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In less depressing news, I finished Gell-Mann's The Quark and the Jaguar.
The short review: Needed a better editor.
The long review:
– The Quark and the Jaguar, Preface, p. ix.
Gell-Mann is a brilliant man. He has found a perfect topic to address in a popular science book – a topic that deserves a book, a whole library, focused on it – and he knows enough about an extraordinary number of things to be one of the few capable of doing it. The poem he alludes to with the title, by his friend Arthur Sze, begins "The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night", and it is this truth Gell-Mann wants to convey. He almost succeeds.
But his book isn't readable.
Gell-Mann spends a lot of his book introducing concepts from mathematics and physics. He has to – the concepts are central to his thesis. But he doesn't describe them enough. I'm an engineering student with a year and a half of college physics under my belt, and he drops terms that I don't understand into his writing without any explanation. I can tell that he's trying to provide an abecedarian description of quantum physics, but he starts it at E.
The Quark and the Jaguar could have been another The Recursive Universe or Gödel, Escher, Bach. Murray Gell-Mann is smart enough, knowledgeable enough, and even writer enough to accomplish that. But he doesn't have the intuition for what his audience would know.
The short review: Needed a better editor.
The long review:
The Quark and the Jaguar is not an autobiography, although it does contain some reminiscences about my childhood and a number of anecdotes about colleagues in science. Nor is it primarily concerned with my work on the quark, although a sizable chunk of the book is devoted to some observations on the fundamental laws of physics, including the behavior of quarks. I do hope some day to write a scientific autobiography, but my aim in this volume is to present to the reader my views on an emerging synthesis at the cutting edge of inquiry into the character of the world around us—the study of the simple and the complex. That study has started to bring together in a new way material from a great number of different fields in the physical, biological, and behavioral sciences and even in the arts and humanities. It carries with it a point of view that facilitates the making of connections, sometimes between fact or ideas that seem at first glance very remote from each other. Moreover, it begins to answer some gnawing questions that many of us, whether working in the sciences or not, continue to ask ourselves about what simplicity and complexity really mean.
– The Quark and the Jaguar, Preface, p. ix.
Gell-Mann is a brilliant man. He has found a perfect topic to address in a popular science book – a topic that deserves a book, a whole library, focused on it – and he knows enough about an extraordinary number of things to be one of the few capable of doing it. The poem he alludes to with the title, by his friend Arthur Sze, begins "The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night", and it is this truth Gell-Mann wants to convey. He almost succeeds.
But his book isn't readable.
Gell-Mann spends a lot of his book introducing concepts from mathematics and physics. He has to – the concepts are central to his thesis. But he doesn't describe them enough. I'm an engineering student with a year and a half of college physics under my belt, and he drops terms that I don't understand into his writing without any explanation. I can tell that he's trying to provide an abecedarian description of quantum physics, but he starts it at E.
The Quark and the Jaguar could have been another The Recursive Universe or Gödel, Escher, Bach. Murray Gell-Mann is smart enough, knowledgeable enough, and even writer enough to accomplish that. But he doesn't have the intuition for what his audience would know.
