Black Bodies and Quantum Cats by Jennifer Ouellette

Looking back at the archives, I see that I never did get around to blogging about Jennifer Ouellette's Black Bodies and Quantum Cats, which I finished back in May. This is a particularly shameful oversight, as she visited campus in late May, and gave two excellent talks for us, so the least I can do is to post a measly book review.

Jennifer Ouellette (pronounced "Woah-lette," more or less, in case you were wondering) should be no stranger to regular readers of this blog, as I fairly regularly link to her blog, Cocktail Party Physics. If you're not reading it, you ought to be. And if you are reading it, you won't be surprised by what you find in this book.

Black Bodies and Quantum Cats is subtitled "Tales from the Annals of Physics," and that's a very accurate description. The book consists of thirty-eight short essays about topics in physics, arranged chronologically from the 1509 publication of Da Vinci's book on the Golden Ratio to the 2003 Nova special on string theory. That spans pretty much every important development in physics, and she has a short piece on just about everything that happened in that stretch (with the one disappointing omission being the lack of anything about laser cooling or BEC. Maybe in the sequel...). It's not entirely clear from the introductory material whether this is all new stuff, or grew out of the "This Month in Physics History" column she used to write for the APS, but whatever the source, it's an impressive collection of topics.

The essays themselves do an outstanding job of framing the stories for a general audience. She provides a good "hook" for each piece, drawn from well-known news stories or pop culture, and a sketch of the personalities involved in each of the historical episodes she describes. As a self-described "recovering English major," she has an excellent sense of story, and builds a compelling narrative for each of the essays. If you're looking for a good example of how to present science to non-scientists, this is the book for you.

The range of topics she uses for story "hooks" is pretty impressive. The first five chapters open with references to The Da Vinci Code, American Gods, ancient Assyrian scribes, the Hubble space telescope, and Addams Family Values. She manages to find either physics content or an interesting analogy in each of those sources, and ties that in with the historical subject.

The physics explanations in each section are compact, non-mathematical, and accurate, at least in a lies-tp-children sense. I have a few quibbles with some of the things said in the chapters on more recent developments (which is the stuff I know best, and have taught recently), but they're mostly just nit-picking. The point here is to give non-physicists a sense of the science, not to enable them to calculate anything, and the book succeeds admirably in its stated goal.

If you're looking for a short and highly readable survey of the history of physics, I strongly recommend this book. It's very well-written, covers a huge range of material, and finds compelling stories even in discoveries that seem awfully mundane. It's an excellent example of popular science writing, and we could use more books like this.