Category: Science

In 1964, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman gave a series of introductory lectures on physics to undergraduate students at CalTech. Six Easy Pieces is an abbreviated version, with six chapters on the essential elements of modern physics including atomic theory, conservation of energy, gravitation, quantum mechanics, and the relation of physics to other sciences.

The lectures highlight Feynman’s particular style, in that they are engaging and accessible. The book contains hardly any mathematics and – aside from one dated and strangely detailed departure into categorizing elementary particles – everything in the book should be reasonably accessible to anyone with a passing knowledge of science. At many points, Feynman identifies things that were unknown to science in 1964. Contemporary readers may find themselves wondering how much has changed in the intervening time. Indeed, it would probably be a valuable exercise for somebody to write an update. Ideally, a talented science writer like Simon Singh who could bring a talent in expression to the update that would mirror that in the individual.

Feynman does accord some space to more philosophical issues, such as defining ‘science’. He repeatedly asserts that: “Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth” and uses that criterion to distinguish it from other kinds of knowledge, including mathematics.

The best thing about the book may be some of the elegant ways in which Feynman explains fundamental truths about the universe, and how they relate to each other. He doesn’t simply assert things like the nature of gravitational attraction or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, but in many cases illustrates how they arise from other pieces of known physics. For instance, Feynman elegantly explains how Kepler’s Laws on planetary motion can be elaborated into Newton’s universal theory of gravitation.

In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain voted Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table to be the best science book ever written. On the basis of that endorsement, I was expecting something along the lines of a very well-written history of the discovery of the elements. Levi’s book differs substantially from that expectation; it is a kind of post-Holocaust memoir, presented in the form of twenty one sketches named after elements. Most have an element of mystery to them, usually involving an investigation of the nature of a substance or the cause of a change. Ultimately, the book feels deeply personal, set against a backdrop of very practical chemistry: the sort where a couple of men in Italy scrape together a living synthesizing pyruvic acid, or making stannous chloride from tin, to sell to small-scale mirror manufacturers.

In many ways, the one of the book is established in relation to the second world war, and especially the Holocaust. In a story focused on the dynamic between prisoner-chemists and one of their masters in Auschwitz , Levi contemplates some of the ethics of complicity:

I admitted that we were not all born heroes, and that a world in which everyone would be like him is, that is, honest and unarmed, would be tolerable, but this is an unreal world. In the real world the armed exist, they build Auschwitz, and the honest and unarmed clear the road for them; therefore every German must answer for Auschwitz, indeed every man, and after Auschwitz it is no longer permissible to be unarmed.

For the most part, however, the book meditates on much more ordinary sorts of human relationships and is full of wise observations. Describing the purpose of the project, Levi explains that:

[I]n this book I would deliberately neglect the grand chemistry, the triumphant chemistry of colossal plants and dizzying output, because this is collective work and therefore anonymous. I was more interested in the stories of solitary chemistry, unarmed and on foot, at the measure of man, which with few exceptions has been mine: but it has also been the chemistry of the founders, who did not work in teams but alone, surrounded by the indifference of their time, generally without profit, and who confronted matter without aids, with their brains and hands, reason and imagination.

At times, the abstract realities of chemistry provide solace. A compound used in high-end lipstick is most abundantly found in the excrement of vipers, but that is as good a source as any since molecules are molecules without reference to their history. Near the end, Levi tells the true story of a single atom of carbon that finds it was around the Earth – incorporated into rock and plant and animal – and explains how the story must be true, given the sheer multiplicity of carbon atoms circulating in the world.

Ultimately, that Levi excels at is the sketching of character: whether it is his own, that of the various objects of romance or curiosity he encounters, or that of compounds and the elements themselves. As such, the book is very human: a consideration of how a thoughtful person functions in a world where some conditions are established through immutable physical laws, and others through the opaque decision-making of the powerful.