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Review - Frightening Light - Nick Arnold

The good news is there's lots of good stuff about light, and unlike many other "popular science" books for younger readers, it does have quite a lot about the people involved in discovering what's going on in light - the sort of context that can be very helpful.

There was rather too much on the eye, which in the end isn't light, just a light receptor. There were also one or two oddities - for instance a photon is described as zig-zagging along, which is misleading, and there's no mention of Ole Roemer, the first person to measure the speed of light. And the explanation of a mirror would seem to imply it should invert top/bottom as well as left/right.

Mostly, though the complaint is about missed opportunities. The book mentions fluorescent lights, but not what fluorescence is (did you know, for instance, that sheep fluoresce?). There's quite a lot of fun stuff about colours, but it doesn't point out the fascinating fact that until Newton's day orange wasn't a colour, just the name of a fruit. And there's a section at the end on amazing future light possibilities that misses out almost every major possibility from slow light to holographic storage and superluminal experiments. Similarly, the book misses the opportunity, when describing Maxwell's first colour photo, of pointing out that he made a booboo - his colour picture didn't actually register red, but it looked like it did because it registered infra-red instead.

Speaking of Maxwell, the biggest omission is a good description of what light actually is. It's described as "just a blip of energy" - nowhere do you get a feel for the wonderful, by-its-own-bootstraps dance of magnetism producing electricity producing magnetism... nor is QED (Quantum Electrodynamics) touched upon. It might seem that Feynman's description of the interaction of light and matter is too complex, but other books in the series manage equally complex topics like general relativity - and QED is one of the most fundamental pieces of science around.

So what the book does, it mostly does quite well, as always ably assisted by the excellent cartoons... but it could have done much more.

Reviewed by Jo Reed

Also in hardback, combined with Sounds Dreadful:

* Our age range recommendation is an estimated guide, but individual readers outside the range could still enjoy the book!

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