Tag Archives: Biography

Henri Poincaré – Jeremy Gray ***

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My first sight of this book filled me with a certain unease. It would be polite to call it chunky – in truth, at 542 pages plus appendices, it is obese. This initial feeling was not poincarehelped by a bizarre statement the author makes in the introduction. ‘This is a scientific biography of Henri Poincaré,’ he says. ‘It is confined entirely to his public life: his contributions to mathematics, to many branches of physics, technology, to philosophy and to public life. It presents him as a public figure in his intellectual and social world; it leaves the private man alone apart from a deliberately brief account of his childhood and education.’

No, no, no! This is a bizarre distortion of what a scientific biography should be. I am comfortable with keeping coverage of his childhood and education brief, as they are usually dull and not particularly illuminating. There are clear counter-examples, for example, with Newton’s formative years, which are absolutely crucial in understanding the scientist, but for many, these aspects are fairly irrelevant. But the point of a scientific biography, as opposed to a book about a person’s science pure and simple is that it puts the science into context – and that context must include the private life. Can you imagine a biography of Richard Feynman without his private life coming into it? This is a crazy viewpoint.

Even so I persevered, as I have always had Poincaré in my mind as one of those mathematicians beloved by other mathematicians but of little interest to the real world, so I wanted to find out more about the man (as much as Jeremy Gray would allow me) and his impact on science and technology. It was hard work. There’s an awful lot (some of it truly awful) about the subtleties of philosophy that gets in the way of much of the more interesting content. This is supposed to be a scientific biography, remember, not a philosophical one.

When there is a section that is more of interest (and the way the book is organized does not make it easy to find your way around), frankly it can verge on the unreadable. This is the worst kind of dry academic writing, combined with an approach to the science that is strongly mathematical in flavour and the author lacks any skill in actually explaining the science for anyone who doesn’t know the maths already.

There is always a danger in reading an academic tone and complaining that it’s not popular science because it was never intended to be. And this book is published by Princeton University Press. But I was told it was suitable for a general readership, and this is usually the case with scientific biographies. But I am afraid this is really only suitable for a very narrow audience with a purely academic interest in pure and applied mathematics and the philosophy behind it. Disappointing.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Neils Bohr and the Quantum Atom – Helge Kragh ***

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This is a bit of specialist one. If you don’t have a physics degree, don’t bother to read any further. Neils Bohr and the Quantum Atom is not intended to be popular science (if you want a more approachable book, try Abraham Pais’s Niels Bohr’s Times), quantbohrbut I was very interested to read it as it’s a subject that is close to my heart.

Bohr himself tends to be underrated – he tended to come across rather badly when public speaking, and some of his quasi-philosophical pronouncements on the nature of quantum physics were painfully obscure. But we must not forget the huge contribution he made to kick-starting quantum theory, starting with his key development of the quantum model of the atom.

Although the book does plunge into equations on a number of occasions it is primarily a historical narrative of the development of Bohr’s model of the atom, including a fair amount of biography, from his early thoughts at Manchester in 1912 to its full fruition and subsequent transformation by the new quantum mechanics in the 1920s. I would be lying if I said that reading it wasn’t quite hard work – but if you really want to get a feel for the detailed process of the development of one of the key foundations of twentieth century physics, the book is unparalleled. There is a lot of detail – but this is about real science, not the sanitised version.

Overall, if you are the right reader (and I was), very satisfying.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Neils Bohr’s Times – Abraham Pais ****

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Fully, if clumsily titled Neils Bohr’s Times, in physics, philosophy, and polity, this is the definitive scientific biography of Bohr by fellow physicist Abraham Pais who knew and worked with him.

paisbohrThe good news is that this chunky title will give you an in-depth look at Bohr and his work. From his early days in Copenhagen, through his brief but fruitful stay in the UK, his return to Denmark, the rush to safety in the Second World War and his gradual move to elder statesman of quantum physics, it’s all here.

As is often the case with a biography written by another scientist, the science content is quite heavy and sometimes not the easiest to digest, but it is worth battling through, and the picture of Bohr himself that comes out of this book is second-to-none. Niels Bohr sometimes gets a rough time of it, in part because his own communication was often rather opaque, but Pais will really open your eyes to Bohr’s importance.

The book dates back to 1991 but is none the worse for that. If you really want to understand the development of quantum physics in its historical and scientific context, this should be on your reading list.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Seduced by Logic – Robyn Arianrhod ***

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Though there still aren’t enough women involved in physics, there are certainly are far more than there used to be. When I look back at my 1976, final year undergraduate group photograph at the Cavendish in Cambridge there are probably only around 5 per cent of the students who are female. (It’s a little difficult to tell, given the similarities in hair length favoured at the time.) Now it would be significantly higher. But go back over two centuries and what’s amazing is to find any woman who dared to make herself visible in the scientific arena.

Yet despite the widely voiced concerns that women’s brains would practically explode if faced with anything more than the fluffiest of science popularisation (the father of one of the main characters in this book, discovering her interest in maths, said ‘We must put a stop to this, or we shall have Mary in a straightjacket one of these days’) the two individuals at the heart of Robin Arianrhod’s book managed not just to learn about the physics of the day but to make important contributions.

The first is Émilie du Châtelet. She was worthy of a biography for her life alone, somehow managing despite being married to the aristocratic Marquis du Châtelet, to spend most of her married life in the company of the writer Voltaire (with another lover later on with whom she had a child, though, sadly, Émilie would die shortly after the birth). But she was also a great enthusiast for Newton’s work, doggedly acquired knowledge of mathematics to better her understanding (soon outstripping Voltaire) and writing an influential paper on what we would now think of as energy. Perhaps most remarkably she made what is still the only complete French translation of Newton’s brilliant but often impenetrable masterpiece, the Principia.

Scottish-born Mary Somerville, the second of Arianrhod’s characters, born 70 years later, had more of a middle class background (Arianrhod helpfully puts her on a par in both period and social status with Jane Austen and her principle characters), but still managed to go on to be a world expert on Newton’s work, both providing new insights for the many scientists who struggled with Newton’s sometimes painful obscurity and writing some of the first approachable popular science on the subject. While both woman were of a certain standing, and could not have broken through the way Faraday did from truly humble beginnings, the achievements of this pair when all of society and the scientific establishment was stacked against them was truly remarkable and it is excellent that their work is being detailed here.

Where I have a little concern with the book (as opposed to the subjects) is that Arianrhod sets out to give us too detailed a rendition. Dotting every i and crossing every t of a scientific life is necessary for an academic biography, but here it can get a little plodding at times. It is only because of this that I have not given the book more stars – it is impossible to fault the attention to detail of the biography, nor the interest of the subjects, but the book doesn’t quite have the page turning intensity that these women’s stories could have had with the right approach.

However, if you want to find out more about this remarkable pair of early female Newtonians, this is definitely the book to make you a very happy bunny indeed.

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Review by Brian Clegg

The Wonder of Brian Cox – Ben Falk ***

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Poor old Brian Cox. Many scientists are already very snippy about his media success – they will be even less delighted to see he now has a biography on the shelves, putting him up against the likes of Einstein, Dirac and Feynman. (Or more accurately the members of One Direction.)

‘But why?’ they will moan. ‘He’s nothing special as a scientist.’ And there they will have missed the point entirely. What is special about Brian Cox, a point this book brings out superbly well, is that he is ordinary. He’s the bloke down the pub who can really explain science to you. (And it doesn’t hurt that the ladies like him.) As Zaphod Beeblebrox’s analyst says of him in Hitcher Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, ‘He’s just this guy, you know?’

I ought to say straight away – and it’s the reason it only gets three stars – that this isn’t a scientific biography. Ben Falk is straight about this. Referring to a talk by Cox and his long-time collaborator Jeff Forshaw, Falk says ‘Personally I struggle to understand why they’re talking about, but then I gladly gave up science at GCSE.’ This is not a book that is going to explain Cox’s science to you, it’s very much about Cox the man, Cox the musician and Cox the media star.

As such, and bearing in mind it has been written without any cooperation from Cox, it does a pretty good job of putting together a picture of where he came from, his lucky breaks and his essential qualities that allowed him to make something of those breaks. Perhaps the most fascinating point is where the second band Cox had an involvement with, D:ream have just became well know and are about to set off on a world tour. He decides (a good choice as it turned out, because D:ream’s fame did not last long) not to stick with them, but to go and start his physics degree.

I’ve had coffee with Brian Cox while waiting to do a gig at the Science Museum together just before he was famous, and I think the book is a fair reflection of how he comes across in life. A nice guy, passionate about his science, but dazzled by the media. At the time he had just got the job of science advisor to the financially disastrous Danny Boyle movie Sunshine, and he was absolutely fascinated by the whole business.

My main criticism of the book is that it’s a shame Falk couldn’t do a bit more with the science. He can’t entirely ignore it, but it’s clear whenever he talks about the scientific part of Cox’s life (a relatively small percentage of the book), Falk is just quoting what he’s read without any understanding of it. Anyone familiar with press releases on science subjects will be familiar with this style.

Weakest of all is Falk’s coverage of IT. I think because it’s less scary he is prepared to put things in his own words, and gets it wrong. So, for instance, we are told that ‘Perhaps the most incredible discovery at CERN prior to 2008 was the internet.’ This would come as something of a surprise to those at ARPA who started the internet from the non-secure part of ARPAnet years earlier. He means, of course, the world wide web. Elsewhere, Falk tells us that Cox was using C++ and clearly thinks this is obscure and highly technical, apparently unaware that the vast majority of bog-standard programs on Windows, Mac OS and Unix are written using this language.

This is a good book, as long as you treat it as you would any other media biography of a current phenomenon. (It’s interesting that there is no back material, not even an index, which somehow is very suggestive of this genre). It even has a longish quote from our review of Cox and Forshaw’s The Quantum Universe. Don’t look for science here, but those jealous scientists who can’t understand Cox’s success would do well to look here to get a better understanding of why it’s him, and not them, in the limelight.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Stephen Hawking – Kitty Ferguson ***

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It’s apt that I’m writing this review on the train to Cambridge, Stephen Hawking’s home turf. A good few years ago we were taking a young German on a tour of Cambridge. He had no interest in science, but when we saw Hawking trundling along King’s Parade in his powered wheelchair our visitor instantly knew who he was. If you ask a person in the street to name the two most important physicists of the last 100 years they would probably name Einstein, then Hawking. Which is odd, because I wouldn’t put him in the top 20.

That sounds harsh, but I think Hawking is to physics what Katherine Jenkins is to opera. To the general public, Jenkins is obviously a great opera singer, after all she’s always on the TV. But those in the opera world will point out she has never sung a complete role. It’s not that she’s a bad singer, she just isn’t what the public thinks she is. Similarly by saying I might not put Hawking in my top 20 I’m not saying he’s not a great physicist. But bear in mind that well over 200 people have won the Nobel Prize in physics over the last 100 years. I’m just saying that most of those who know the field would have to consider Feynman or Dirac or Rutherford or a whole host of others before they got round to Hawking.

Yet Hawking remains a star. I went into Kitty Ferguson’s chunky biography of Hawking hoping I would understand this better, as well as getting a detailed feel for his work. The two obvious factors driving his stardom are the remarkable story of his having a full working career despite being told he would die in his 20s of his degenerative disease and his media exposure, driven by the huge success of A Brief History of Time which started the popular science bubble – but would Ferguson reveal more?

It is perhaps telling of the subject that I found myself more interested in the biographical parts than the science. It doesn’t help that this is often fairly abstruse – many of Hawking’s indubitably ingenious ideas are speculative and at the edge of our understanding, more grounded in maths than real observational science, which gives Ferguson a real challenge in explaining them. On the whole she does well, but the section on the relationship of space and time near the big bang was very difficult to read. I was also a little disappointed by the obvious omissions of explanation, even in something relatively straightforward like Hawking radiation.

Ferguson tells us that black holes lose energy this way, as a virtual particle pair that forms near the black hole can have the negative energy particle sucked into the hole while the positive energy particle zooms off, reducing the overall mass/energy of the black hole. There are two problems with this she doesn’t explain. One is how a particle can have negative energy – an antimatter particle, for instance, doesn’t have negative mass, so why negative energy? The other is why the majority of particles from virtual pairs sucked into the black hole are the negative energy ones. Why aren’t an equal number (statistically) of positive energy ones sucked in, producing no net effect? These kind of simple questions are often the ones popular science readers like answered.

The good news is that I did feel I had learned a lot more about Hawking’s ideas (if it was sometimes hard work) and about his personal life. The were some insights into Brief History of Time too (I couldn’t believe he got a $250,000 advance for the US version), though not really explaining its runaway success. I found the book genuinely interesting, despite Ferguson occasionally verging on hero-worship of Hawking. There were a couple of minor factual quibbles. I was unnerved to read that the New Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge was built in 1974 as I started attending lectures there in 1973. And the author’s American origins came through in her lack of understanding of British life before the 1960s – she suggested that somehow not having central heating made Hawking’s childhood home ramshackle – but it was the norm back then. These are trivial indeed, though.

If you are genuinely interested in Hawking this will definitely fill in a lot of the gaps in both his personal life and many popular science explanations of his work. If you made an attempt on Brief History of Time and failed, this is probably not for you.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Quantum Man – Lawrence Krauss ****

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With the exception of science’s Holy Trinity of Newton, Darwin and Einstein, the scientist who has probably had most written about him is Richard Feynman. Arguably the second most brilliant physicist of the twentieth century, and without doubt the most charismatic, Feynman is a natural biographical subject. To see a video of him giving a lecture, whether you understand him or not, is ridiculously entertaining for a scientist. If he had been played in a movie it should have been by a young Tony Curtis (accent included). And his own stories of his adventures, brilliantly told, if occasionally embroidered, in Surely You Must be Joking Mr Feynman and the like, are unparalleled.

Given all this, do we really need another Feynman biography? The Gleick book Genius surely says all there is to say?

The answer is yes and no. If what you want is a good, approachable biography of Feynman, look no further than Gleick. If, on the other hand, you really want to get a feel for the nature of Feynman’s science, then to turn to Quantum Man. The subtitle is ‘a life in science’ but it should be ‘a life through science’ because physicist Lawrence Krauss makes sure that the science dominates. In fact this is arguably not a biography at all but rather a book on Feynman’s scientific achievements that makes passing reference to his life. So, for instance, his second wife gets no more than half a page of coverage.

The one problem with this approach is the book is neither one thing or another, which can be quite frustrating. Krauss describes the science in more detail than some readers will be comfortable with, but it is all covered fleetingly enough to make it quite difficult to follow. He gives us tantalising peeks at the detail that doesn’t make it into a conventional biography, but fails to explain in enough depth for it to be meaningful, which can be frustrating.

Nonetheless this is a very good book for those who are prepared to work a little at their popular science. I would recommend reading the Gleick book first and would see this almost as a supplement to get more detail of the significance of the science. If Krauss could have made the scientific content more approachable this would have been a marvel of a book. As it is, it is solid and a very useful addition to the Feynman canon.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Einstein and Relativity – Paul Strathearn ***

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This is part of author Paul Strathern’s ‘Big Idea’ series, with each book in the series aiming to provide a condensed, readable introduction to a particular scientist’s life and work. The format is the same each time, so we also have, for instance, ‘Darwin and Evolution’, ‘Curie and radioactivity’ and ‘Newton and Gravity’.

This offering on Einstein really is very short – at under 90 pages, it can be read in about 90 minutes. Still, Strathern manages to get in a good overview of the major episodes of Einstein’s life, encompassing his political activities and his ultimately unsuccessful work towards the end of his career on unification, and we get some insights into Einstein as a person.

Clearly, given the length of the book, you will need to go elsewhere to get a full account of relativity. But, again, the book does well to fit in what it does into such a small amount of space. We get brief but useful explanations of the special and general theories, Einstein’s thinking whilst coming up with each, and the context within which the breakthroughs were made. And via discussions of the Michelson-Morley experiment, the differences between Galilean relativity and Einstein’s relativity, and the action at a distance problem in Newton’s theory of gravitation, the truly revolutionary nature of Einstein’s theories comes through.

The book is easy to read throughout and would be particularly good for those new to popular science, and as something to look at before going on to, say, Walter Isaacson’s detailed Einstein: his life and universe. All in all, this is a useful summary of the man and his ideas, which definitely has a place in the popular science genre.

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Review by Matt Chorley

The Ultimate Quotable Einstein – Alice Calaprice (Ed.) ***

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There is no doubt that Albert Einstein had a way with words. He was an expert with the sound bite long before the concept existed. In this fat little book, Alice Calaprice has collected together a vast number of his quotable snippets to delight the Einstein fans.

Just looking at the Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations shows how quotable (and what a wit) Einstein was. He has 37 entries compared with 10 for Rutherford (no slacker) and 7 for the ultimate science wit Richard Feynman. And that’s where the doubt creeps in. Feynman was, without doubt, even better at coming up with little gems – yet we don’t get equivalent books for him. At the moment on TV, a grotesque animation of Einstein is being used to advertise bread. He is more than a scientist, he is a brand. The only real reason for producing a book like this is because Einstein has fans. It wouldn’t be going too far to call the action of putting this collection together hagiography.

This being the case, it’s hard to be too enthusiastic about the result. It would have been much better, for instance, if it had far fewer dull quotes but gave a lot more context. Ultimately, I just don’t see what this book is for. You would have to be a real fan to read it from cover to cover, and it’s not really a reference book for any practical use. An oddity beyond doubt.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Galileo: Watcher of the Skies – David Wootton ***

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There have been a lot of biographies of Galileo. A LOT. To find this book in Amazon I had to scroll through over a page full of other titles. So David Wootton had to be able to put a different spin on things in some way – and I’m pleased to say he has. This is particularly surprising when you consider what limited material we have to investigate Galileo’s life outside of the big events like his trial.

Compared with many of the other titles, this is a weighty and serious academic biography. As such it can occasionally be rather dry reading, but repays the reader in the details of context that it gives. I’d say that Wootton’s real plus over the competition is his deep feel for the social and political times, so we get a much richer understanding of the interpersonal connections of Galileo and the nuances of the arguments between philosophers, proto-scientists and theologians.

One small example that particularly impressed me – apparently the concept of a ‘fact’ really didn’t exist until around this time, and it’s a term that Galileo explicitly uses (as he also does ‘science’). In particular, in his analysis of the disputes over Copernicanism and Galileo’s contribution, Wootton’s is by far the best Galileo book of the many that I have read.

If I have any concerns, I think they derive from the fact that the writer is a historian, rather than a scientist. I suspect for this reason, he tends to overplay the importance of Galileo’s support for the Copernican model and downplays his contributions to physics, where he was much more original and his work made much of a long-term difference. Galileo’s great book on Two New Sciences, which covers much on matter and motion is skimmed over in a short chapter. My other concern is that this grounding in history rather than science means that the writer is more interested in having a fresh interpretation of some part of Galileo’s history than he is of putting the science into context.

This is particularly obvious when it comes to Galileo’s religious beliefs, where Wootton draws some very speculative conclusions from very little evidence.

All in all, not a book to read for an entertaining tour of Galileo’s life and work, but an essential if you really want to get an understanding of the mind of Galileo, why he did what he did and what the context of his work was.

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Review by Brian Clegg