A little blog for a restless mind

A Case of a Bad Book

I'm reading the book Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others. I recommend that you avoid it at all cost. I'm two thirds through it and this just does it. I've had it. It's a bad book. Baaaaaad book. The writer should go sit in a corner. For a decade. Just for an example, I'm just through reading about the radiation of black holes. First he mentions that Stephen Hawking theorised that black holes radiate (not directly, but you shouldn't know that at this time). Then he deviates into describing when and where Hawking first mentioned this theory. At the end he added the word "quantum". Quantum radiation of black holes. Nice. Now I know a lot more. He even mentions evaporation of black holes in the next sentence! Wow! And then he goes on describing mini black holes, the size of an atom and the mass of a million tonnes. Then from somewhere he suddenly pulls the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. And couples if with vacuum just like that, telling you that matter-antimatter pairs of particles spontaneously pop into existence for very short time intervals all over the space. They are called virtual pairs of particles. And only then he says that if that happens at the proper distance from a black hole so that one particle gets eaten by the black holes and the other one doesn't (because it's just the right tiny bit away so the black hole doesn't exort enough gravity anymore), then we see that as a sort of faint radiation. Virtual particles become real particles. The black hole diminishes in size slightly because of that. You see, it gains negative mass. So it's disappearing ever so slightly.
I didn't have any trouble reading it, because I know the whole theory already. But I can just imagine a clueless person reading through it collecting a heap of unknown terms to be explained later. That is no way of writing a book on physics. And who cares that Einstein had a son with schizophrenia! There is so much of irrelevant data about when who published what and on what terms they were with other scientists, some tidbits of Einstein's life like I were reading some tabloid, etc. Horrible.
It has a foreword written by Stephen Hawking who wrote about the book in a positive way. That's why I bought it. Hawking writes great books. But now I see I shouldn't blindly believe the foreword. Next time I'll try to read a paragraph first.
Anyway, if you want to read about the stuff in this book, and about a lot more of the interesting stuff, then I recommend The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking. And if you're a heavy thinker and want to delve deep into the string theory, explaining multiple dimensions, quantum physics and black holes, check out The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene. An extraordinary book. And a bit hard to understand, especially the last few chapters; you really have to focus on what you read and think about it all the time, it's no light reading.

posted by AlesS @ 8/08/2005 10:35:00 PM