Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
by Carlo Rovelli, Riverhead Books, 96 pages, $18
In the early 1960s, famed physicist Richard Feynman developed a new lecture course for new undergraduates at the California Institute of Technology. Feynman aimed to turn the standard physics curriculum on its head, introducing young students to some of the most exciting questions in the field right away, rather than slogging through the usual staid topics en route to the research frontier.
By most accounts (including Feynman’s own), the classroom experiment was a flop. Even in the hands of such an acclaimed teacher, the leap was just too far for most incoming students to handle. Yet all was not lost. “The Feynman Lectures on Physics”, first published in 1964, have become some of the most admired — even, cherished — lectures in modern science. Sales of the English-language edition have topped 1.5 million copies, and counting. An abridged version, consisting of the more elementary material, was published under the title “Six Easy Pieces”.
A reader might expect Carlo Rovelli’s new book, “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics”, translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre, to offer an update on Feynman’s “Six Easy Pieces”, with a bonus lesson thrown in for good measure. Stylistically, however, the books are worlds apart. Rather than hark back to Feynman’s model from half a century ago, “Seven Brief Lessons” evokes an even earlier scientific bestseller and publishing sensation, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s “Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds”, first published in 1686.
Feynman sought above all to teach core principles, to convey (with a minimum of mathematics) some notion of the deep structures at the heart of modern physics. Though he remains beloved today for his wild tales of safecracking and bongo-drumming — stories that mostly emerged in later autobiographical vignettes — his lectures from the 1960s were didactic and clear, fuelled by a kind of Sputnik-era earnestness.
Fontenelle’s book was shaped by rather different sensibilities. Learned scholars of his day had to entertain courtly patrons, and Fontenelle aimed to charm his readers as much as instruct them. In his preface (as rendered in an 1803 English translation) he warned readers who had “some knowledge of natural philosophy” that his little book was not “capable of giving them any information; it will merely afford them some amusement, by presenting in a lively manner what they have already become acquainted with by dint of study”.
For those who had not studied the latest science, Fontenelle noted that he had chosen topics “most calculated to excite curiosity” — ideas that were “in themselves beautiful” and that “give as much pleasure as if formed only to charm the imagination”.
Rovelli, too, seeks to charm as well as instruct. “There are absolute masterpieces which move us intensely,” he writes, “Mozart’s ‘Requiem’; Homer’s ‘Odyssey’; the Sistine Chapel; ‘King Lear’.” (Three-quarters of his list could have appeared in Fontenelle’s book.) “To fully appreciate their brilliance may require a long apprenticeship,” he continues, “but the reward is sheer beauty.”
To his list, Rovelli appends the general theory of relativity, Albert Einstein’s elegant description of gravity arising from the warp and weft of space and time. “Within [Einstein’s] equation there is a teeming universe,” he writes, “a phantasmagorical succession of predictions that resemble the delirious ravings of a madman, but which have all turned out to be true.”
What ravings? “The theory describes a colourful and amazing world where universes explode, space collapses into bottomless holes, time sags and slows near a planet, and the unbounded extensions of interstellar space ripple and sway like the surface of the sea.”
Rovelli proceeds with similar flair to the incessant quantum jitters of matter, the roiling explosion of the big bang, and the soaring symmetries according to which elementary particles seem to be arranged. “A handful of types of elementary particles,” he writes, “which vibrate and fluctuate constantly between existence and non-existence and swarm into space even when it seems that there is nothing there, combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies, of the innumerable stars, of sunlight, of mountains, woods and fields of grain, of the smiling faces of the young at parties, and of the night sky studded with stars.”
Or, as Fontenelle had put it 300 years earlier: “Do you not think ... that the charms of a fine night greatly exceed those of the day?”
Rovelli’s and Fontenelle’s books share more than just paeans to the night sky. Fontenelle popularised the Copernican notion that Earth was but one planet among many, and hence the universe could be filled with a plurality of worlds much like our own. Rovelli introduces readers to physicists’ more recent, heady attempts to unite gravity with quantum theory — attempts that have led many leading physicists to imagine a plurality of distinct universes, all bubbling within some encompassing “multiverse”, or perhaps a single universe caught in an endless loop, cycling from big bang to big crunch to big bang again.
How far we are from Feynman’s world, in which a good fraction of the imagined audience of science students sat beneath fluorescent lights. A devoted reader might walk away from “Six Easy Pieces” with an appreciation of how physicists deploy a concept such as the conservation of energy to order experience. Rovelli instead invites his readers to marvel at the splendours of modern physics, to be enchanted by the beauty and the open-ended nature of the quest — to muse more than to mull.
With luck, his charming, lyrical invitation may well achieve Feynman’s original goal: to get students excited about the biggest questions in physics, inspiring them to dig in and push right to the heart of the unknown.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
David Kaiser’s latest book “How the Hippies Saved Physics” is published by W.W. Norton.
