Popular Science Review - Mr Tomkins in Paperback

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Review - Mr Tompkins in Paperback - George Gamow

It's difficult to undertake this review without a sense of extreme trepidation - inevitably I will be trampling on a few fond memories. I know a number of scientists who look back on the Mr Tompkins books with the fond glow of nostalgia. The books were an inspiration to them when they were young. But the fact has to be faced that they really don't come across very well any more.

This book combines the two original Mr Tompkins titles, Mr Tompkins in Wonderland and Mr Tompkins Explores the Atom. Written by a genuine famous physicist, George Gamow, the books are an early attempt at making the more obscure aspects of physics accessible to the general reader. In them, a bank clerk from London, Mr Tompkins, enters strange worlds in a series of dreams where he can experience the realities of relativity, quantum physics and more at close hand. In one he becomes an electron, experiencing the dance around the atom, bonding with another atom, and becoming a free electron. In another, he experiences life with a very slow speed of light. In yet another, quantum billiard balls exhibit the strange, probabilistic nature of quantum particles. These dreams are interspersed with lectures on physics that Mr Tompkins attends.

So far, so good, and as I mentioned, these books are the beloved historic reading matter of a good number of professional scientists. Unfortunately, though, it's a bit like that awful moment when you encourage a friend to watch a 1950s science fiction movie that delighted you when you saw it on the TV as a child. Now it simply creaks. The special effects are terrible, the dialogue worse. It really is a very similar experience when you come back to the Mr Thompson books.

The least of the problems is that the science is rather out of date. The basics of relativity and quantum theory are mostly fine (though the explanation of uncertainty duplicates Heisenberg's early mistake when he seemed to imply it was caused by the act of observation, rather than being a fundamental part of reality), but there's a lot about particles and cosmology, for instance, that needs a good update. Worse, though, is the period style, with all the quaint attitudes expected from a 60-year-old view on the world. Even worse are the lectures that intersperse Mr Tompkins dreams, which make no attempt to be any more engaging than typical undergraduate lectures and are simply too technical. Worst of all is the whimsy. Sadly, whimsy was very popular as a way of lightening a message at the time - now it simply grates.

I ought to stress again that these books were wonderful in their time. The last thing I want to do is destroy anyone's fond memories. But the books are probably best left as a distant memory, rather than re-lived today.

The Mr Tompkins books appear in a number of forms. We have chosen to review the last "pure" version - however there is a modern edition The New World of Mr Tompkins, updated by Russell Stannard: also available in hardback:

Rather bizarrely, Mr Tompkins in Paperback is available in hardback:

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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