One book I can’t help but mentioning, which I don’t think is eligible for the prize since it came out in 2013 rather than 2012 — The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics, by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky.

Amidst the veritable deluge of science books, Susskind and Hrabovsky have done something simple but radical: they explain introductory physics for real, with all the equations, in a book that is not actually a textbook. This volume (everyone hopes there will be more) covers the principles of classical mechanics, with extraordinary concision but wonderful clarity. The fact that they are trying to explain major concepts rather than cover every detail means they can get much further than a textbook would; a hundred pages in you’re learning about the Principle of Least Action, and not long after that it’s on to Poisson Brackets. If you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and follow the authors along, this is a book from which you can learn a great deal.

This book, needless to say, is not for everybody. But no book is for everybody; the question should be whether there are enough people in the appropriate niche that a book like this might be commercially viable. The answer is a resounding yes, apparently. Released just a few days ago, The Theoretical Minimum zoomed to #4 on the Amazon.com bestseller rankings, which is truly amazing. (The highest I ever got was around #100, but I’m not jealous!)

I wonder if now we’ll see a slew of copycat books that throw conventional wisdom to the wind and try to boost sales by having equations on every page. Perhaps not, but readers would certainly benefit. While I am obviously a firm believer in explaining science to as wide an audience as possible, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there is more than one audience out there. Many people might be interested in brushing up on some subject they last took seriously long ago in high school or college, or they might want to fulfill a deferred dream of studying something they regret not taking. The lesson shouldn’t be “equations are okay after all”; it’s “there’s an audience out there for challenging material if it’s presented in an engaging way.”

When I wrote From Eternity to Here, I was faced with a perennial problem for pop-physics authors: how to write a book that will appeal to the aficionados (although not scientists themselves) who have already devoured everything Brian Greene and Lisa Randall have ever written, but also be understandable and interesting to folks who don’t know much more about Einstein than the fact that he rarely combed his hair? I came across a short blog review that claims I wasn’t entirely successful in balancing the competing requirements, and it might be a fair criticism.

But one small complaint is I’m not sure if he’s quite exactly worked out his audience. Early in the book, I was starting to fear it would be a rehash of stuff I already knew. It’s not. But there were some elementary rehashes that, frankly, I think if someone went into the book not having that knowledge already, they aren’t going to be able to grok the rest. This is not a mathematically demanding book, but it is a conceptually demanding book, and I am not sure if someone who doesn’t have some limited grounding in the mathematics side will be able to make it through the conceptual side without missing a lot.

The diagnosis is completely accurate. On the one hand, I do spend time going over the basics of relativity, quantum mechanics, and logarithms, in ways that hopefully make these ideas accessible to people who haven’t ever tried to understand them before. On the other hand, the meaty middle section of the book is conceptually very challenging for almost everybody, even if you are a regular consumer of popular physics books. We are simply not used to thinking in ways that don’t presume the arrow of time from the start, and some of the issues that arise are highly non-intuitive. I tried to keep things fun and engaging, but there’s no question that certain pages of the book require careful thinking and brain work.

What to do? I’m not sure that, given the material I wanted to cover in this book, there is much else one could do. Probably I could have had less about the basics of relativity, and moved what there is until later in the book. But although the central ideas are conceptually very challenging, I don’t think they’re actually inaccessible to anyone who is willing to put some thought into them, regardless of mathematical background. So I don’t regret that I didn’t write a leaner and more challenging book aimed only at the aficionados, although I appreciate that something along those lines might have been more focused. I think that the aficionados just have to get used to reading introductions to GR and QM from a wide variety of different books — at least until those topics become part of the standard high-school curriculum.