Physics for Future Presidents by Richard A. Muller

I consider myself relatively well-informed when it comes to contemporary topics in politics and world affairs; this is especially true in topics of science, which tend to interest me. It becomes difficult to keep all the relevant facts organized, however, especially as the amount of knowledge necessary to cope with the news has grown.

Space exploration; nuclear energy; bioterrorism; global warming: these are only a few of the sensitive topics that a potential future president will have to deal with. This is exactly the hypothetical audience that Muller has written for: you, as reader, are a commander-in-chief-to-be, and are reading this as a primer to cut through the bullshit about the delicate decisions you will need to make.

I’d never heard of Muller before picking up this book, but he appears to be a widely published professor; as well, he received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, which aren’t given to just anybody.

Muller begins with an explicit discussion of September 11th, and the oft-quoted physics behind the effective burning and collapse of the World Trade Center towers; this topic of terrorism becomes a springboard for the other potential sources of terrorist violence, which Muller then analyzes for their relative risk and likelihood. Gasoline, he tells us, is a remarkably efficient source of energy. Plain old fossil fuels such as gasoline or natural gas are in fact much more dangerous in the hands of terrorists than anthrax or even a dirty bomb.

Nuclear power may surprise you the most; Muller, clearly, is on the side of those who believe that nuclear power is safe and effective, sneering at some of the fearmongering which greatly overstates the danger from radiation. The author isn’t what you could brand as a leftist, I don’t think, or an environmentalist; I was actually surprised at the vehemence with which he support nuclear power, given his usually careful stance.

Climate change, too, is significantly more understated than I would have expected. Muller doesn’t deny human-caused climate change, though he quibbles about its extent, and even delivers a few politely nasty blows to Al Gore (“propagandist”).

For better or worse, Muller’s approach is effective, even with the surfeit of “output per unit” phrases. A lot of the science will surprise you; it’s an excellent primer on these very relevant issues, and I would recommend it even for people who don’t normally follow much science.

Death From the Skies! by Philip Plait, Ph.D.

Call me a sucker, but I can’t seem to stay away from popular science books. When they’re good, they’re excellent (Outliers; the often-cited A Short History of Nearly Everything); when they’re bad, they can run the gamut from underwhelming (Physics of the Impossible) to “pretty damn bad” (Electric Universe).

I’m pleased to note, before getting to any discussion of substance, that Plait’s Death From the Skies! falls firmly in the former category.

When I was a young lad, I became enamored of a series of books called The Encyclopedia of Danger, which was a series of books devoted to things which could kill you. I began with Dangerous Insects, moved to Dangerous Mammals, and finally on to entries whose subject matter may seem more at home on TLC, such as Dangerous Professions. I tell you this not necessarily because I think you should read these books, but because it’s important that you understand some of the psychological currents at work in my delight at Death from the Skies. This kind of morbid fascination is, I would agree, universal in some degree, and the impetus behind everything from snuff films to horror movies to simple gossip.

Philip Plait, Ph.D. proposes to scare you (First line in the book: “The universe is trying to kill you.“), but almost always pull you back from the precipice at the last moment, usually by pointing out the literally astronomical odds of these sorts of cataclysms occurring. The flow of chapters goes from the most likely (being hit by asteroids or meteorites) to the least likely (being fried by a gamma ray pulse) or least relevant (heat death of the universe).

Each chapter begins with an italicized section narrating the horror in potentia: movie trailer-like, the scene begins with little girls playing hopscotch and kittens being precocious, and suddenly an asteroid six miles long slams into the continental United States, instantiating a tremendous shockwave that circumnavigates the globe (twice!), blasting away humanity in a sudden rage of heat and pressure. Whoever or whatever left alive after the initial tempest will surely die as the thrown debris blots out the sun and devastates the food chain from the bottom up.

Giving more credit to Michael Bay than is probably due, Plait serious considers the idea of landing a rocket on such an asteroid, provided we have advance warning of it. In fact, he runs through a number of scenarios, all of whose efficacy varies depending upon the state of our technology, the orbit of the damnable rock, and the amount of time we know in advance. Ten years is best, he says, though often we don’t see such things until they pass us by (!). But these impacts, though still rare on any scale to arouse alarm, are more or less guaranteed to happen (evidence shows that they already have in appreciably recent history, the most recent being the Tunguska Event in 1908). But they are also the sort of event we have the most power to predict and counteract (and also they give us the most chance of survival).

By the time Plait is talking about supernova, the likelihood of the doomsday scenarios he describes are infinitesimally small: in any given lifetime, you’ve got a 1 in 10,000,000 chance of dying from a supernova; even that seems relatively low. The odds of us being swallowed up by a black hole that wanders too close (or our solar system dropping too close to the relatively tiny black hole at the center of the Milky Way) are approximately 1 in 1,000,000,000,000. These phenomena as real dangers are an academic exercise; we can make vague predictions about the damage to the Earth based on estimated energy output or gravitational effect, but Death From the Skies is not a real-life encyclopedia of danger. In that case, it didn’t appeal to any sense of pornographic morbidity that I may harbor.

No, what made this book so compelling is that there is nothing more humbling than reading about astronomy. The sheer scale here is more than any of us can really appreciate. A red giant star, for instance, when going supernova, can easily—in an instant—release an amount of energy equivalent to our humble sun’s entire lifetime out of energy; or, to put it another way, the output of one hundred billion billion (that’s two “billions”) of our sun at a given moment in time. That’s massive; it’s really beyond our ability to appreciate. I sunburn after ten minutes in July, for goodness’ sake.

Much of the book is filled with this: Plait takes astronomical phenomenon as a narration, stepping us through the stages of cataclysm that lead to an exploding star or a gamma ray burst or the collapse of a star into a supermassive black hole. Most humbling yet is his final chapter, which, though hardly related to prescient warnings of asteroids or solar flares, is the eventual heat death of the universe, which is an extrapolated event based on somebody’s mathematical equations, wherein all matter is ultimately dissipated and there is zero activity in the entire universe. If that makes you a little queasy, don’t worry: it’s not supposed to happen for 10⁹² years. Speculative, sure, but it’s the sort of writing that makes you want to go pour yourself a drink.

Death From the Skies is, in my view, the very definition of popular science writing. It isn’t afraid to pull our scary numbers or reference quantum mechanics, but all along it manages to be abstracted enough to appeal to those of us without doctorates in astronomy. Despite its somewhat lurid title, it is solid science writing, and manages to be wholly engaging the entire time. Plait has created a real gem here; I would recommend it to any and all comers.

Condensed Knowledge by Will Pearson et al.

My brother’s been reading mental_floss and its associated books for several years. Condensed Knowledge is, to the extent of my knowledge, the first of their [adjective] Knowledge compendia, essentially giant books of trivia. After having my appetite whetted by A.J. Jacobs (who, though is a contributor to mental_floss, does not have any material in this particular book), I decided to try my hand at one of these.

To be honest, Condensed Knowledge is a little hit-or-miss. Personally, I can’t quite figure out of it’s supposed to be a “Knowledge for Dummies” kind of book, or a “Bet You Didn’t Know…” kind of book. It’s organized into sections based on topic; e.g. “Condensed Religion,” “Condensed Geography,” “Condensed Art.” Each section contains a bunch of 1 or 2-page articles with a variable number of trivia. For example, “5 Famous Sculptors” or “7 Ancient Civilizations You Never Knew About.” Each subitem gets a little blurb.

Perhaps it’s just my own variable knowledge that made the book seem inconsistent. When I’m being told, somewhat condescendingly, about famous painters, I think to myself, “Why am I reading this again?” But when the books veers into the esoteric, like little-known painful rituals in history, it becomes genuinely interesting. Even within a section (each section being written by a different author or co-authors), there is remarkable inconsistency: religion, for instance, goes from the stupidly simple to the genuinely interesting.

Then, too, some of the authors seem to have a better grasp of neutrality than others. The author responsible for the philosophy section, for instance, really hates Jean-Paul Sartre, and made those feelings known on at least two separate occasions.

Remember, too, that the purposed of Condensed Knowledge is to tell you a little bit about a lot of things. There’s no in-depth analysis here; sometimes the author repeats a misconception or is so glib that they misrepresent their topic.

Despite its flaws, the book was a fun enough read. If nothing else, it should function similarly to Wikipedia: if you read a blurb that piques your knowledge, or that sounds suspicious, go research it. I know that happened with not a few topics in my case. In that respect, I suppose, the book has fulfilled its mission.

Black Bodies and Quantum Cats by Jennifer Ouellette

At some point, my preconceptions of this book got crossed with another—likely Tyson’s Death by Black Hole, currently queued—and I expected it to be a collection of loosely-related physics articles. In fact, it is a chronology of anecdotes about important inventions or discoveries and the physical principles that underlie them.

One rhetorical tack that Ouellette likes to use is to introduce each anecdote or story with some applicable piece of modern culture—e.g. Buffy the Vampire Slayer as an illustration of chaos theory—which I’m sure is her attempt to popularize the subject and connect it, however tenuously, to the sugary pillars of modern televised culture. Xerography and electric paper? Think Harry Potter. Some examples are better than others.

I’ll admit, it does feel a bit like pandering, but the rest of Ouellette’s writing is still pretty good. My only other source of irritation was her insistence upon illustrating and describing what looks like Bohr’s atomic model, which isn’t considered accurate anymore. When she gets to quantum theory, she knows about electron “clouds,” but never uses that term and never specifies that this cloud model is a clarification of the simplistic satellite-like Bohr model.

It builds well, though: she starts with the earliest scientific discoveries and works her way forward through Galileo and Newton and Franklin, and through Morse, Edision, and the Age of Invention, through Einstein and Planck and finally string theory. I was aware of almost all of this history from Bill Bryson’s fantastic A Short History of Nearly Everything, and in fact Bryson’s history is much more detailed and informative (not to mentioned crossing many more branches of science), but Ouellette delves deeper into the mechanics of physics than Bryson dared.

As with most attempts to popularize esoteric subjects, Black Bodies and Quantum Cats both succeeds and fails. Ouelette’s book does a bit better than some, I think, but fails to capture the same magic as Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, a book she holds up as an icon of accessible science writing.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen W. Hawking

On the heels of a somewhat disappointing science book in this meme, I felt I’d be pretty safe with this one. Written in ’88, it’s a bit dated for a cosmology/astrophysics tome, but it’s landmark enough (cosmology for the layman? what a concept!) to merit it’s expansion in 1998. Sadly, my library only had the original.

While written in a distinctly different style than the subpar Electric Universe or the—dare I say it?—orgasmic A Short History of Nearly Everything, Hawking’s book manages to cover extremely highbrow scientific concepts in a way that, while still baffling, is most certainly readable. Take this excerpt, for example:

If the universe really is in such a quantum state, there would be no singularities in the history of the universe in imaginary time. It might seem therefore that my more recent work had completely undone the results of my earlier work on singularities. But, as indicated above, the real importance of the singularity theorems was that they showed that the gravitational field must become so strong that quantum gravitational effects could no longer be ignored. This in turn led to the idea that the universe could be finite in imaginary time but without boundaries or singularities. When one goes back to the real time in which we live, however, there will still appear to be singularities

Of course! It’s so simple! No, really, no matter how good a writer Stephen may be, his non-”Lucasian Professor of Mathematics” readers will only understand this material on a superficial level. Still, I found it absolutely fascinating, as Hawking manages to find a happy medium between technical specificity and reader-friendly vagueness. The only formula he includes is e=mc², and for very good reason: someone told him—kidding “on the square”—that every formula included halves the book’s sales numbers.

So, you never know what mathematician/cosmologist will end up penning a decent book. Had I let Brian Greene’s atrocious Nova special color my opinions of him, I never would have read The Fabric of the Cosmos, which was superb. Again, however, I must stress that if you aren’t a science/tech geek, even on a very basic level, this book might be too much for you, and you might be better off with the rather toothless scientific jaunts of David Bodanis.