JIM AL-KHALILI
Jim Al-Khalili is a physicist, science communicator and presenter of The Life Scientific on BBC Radio 4. His newest book, The World According To Physics, is published in March and documents his self-confessed love affair with the subject. Here, he recomme
Theoretical physicist and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili tells us his essential reading for physics fans.
1 SURELY YOU’RE JOKING, MR FEYNMAN! RICHARD FEYNMAN
If you wanted to fall in love with physics, read this book. it’s just full of so many gems, about how maverick physicists like Richard Feynman were thinking.
I’m still wrestling with a sort of moral dilemma, I think, as we now look back and re-examine people who were unquestioningly heroworshipped in the past. In Feynman’s private life he was a misogynist, and some of the things he did, there’s no way you could countenance these days.
We do need to re-evaluate what Feynman stood for, but I’m still uncomfortable about wiping his achievements from history, or the things that he did that we would not be uncomfortable about.
2 THE BORN–EINSTEIN LETTERS MAX BORN AND ALBERT EINSTEIN
This book is a compilation of letters between Max Born, who was a German physicist and one of the founders of quantum mechanics, and Albert Einstein.
The pair of them had a long running correspondence, to-ing and fro-ing about ideas on the nature of reality and the nature of physics, which I read and fell in love with as a student.
3 BEYOND WEIRD PHILIP BALL
This is the book on quantum mechanics that I wish I’d written, but I’m really glad I read. Philip
Ball really encapsulates the sheer mystery of quantum mechanics so well.
4 THE DEMON IN THE MACHINE PAUL DAVIES
This book is really about whether a physicist can define what life is, and the living systems that are far from equilibrium, yet maintain high-order. For Paul Davies, life is an information processing machine. That’s his demon in the machine. It’s one of those books where you read a few pages, then you lean back and think and go, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
5 THE ARROW OF TIME ROGER HIGHFIELD AND PETER COVENEY
This looks at something profound about the nature of time itself. Why does time go from the past to the future? What is it that gives time a direction? It pulls together lots of different ideas in physics that are still relevant today.