Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Feynman got the Nobel Prize for quantum electrodynamics, the most successful physical theory humans have ever devised. It describes the interaction between light and matter, between photons and electrons. That interaction governs absolutely everything around you: the forces that hold together the molecules in your body, that burn the petrol in a car, that make the ground beneath your feet solid.
Your first book, by Richard Feynman, is just called QED. Presumably to demonstrate that it’s a science book.
Well you know who Richard Feynman is, don’t you? Probably the greatest American postwar physicist. He worked on the atomic bomb in his 20s and he got the Nobel Prize. But he was also famous for writing his papers in topless bars. His wife died of tuberculosis when they were at Los Alamos building the bomb and he decided you could go one of two ways. You could either say, “I’m going to be totally depressed for the rest of my life,” or, “I’m going to enjoy myself.” I was a student of Feynman’s at Cal Tech [the California Institute of Technology] and I remember he used to sunbathe nude on top of the physics building and hug all the secretaries every day.
He got the Nobel Prize for quantum electrodynamics, which is essentially the Mona Lisa or Sistine Chapel of physics. It’s the most successful physical theory humans have ever devised. It describes the interaction between light and matter, between photons and electrons. That interaction governs absolutely everything around you: the forces that hold together the molecules in your body, that burn the petrol in a car, that make the ground beneath your feet solid. It governs everything except gravity and the nuclear forces – the things that go on inside a nucleus like radioactivity. Apart from that quantum electrodynamics explains the world around us and predicts what we see to an obscene degree of accuracy.
So Feynman writes about this in a way that makes you want to read about it?
Yes, and that’s the point. When Feynman was at Cal Tech, this wealthy couple who’d grown up in the same New York neighbourhood as he had said, “Look, you’ve won this Nobel Prize, now explain to ordinary people what for.” And Feynman said, “No, it’s too complicated.” But eventually he did this series of public lectures, and that was the book. It’s a tiny book and in it he describes the whole of quantum electrodynamics without a single equation. It’s the most fantastic achievement: the most successful theory in physics described by the guy who invented it in 150 pages.
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Marcus Chown is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he is currently cosmology consultant of the New Scientist. His books include The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead; Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, and the recently published We Need to Talk About Kelvin.
