What attracts teenagers to study physics?
The reason I’m usually given is “because I want to know how the world works”. these students have a strong sense that the world is, deep down, understandable, and that there are principles, principles that are both interesting and in themselves and have a power that can be harnessed for the welfare of humanity, that we can use and apply in all kinds of contexts.
You are reading: Physics books for high school
Let’s say you’re flying in an airplane with your mobile phone. you can get to a stage where you’re not just happy to look up at the sky, take a picture and say ‘there it is’. you want to know the underlying mechanisms of the plane, how it is built and how it stays in the air. these are things that most people throughout human history had no idea about, and they made up all sorts of wonderful stories to “explain” them. everything is inherently fascinating.
Contrary to the myth of difficulty, I think the appeal to some is that it somehow feels easier than history, philosophy, or politics: very complicated subjects that don’t necessarily offer solutions to problems. I imagine there is some clarity and underlying logic to the math and physics: the idea that if you work hard enough it will make sense, even if you have to work for a long time and ultimately only see part of the big picture.
Does the fact that physics is a difficult subject turn people off in their experience?
it depends. I find other subjects much more difficult than physics. and people often take physics because they find it difficult. it is, I suppose, a prestigious subject. If you’re applying to college with an A or * in a Physics level, that’s a big plus for you, because it shows that you can think in a wide variety of ways. that attracts people.
Let’s go to your books. first, he chose randall munroe’s explainer of things, a book that explains complex things using only the top 1,000 words in the english language:
—ten hundred! it has to be ‘ten-hundred’, because the word ‘thousand’ is not one of the most used words in the English language.
why did you choose it?
because he is charming and tremendously intelligent. he wrote it as some kind of joke. Randall Munroe is this extraordinarily talented and intelligent cartoonist with a background in robotics; At one point he worked for NASA as a contract programmer and roboticist.
but the book is about how to explain things using the simplest terms you can. take your usa space team diagram uu. goer five, which is the saturn v rocket. at the bottom, a pair of arrows point to the jet’s propellers with this note:
This end should point towards the ground if you want to go into space. if it starts pointing towards space, you’ve got a serious problem and won’t go to space today.
[laughs.] and there is another indicator with the message: “a lot of fire comes out here”. the accuracy! when it describes something you already know, you think, “That’s a very clever way of putting it in the simplest, most robust terms possible.”How would you describe helium without using the word “helium”? well, in this book it’s ‘funny voice air’. it’s both smart and wildly funny throughout. he will talk about “handheld computers” instead of mobile phones, or “little energy gates” instead of transistors. it’s absolutely beautiful.
munroe said that one of the main problems in writing this book was that the words “thread”, “wire” or “rope” were not among the top “1000” words, so he had to use “line”. and whenever the book refers to any kind of electrical connection or wiring or anything like that, he has to call it “line”. she had to compromise on all sorts of things.
It’s just clever. Many people will try to sound smart by using lots of fancy words, but this is the exact opposite. it’s being smart by using the most direct language possible, without sacrificing accuracy. it’s beautifully drawn and beautifully written, and it makes me smile a lot.
going to your second choice, we have human universe by brian cox and andrew cohen. this is basically a “why are we here” book, isn’t it? and it was also a very popular television series.
more or less. I think the book is much better than the TV series. the thing about brian cox (bless him) is that on tv, everything seems to come down to the cliche of him standing on top of a mountain looking aesthetically pleasing and going ‘oh isn’t he beautiful?’ or ‘isn’t it? just wonderful and fantastic?” with his charming Mancunian accent. while the book itself is beautifully written.
I like it for its broad historical scope, but also because it gives an up-to-date account of modern cosmology and particle physics, so it’s “as simple as it could be, but not simpler”, as the saying goes. attributed to einstein.
what I had to keep reading about 12 times was his description of inflationary cosmology and what the big bang is, and how you can discuss the idea of what happened before the big bang and the general idea of a scalar field . I still don’t think I fully understand. but the description of him is the most lucid I have ever read. It’s very nice.
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The whole book seems to rest on the juxtaposition of two notions. first, that the universe doesn’t seem to care one bit about the fact that we’re here; in that sense, we are insignificant. yet, at the same time, this is the only known place where beings like us exist; therefore, we are special. the book plays with that juxtaposition all the time. It is very current and almost moving. I listen to it when I drive.
“The universe doesn’t seem to care one iota that we’re here; in that sense, we are insignificant”
I only found it recently when I was on new scientist live. In one of the talks, I found myself expressing my frustration: Isn’t inflation a complete botch job? how are you going to get a homogeneous isotropic universe? we just pretend that we have this exponential inflation in the first ten to minus seconds of the big bang. but why do we have such a thing?
These poor people were trying to explain it to me and I was being quite difficult, maybe because I still don’t get it. They said that the best description was in the human universe, and they told me to go out and find it. and they were absolutely right.
his next book, the right stuff by tom wolfe, is perhaps a bit of an extravagant choice. It is a very human novel about NASA astronauts. why did you choose it?
It’s probably a cliché to say that so often amazing feats of science and human achievement are presented simply as “what happened” without looking at the real personalities involved. I think you can do that, but you miss the interaction between the characters.
This book takes you from Chuck Yeager’s breaking of the sound barrier to the beginning of the Apollo program. it’s before all the things that people would say are the heyday of nasa, like the moon landings, etc. is everything that happened before.
It’s all the amazing things people did. it’s what you can do if you have a mindset completely separate from worrying about your own safety, not worrying about whether your spouse will be widowed and her children will be left without a father. it’s a mindset of absolutely bloodthirsty bravery, bordering on arrogance, combined with an essentially unlimited budget to satisfy what was then a political agenda.
Some of the stories in the book are slightly dramatized. as you say, she is a novelist. but it’s so convincing. once you’ve started, you just can’t stop. it is wonderful. the description of the breaking of the sound barrier is inspiring and exciting. this is what people can do if they are determined and do not take no for an answer. Yeager said, “I don’t think there’s a sound barrier, so I’m going to do it.”
and so he did. And she did it with a broken rib! she had fallen off his horse in the desert the day before. he didn’t want to tell anyone, because then they would have put someone else on x1 to break the sound barrier for the first time. so he had his navigator-engineer cut a piece of wood. (in the movie adaptation, it’s depicted as part of a mop, but I’m not sure if that’s true.) he designed it as a handle so he could keep his arm on the injured rib and stick the handle into the door of the plane and pull it closed.
He was not going to be denied that first flight. and they knew that every time they got on these planes there was a one in three chance that they would die. On the apollo missions, and that’s when some of the problems with the technology were worked out, they knew their chances of success were 50/50. they knew this, and they did it anyway. maybe it was crazy, maybe it was arrogance, but it’s still amazingly wonderful arrogance and makes for a very good book.
how is it useful for a physics student?
gives you a very good idea of what it’s really like to be in a rocket going off and (especially on re-entry) the physical strain placed on the body under extreme accelerations. it’s all very well to say that upon re-entry, they would be experiencing seven, eight, or nine g’s, and they might pass out, and so on.
but we do have transcripts of actual radio communications with mission control about what these guys went through. they had monitors strapped to their entire bodies at the time and they were measuring everything. they were measuring magnetic field strength, altitude, pressure, and acceleration, all of these things. how extraordinary is it that people could actually do this and really want to? they wanted to get on top of a bomb that would then ignite. how extremes of pressure and acceleration are experienced – there are really beautiful descriptions of that.
the next book is six easy pieces by richard feynman. this seemed like the most obvious book on “how to learn physics” to me.
exactly. I thought to myself, if I put this as one of my picks, people might be like, ‘oh god, really? did you have to put that in?’ but if I didn’t, then people would say ‘why didn’t you put that in?’
There are two things I love about this book. The first is that Feynman could write about difficult physics and teach it in a way that no one else could. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest physics professors of all time, not to mention a person who was largely responsible for formulating quantum electrodynamics, which is why he got the Nobel Prize for it. his turns of phrase convey a sense of how to understand something terribly complicated. I love that. It’s a wonderful way to think about a point of view.
The other thing is that they were based on conferences from 1961. What I love is reading how far we’ve come since then. There are all kinds of bits where I wish I had been in the audience to shout, “You’re wondering what the substructure of protons and neutrons is, but seven years from now, the people at Stanford will discover these things called ‘quarks.’ ‘ and I can tell you exactly why you have that particular pattern there—” and so on. Not that I feel superior or anything like that, but it’s wonderful to see the extraordinary progress we’ve made in such a short amount of time and how encouraging it is.
His discussions of Newtonian gravitation and how we got to it, phenomena like tides, and how the speed of light can be measured by looking at Jupiter’s moons, are described with much humor and clarity. conveys the emotion of physics. in one of his probably less appropriate, but very famous, quotes from him, he says that “physics is like sex. sure, it can give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it”. he was an extraordinary person. you can see why his students and almost everyone he met fell in love with him.
So it’s probably a pretty obvious choice, but I had to put it in because I love it and have read it about 20 times. it gives a broad brushstroke of many of the basics and is a wonderful way to get some of the fundamental ideas into your head. then you can build on them and see how far we’ve come since then.
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Finally, we have the pop-up book Large Hadron Collider: Journey to the Heart of Matter by Anton Radevsky and Emma Sanders. why did you choose this?
because it’s ridiculously funny. The whole idea of the large hadron collider is this extraordinary machine with a circumference of 27 kilometers in which we collide two beams of protons, each of which is thinner than a human hair, to try to solve the underlying structure of the universe.
much of this type of physics is three-dimensional. representing things on flat sheets of paper is misleading. Going back to the last option, this is something Feynman says in his first lecture: he laments the fact that he is trying to draw the ice structure. he apologizes for showing a two-dimensional image, but asks his audience to imagine that it is actually a three-dimensional structure. he desperately tries to represent it, but all he has is a slide.
This book is so much fun. anyone can read it. goes into some pretty technical details about, for example, superconducting magnets and the structure of detectors, especially atlases, which is the main focus of the book. it gives you a scale model of how deep underground the collider is, and what the different layers in a modern particle detector are designed for, and why we have this onion structure in the detector layers. another model shows the actual detector itself. the scale of this is staggering. it’s a bit of a paradox that the smallest structures in the universe have to be examined by huge detectors the size of a 10-story building.
you can get endless hours of fun with this book. magnets are amazing, we have to use liquid helium. they already had the previous accelerator tunnel which was the lep (large electron positron collider). they already had the tunnel and realized they could build this upgrade, but to reach the kind of energies they needed to search for particles like the higgs boson, the tunnel was essentially too small. they wanted a tunnel that had a much, much larger circumference because to get the particles to reach a certain speed, to direct them in a circle, you have to apply a very, very strong centripetal force. such a strong steering force could not be obtained with the magnets of the time.
So, they practically had to invent these new superconducting magnets that are cooled by liquid helium. they realized that it was cheaper to use the old tunnel and develop a completely new magnetic technology than to build a new tunnel. people say “billions of pounds are spent on particle physics, so why can’t we alleviate poverty?”, but fundamental research does more than broaden our horizons. there are so many practical derivatives. aside from the entire world wide web being invented by cern scientist tim berners-lee, those magnets are the magnets, the same background, the ones used in MRI machines.
this is the evolution of the universe and how we went from a big hot bang to the structure of the universe we have now. this is a few hundredths of thousandths of a second after the big bang. what we’re looking for is how the experiments at the large hadron collider relate to conditions in the early universe. how can we explain the formation of hydrogen and helium in the early universe, etc.? it’s just so much fun. is a beautiful but accurate description of the world’s largest physics experiment.
I know you wanted to mention it, so I’ll ask you. A book you put down now is Illumination by Steven Pinker. you didn’t include it, but why were you interested in doing it?
because I think it’s a terribly important book. I’m sick of people these days saying that modern life is rubbish and the world is going to hell. the pollution is terrible, the population of the world is growing and growing, and there is so much war and suffering in the world. hello, historical myopia!
You’ve forgotten what life used to be like. you’ve forgotten that war was the default state of most civilizations, that life expectancy even 50 years ago was 20 years less than it is now, how infant mortality rates used to be, how people suffered and died like flies due to infectious diseases. , how frequent famine was, how polluting power generation used to be (compared to what it is now), the inefficiencies of everything, of machines, of cars. you’ve forgotten how difficult it was for someone other than a white man to do anything important in the world.
The way to counter that is to count: track and see how things have improved, objectively, for the vast majority of people on the planet. it’s looking at the drivers and, more importantly, saying that what we’re doing is working in some way. we have to look carefully to see what works and what doesn’t, and see what we can do to improve it.
pinker looks at this process and finds this intellectual aversion to so-called progress. he says something like, ‘intellectuals dislike progress, but intellectuals who call themselves progressive really dislike progress,’ he’s actually saying the changes of thought that started in the enlightenment, all the values of reason, humanism, of not taking things seriously. faith and the audacity to understand—have made a better world and continue to make it a better one. we need to defend them and praise them and say how wonderful they are, not go around saying, ‘the industrial revolution was such a bad idea; look how messed up the world is. it is exactly the opposite.
backs everything up with terribly rigorous data that’s hard to counter. are things you might not know, too: For example, the world’s population growth rate peaked in 1965 or so. now it has dropped to nearly one percent. it is projected to be zero by 2050, and then the population is projected to decline. the world population is not only growing, the rate has markedly decreased. Why is that? educate women.
When women are educated and have access to contraception, they have fewer children. and the children they have live longer, happier lives. As a result, the living conditions of entire cultures and peoples are improving.
The point is that nowadays we are very good at reporting suffering and there is a lot of bad stuff out there. this is something that hans rosling says: “things are bad, but they have never been better”. both can be true at the same time.
Before you go, I want you to touch on the rather overloaded question of why comparatively few girls study physics. what is your opinion?
There are, and always have been, brilliant women in physics. we need your ideas and we need the diversity of approaches and perspectives. certainly many girls here want to. in year 12, we have a third of our cohort studying physics: 35 girls out of about 100. and in year 11, we have about a quarter of the cohort taking physics for full level. but we could be a small exception.
If you watch movies from 10 or 15 years ago, you will have a female scientist, but there will be something wrong with her; she will be ‘exceptional’ in some way. she will be peculiar, or she will be obviously the symbolic female. but more and more, I find that people are people: purple people with yellow stripes can also be physical. it has become much more inclusive.
The degree to which universities and research institutions realize that they have to engage with children of this age has completely transformed since I was doing my Ph.D. these institutions now do much more to show what they are working on and why it is so amazing. they’re giving courses, giving talks and getting people to do all sorts of fun things, even with elementary school kids, because that’s when the interest starts. interest does not start at the age when children are asked what kind of work they would like to do; is when they are six years old. that’s when they say ‘look at these amazing things!’
I think the big issue isn’t getting girls to study physics in the first place or even take it to graduate level: it’s keeping them in the profession. the problem with an academic career or a research career is that when you get your doctorate, it’s still the case that you then go on to this postdoctoral position. It will be three years here and two years there. If you’re in a slightly specialized field, your first posting will be in Brighton and your second in New York and your third in Stuttgart. Although it is a traditionalist view, this coincides with the stage of a woman’s life in which she is expected to reproduce.
so what are you going to do? Are you going to go into this profession knowingly when you’re not going to be able to stay in one place for more than a few years at a time, with no guarantee of a permanent job at the end? Or are you going to take your wealth of skills and do something similar but different, where you would effectively have a job for life? that was the decision I made.
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