![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
This book tells the human story of one of man’s greatest intellectual adventures - how it came to be understood that light travels at a finite speed, so that when we look up at the stars, we are looking back in time. And how the search for an absolute frame of reference in the universe led so improbably to Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2,, which represents the energy that powers the stars and unclear weapons. From the ancient Greeks measuring the distance to the Sun, to today’s satellite navigation, the book takes the reader on a gripping historical journey. We see how Galileo with his new telescope discovered the moons of Jupiter and used their eclipses as a global clock, allowing travellers to find their Longitude. And how Ole Roemer, noticing that the eclipses were a little late, used this to obtain the first measurement of the speed of light, which takes eight minutes to get to us from the Sun. We then move from the remarkable international collaborations to observe the Transits of Venus, including Cook’s voyage to Australia, to the extraordinary achievements of Young and Fresnel, whose discoveries eventually taught us that light travels as a wave but arrives as a particle, and all the quantum weirdness which follows. In the nineteenth century, we find Faraday and Maxwell, struggling to understand how light can propagate through the vacuum of space unless space is filled with a ghostly vortex Aether foam. We follow the brilliantly gifted experimentalists Hertz, discoverer of radio, Michelson with his search for the Aether wind, and Foucault and Fizeau with their spinning mirrors and light beams across the rooftops of Paris. Messaging faster than light, Einstein’s theory, quantum entanglement, and the reality of the quantum world, conclude this saga.
John C H. Spence teaches physics at Arizona State University and is Snell Professor and Director of Science for the National Science Foundation’s BioXFEL Consortium. This is an absorbing historical account of how scientists learned to measure the speed of light but although I enjoyed the personal details Spence gives on the scientists and he does try to simplify the complicated mathematical formulae, some of the book was above my skill level.
I’m going to start this review by admitting that my knowledge of maths and physics is not great. As a result, although I could follow the earlier formulae and diagrams that Spencer sets out over the course of this book, as he gets deeper into the physics of it I really began to struggle to follow it and by the end had pretty much given up. That is not Spencer’s fault. These are complicated ideas and a lot to get your head around and if you aren’t up to a certain standard of maths and physics (and I’d say that you’d really need to be at around A Level) then you won’t get the full benefit of this book.
That’s a shame because Spencer takes a pretty sequential approach to tracking the history of the research and development of theories regarding the speed of light, including how scientists in the 19th century were convinced that there was some form of aether in space that affected the speed at which light could travel.
As the scientific theory reaches the 17th century (where possible) Spencer provides little details about the personalities behind the scientists, which I very much enjoyed because it prevents the book from becoming too dry. Also interesting is how in the 19th century in particular scientists were able to make such intricate instruments to help measure the speed of light but at the same time they weren’t quite sensitive enough to achieve the results needed to make the next leap in learning of the speed of light.
Obviously one of the key parts of the story is Einstein and his theory of relativity and I have to say that the way Spencer explains this helped me to make sense of it for probably the first time ever. Spencer touches on what may have influenced Einstein’s thinking and how it was then picked up and further developed by later scientists and he has included an extensive reference section for those who want to read more on matters that are beyond the purview of this book.
All in all, I ended this book wishing that I had a better understanding of maths and physics so that I would have got the full benefit of what is a genuinely interesting account of a massive achievement in human science.
The Verdict:
John C H. Spence teaches physics at Arizona State University and is Snell Professor and Director of Science for the National Science Foundation’s BioXFEL Consortium. This is an absorbing historical account of how scientists learned to measure the speed of light but although I enjoyed the personal details Spence gives on the scientists and he does try to simplify the complicated mathematical formulae, some of the book was above my skill level.
Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.
This book tells the human story of one of man’s greatest intellectual adventures - how it came to be understood that light travels at a finite speed, so that when we look up at the stars, we are looking back in time. And how the search for an absolute frame of reference in the universe led so improbably to Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2,, which represents the energy that powers the stars and unclear weapons. From the ancient Greeks measuring the distance to the Sun, to today’s satellite navigation, the book takes the reader on a gripping historical journey. We see how Galileo with his new telescope discovered the moons of Jupiter and used their eclipses as a global clock, allowing travellers to find their Longitude. And how Ole Roemer, noticing that the eclipses were a little late, used this to obtain the first measurement of the speed of light, which takes eight minutes to get to us from the Sun. We then move from the remarkable international collaborations to observe the Transits of Venus, including Cook’s voyage to Australia, to the extraordinary achievements of Young and Fresnel, whose discoveries eventually taught us that light travels as a wave but arrives as a particle, and all the quantum weirdness which follows. In the nineteenth century, we find Faraday and Maxwell, struggling to understand how light can propagate through the vacuum of space unless space is filled with a ghostly vortex Aether foam. We follow the brilliantly gifted experimentalists Hertz, discoverer of radio, Michelson with his search for the Aether wind, and Foucault and Fizeau with their spinning mirrors and light beams across the rooftops of Paris. Messaging faster than light, Einstein’s theory, quantum entanglement, and the reality of the quantum world, conclude this saga.
John C H. Spence teaches physics at Arizona State University and is Snell Professor and Director of Science for the National Science Foundation’s BioXFEL Consortium. This is an absorbing historical account of how scientists learned to measure the speed of light but although I enjoyed the personal details Spence gives on the scientists and he does try to simplify the complicated mathematical formulae, some of the book was above my skill level.
I’m going to start this review by admitting that my knowledge of maths and physics is not great. As a result, although I could follow the earlier formulae and diagrams that Spencer sets out over the course of this book, as he gets deeper into the physics of it I really began to struggle to follow it and by the end had pretty much given up. That is not Spencer’s fault. These are complicated ideas and a lot to get your head around and if you aren’t up to a certain standard of maths and physics (and I’d say that you’d really need to be at around A Level) then you won’t get the full benefit of this book.
That’s a shame because Spencer takes a pretty sequential approach to tracking the history of the research and development of theories regarding the speed of light, including how scientists in the 19th century were convinced that there was some form of aether in space that affected the speed at which light could travel.
As the scientific theory reaches the 17th century (where possible) Spencer provides little details about the personalities behind the scientists, which I very much enjoyed because it prevents the book from becoming too dry. Also interesting is how in the 19th century in particular scientists were able to make such intricate instruments to help measure the speed of light but at the same time they weren’t quite sensitive enough to achieve the results needed to make the next leap in learning of the speed of light.
Obviously one of the key parts of the story is Einstein and his theory of relativity and I have to say that the way Spencer explains this helped me to make sense of it for probably the first time ever. Spencer touches on what may have influenced Einstein’s thinking and how it was then picked up and further developed by later scientists and he has included an extensive reference section for those who want to read more on matters that are beyond the purview of this book.
All in all, I ended this book wishing that I had a better understanding of maths and physics so that I would have got the full benefit of what is a genuinely interesting account of a massive achievement in human science.
The Verdict:
John C H. Spence teaches physics at Arizona State University and is Snell Professor and Director of Science for the National Science Foundation’s BioXFEL Consortium. This is an absorbing historical account of how scientists learned to measure the speed of light but although I enjoyed the personal details Spence gives on the scientists and he does try to simplify the complicated mathematical formulae, some of the book was above my skill level.
Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.
