{"id":76924,"date":"2018-03-15T08:22:56","date_gmt":"2018-03-15T15:22:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/03\/quantum-physics-made-fun"},"modified":"2018-03-15T08:22:56","modified_gmt":"2018-03-15T15:22:56","slug":"quantum-physics-made-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/03\/quantum-physics-made-fun","title":{"rendered":"Quantum physics made fun"},"content":{"rendered":"

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We all know that physics and maths can be pretty weird, but these three books tackle their mind-bending subjects in markedly contrasting ways. Clifford V. Johnson\u2019s The Dialogues<\/em> is a graphic novel, seeking to visualise cosmic ideas in comic-book style. Darling and Banerjee\u2019s Weird Maths <\/em>is a miscellany of fun oddities, ranging from chess-playing computers to prime-counting insects. Philip Ball\u2019s Beyond Weird<\/em> argues that we\u2019ve got quantum mechanics all wrong: it\u2019s not so weird actually, but quite sensible. All three books do a fine job for their respective audiences. Just make sure you know which target group you\u2019re in.<\/p>\n

The Dialogues<\/em> is a sequence of illustrated conversations, often between pairs of youthful and attractive characters, scrupulously diverse in race and gender, who happen to meet in a caf\u00e9, gallery or train carriage, and find themselves talking about physics. Perhaps \u2018The Lectures\u2019 would be a better title, since one interlocutor is the expert, while the other is an interested lay person whose role is to feed questions at appropriate intervals.<\/p>\n

The author shows himself to be a highly talented graphic artist as well as being a distinguished theoretician, and while the ping-pong chats may be somewhat lacking in narrative drive, they do provide a platform for some admirably lucid explanations of topics such as Maxwell\u2019s equations or Einstein\u2019s cosmological constant. Not the kind of comic book you roll up in your pocket, but a weighty hardback that would grace any coffee table.<\/p>\n

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We all know that physics and maths can be pretty weird, but these three books tackle their mind-bending subjects in markedly contrasting ways. Clifford V. Johnson\u2019s The Dialogues is a graphic novel, seeking to visualise cosmic ideas in comic-book style. Darling and Banerjee\u2019s Weird Maths is a miscellany of fun oddities, ranging from chess-playing computers [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,41,1617,1491],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-information-science","category-quantum-physics","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}