I recently read a book by the authors in my sig line. They seemed to suggest that there is an inherent bias in pop-physics books because they are generally written by theoretical physicists and not experimental physicists. (I’m not going to attempt to reconstruct their arguments.)
My question is merely this: What, if any, popular physics/science books on the bookstore shelves today are by experimental physicists?
The God Particle by Leon Lederman.
He constantly talks about being an experimental physicist rather than a theoretical one.
Not a bad book. Not a fan of his writing style in some parts, makes it a chore to plow through at times.
That is the only one I know.
I saw Leon Lederman speak at a local high school last year. He is also very involved in issues of physics and science education, especially at the USA high school level.
I suppose you could visit the homepages of famous labs around the world (CERN, Los Alamos…), check out the staff homepages, and see what, if any, books they have written.
Another vote for The God Particle. I love Lederman’s writing style, he’s funny as hell.
For a book on cosmology I would suggest The Whole Shebang by Timothy Ferris. Ferris is neither a theortician or an experimentalist, but rather a renowed science writer so he offers a bit of everything from the experiments to the speculative.
While I’ve never read them, Emilio Segre’s popular works seem to readily remain in print. Georges Charpak has a book about scepticism and the like out recently. I’m fairly sure that Christine Sutton’s background was as an experimentalist.
Then there’s the slightly special case of the professional astonomers who’ve written some popular books, since they tend not to be split so clearly between theorists and “experimentalists” in the first place. Smoot springs to mind. In a slightly different area of the field (but highly topical this year), Ralph Lorenz’s Lifting Titan’s Veil (Cambridge, 2002) is an excellent book about the Cassini mission, written by someone who designed experiments for it.
The latter’s an example of how a lot of fairly non-technical stuff is published that many readers may not be aware of. It’s been put out by a university press, won’t have been reviewed outside of specialist publications and is unlikely to trouble the stockists in any airport bookstore. But it’s well done and has hopefully found some sort of audience. The thing is that this sort of stuff is out there.
Still what does get all the attention and sales is playing in a different market. In some cases it’s a matter of professional writers, though usually with a physics background, who pretty much have to sell a lot to make the exercise worthwhile. This is people like John Gribbin, Timothy Ferris, Dennis Overbye, etc. The few breakout cases of professional physicists, rather than professional writers, managing to sell in big numbers do then tend to follow a fairly narrow pattern. Pretty much the only current examples are Hawking, Greene, Davies and maybe Close.
None of these are experimentalists.
Good looking out.
I assume that these are the sorts they were referring to, though the above may fit in that category as well (?). Edward Teller has a book on the shelves right now, is he an experimentalist?
I wonder if there is a significant bias between experimentalists and theorists.
Experimentalists and theorists? Cats and dogs, I tell ya.
Slightly more seriously, when it comes to most things, they’ve more in common than anything else. Particularly when it comes to the issues involved in writing popularisations. For instance, both are expected to teach undergraduate courses at a technical level far above that necessary to explain physics at a popular level.
As for why this difference exists at the bestselling end of the market, it’s actually much worse than just theorists vs. experimentalists. Hawking, Greene and Davies are all from quite a narrow speciality - in one form or another, they’ve all mainly worked in quantum gravity. Why should this be? On one level, it’s just whizzbang and sexy. Black holes and the Big Bang. That sells in a way that, with the best will in the world, precision fits within the Standard Model or some innovative material sciences technique just won’t. Speculation is popular.
As far as experimental particle physics as concerned, it possibly doesn’t help that there have been no startling discoveries for a generation. Hence no Rubbia figures to be persuaded to write a book. For there seems to be a tendency amongst publishers (understandably) to go for star rolls of the dice as the attempt to match A Brief History of Time. Smoot’s book was in this mould. Similarly, The God Particle. But also The Quark and the Jaguar. And it’s notable that none of these authors have followed these books up. Big publicity splashes in an attempt to claw back big advances for books that didn’t become the new Brief History?
In an ideal world, one would like a selection of mainstream popular books that reflect what it’s like to be an experimentalist. In particle physics, the last attempt to do that was Nobel Dreams by Gary Taubes. Twenty years ago.
Teller was very much a theoretical physicist. Though he had been educated as a chemical engineer and the resulting practical streak is evident at points in his career as a nuclear weaponeer.