The Evolution of Physics

Abstract

THE interpretation of science to the lay reader—and we may quite candidly admit that ‘lay reader’ must be interpreted as including practically all men of science who do not happen to be professionally interested in the particular branch of science under consideration—is a task both important and difficult. Of books which might be described as being suitable for some “ Wonders of the Universe ” series there is an excellent supply, and very good some of them are. The universe is a wonderful place, and to explore it under the guidance of a distinguished cicerone is both pleasant and profitable. Too often, however, one lays the book down with an uneasy feeling that something is missing. It reads like a detective story from which all the middle pages are missing. The first chapter, with its neatly arranged pile of corpses, is there, and the last page or so in which the name of the villain is disclosed ; but the account of the search, and in particular, that thrilling chapter, near the end, where the 'little grey cells' come iftto play, is wanting, and the real interest of the book has vanished with it. While it is, no doubt, edifying to learn that a lump of matter is nothing but a whirl of flying electric charges, what the reader would like to know, and what it is important that he should know, is how, and by what stages, the physicist arrives at this astounding conclusion. If, as Prof. Einstein and his co-author claim, “Physics is a creation of the human mind, with freely invented ideas and concepts ”, it is this intellectual content which gives to physics one of its chief claims to cultural significance, and provides for the thoughtful non-technical reader his main source of interest in it. It is with this aspect of the subject that the authors are concerned in this very distinguished book.

The Evolution of Physics:

the Growth of Ideas from the Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta. By Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld. (Cambridge Library of Modern Science.) Pp. x+319+3 plates. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1938.) 8s. 6d. net.