It’s hard to go more than a couple of days without seeing another “imminent death of publishing” article somewhere, predicting the ultimate triumph of ebooks, There’s one category of books that I expect to remain safe for the foreseeable future, though, namely books that are specifically constructed to be aesthetically pleasing. In other words, coffee-table books.<\/p>\n
Clifford Pickover’s new Physics Book<\/cite><\/a> is one of these. It’s a very attractive and well-made book, pairing some 250 full-page images representing milestones in physics, paired with one-page descriptions of the underlying scientific concept. The link above goes to the author’s page for the book, which includes a fairly representative sample of the images from the book.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The nature of the genre, as it were, means that this isn’t a book that you would sit down and read in one sitting, Instead, it’s something to flip through and read an entry or two, and follow some of the abundant cross-references to other entries. Accordingly, I can’t say I’ve read the whole thing, but I have jumped around a bit. The entries are well written, giving a brief and clear description of the core concept, and the cross-references are well selected and make for interesting browsing.<\/p>\n I have not run across any description that I found any problems with in terms of accuracy. Some of them are a little short, but that’s a necessary constraint of the format. The topics selected use a fairly broad definition of physics, including a number of technological innovations that some might view as engineering rather than physics. But then, it’s hard to complain too much about this, since it allows a discussion of the trebuchet, and trebuchets are awesome.<\/p>\n The images are often more impressionistic than technical– they’re artistic photographs rather than physics diagrams, which may disappoint some people. But again, this is a necessary constraint of the format.<\/p>\n In the end, what you want from a coffee-table book is something that’s pleasing to look at, and can prompt some thought about the subject that may spur people to look elsewhere. By that measure, The Physics Book<\/cite> is a great success, providing striking images and interesting descriptions, and even a few pointers to other resources that I hadn’t heard before, including a reference to a paper on “Mechanics of the Sand Glass”<\/a> that I’ll be using in this winter’s course on timekeeping.<\/p>\n If you’re interested in physics, and like pretty pictures (and, really, who isn’t?), you should definitely check this out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s hard to go more than a couple of days without seeing another “imminent death of publishing” article somewhere, predicting the ultimate triumph of ebooks, There’s one category of books that I expect to remain safe for the foreseeable future, though, namely books that are specifically constructed to be aesthetically pleasing. In other words, coffee-table… Continue reading The Physics Book by Clifford Pickover<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73,18,80,7,51,37,11,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-books","category-history_of_science","category-physics","category-physics_books","category-pop_culture","category-science","category-science_books","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}