Customer Reviews

Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics

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Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would ever understand the first thing about string theory, much less about cosmic microwaves-- but eager to improve my brain a bit, I recently picked up a copy of Black Bodies and Quantum cats. Now, thanks to this immensely enjoyable book, I am happy to report that for the first time in my life I might actually be able to hold a coherent conversation about these and more. By presenting some of the most challenging ideas imagineable within cultural (and even pop cultural) contexts, and writing about them with wit and humor, Ouellette has done the near impossible -- she's made physics fun for the lay person... fun, and, dare I say, maybe even a little bit sexy. I imagine that even if you did have a better grasp of physics than I did prior to picking up this book, you would find it to be an extremely entertaining, smart, and very humorous refresher course.

Jennifer Ouellette and Albert Einstein would have made great contemporaries. While Einstein was amusing himself with questions like "I wonder what would happen if I was driving a car at the speed of light and I turned my headlights on," Ouellette gets similar inspiration from backyard oddities.
When I first heard of this book, I assumed it was another treatise on Schrodinger's famed cat hypothesis. Instead, it's an incredible look at physics through real world concepts that are familiar and easy to grasp.
More and more physicists are learning to share their knowledge with an audience that is not necessarily made up of scientific scholars. Joe Six Pack has an innate curiousity about the lofty questions of existance and the universe around him. Theorists and physicists are finally coming to understand that. They are writing for that wide-eyed audience these days instead of for teh scientific community expressly.
Science can only benefit from this growing interest in matters that were once exclusive to the men and women who worked in labs and huddled together in lecture halls. Ouellette, with her writing background, is perfect for the job of bringing complex matters, like quantum mechanics, out of the classrooms and into the populace. She has an eye for science and a beautiful way with the language. Those attributes are great for people who want to know as much as they can about emerging science, but who will likely never be enrolled at MIT.
Writers like Ouellette, Brian Green and Michio Kaku are opening up the world of physics to an expanding list of readers and that's good for everybody. With the analogies and thought experiments offered up in "Black Bodies and Quantum Cats," even laymen like myself and Joe Six Pack can sound reasonably smart when we're hanging around the bars and trying to impress our fellow drinkers. This book is an instant winner for those with even a passing interest in physics.
-- Mark LaFlamme, author of "The Pink Room."

I studied physics in school, but I still enjoy reading popular physics books for fun from time to time (I know, what a nerd!). One of the best things about this one is the inclusion of fascinating historical insights that bring people like Tesla to life (on the page anyway). "Black Bodies and Quantum Cats" is a fun read that is ideal for casual science fans and budding scientists alike. I highly recommend it, and I am going to give copies to all my nieces and nephews to show them that physics is much more than equations on a chalk board.

I've read a number of "popular science" books and would rate this among the best. The variety of topics covered make it an ideal resource for science teachers as well as a good pick for gym-readers and others that get frustrated with the amount of time and effort required to follow many popular science books. Ouellette's style is entertaining and her enthusiasm for discovery and understanding is contagious. This book is a refreshing detour from those that require 250 pages of background reading before you reach the main topic.

I found this a curiously fun sort of read-different from my usual choice of reading entertainment. I don't typically read science books, mostly because I'm lazy and don't want to work at understanding something really technical (many science writers put off the general public by delving too deeply), but hey folks, the author makes the science easy to grasp. And the writing style is witty, light and intelligent. Ouellette has a gift for marrying science, history and storytelling.
What's especially appealing is the way the author connects seemingly esoteric science with our everyday life-Reddi-whip (the physics of foam), velcro (biomimicry)-and illuminates the process by which scientists and inventors impact our lives. I loved the references to literature and pop culture that segue into the science or serve as examples of the science in action.
There's something for everyone. Science fans will get an enlightening and lively look into the history and people behind the discoveries. Those more interested in history will learn a thing or two about the science (painlessly). And old English majors, like me, will appreciate the storytelling.

This book was strongly recommended to me in my search for something accessible regarding quantum physics. However, like others reviewing this book, I'm bothered by the factual errors in the first few chapters regarding elementary facts about telescopes, microscopes and lenses. The President of the American Physical Society's insistence in the factual accuracy of the book and the author's similar insistence in her foreword make them all the more irritating. Even the Penguin editor should have caught these boners. How can I feel confident when she gets to a discussion of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics?

If Jennifer Ouellette had been writing books like this when I was a kid, she'd have been my favorite explicator of science. Instead, I was reading Isaac Asimov, who was fun and interesting but a scientist himself, with a tendency to focus on minute details that were sometimes a little bewildering to someone just getting her feet wet. Ouellette knows not only how to get her physics-phobic audience's attention, but avoids bogging them down in technicalities.

Occasionally, the techniques of writing for a general audience call for the sacrifice of precision in favor of broader generalities, like "rounding off" the technical details of lens grinding, which are best left to a more in-depth discussion of the topic. But as a non-scientist who's been reading science writing for the last 30 years as well as teaching it at the university level, I can truthfully say that very little is lost in this book. In this case, "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down," to quote Mary Poppins. Not too many people are eager to read about physics, whether it's cloaked in pop culture or not, but Ouellette slyly draws you in with doses of the Olsen Twins, the Addams Family, and the DaVinci Code. By the end of the book, you'll catch yourself thinking that maybe physics isn't so terrifying, and certainly not boring. And if you're not getting the nitty-gritty details here, well, you can always go read Richard Feynman, or try plowing through Stephen Hawking.

And you're not going to read about flying monks in any of their books.

Jennifer's Ouellette's venture into the esoteric realms of science is light and fun, but, I'm sorry to say, it is sprinkled with factual errors. Here are just a few:

In her discussion of telescopes, she says the objective lens of a refracting telescope is concave, to gather light. This is just not so. The objective lens is always convex. Millions of teleswcope and astronomy buffs know this. How come the two academioc gurus who praise this book in its front matter didn't catch it? They couldn't have read it carefully. Most high school physics students would spot the error.

More errors: In her discussion of spherical aberration in lenses she says the aberration is the result of faulty grinmding of the lenses. Not so. The aberrration is inherent in the spherical curvature itself. A lens that is ground to a perfect spherical curvatue will still exhibit the aberration. The fault is not in the grinding, but in the design.

Spherical lenses, that is, lenes with surfaces that are part of a perfect sphere, are the easiest to grind; that's why lenses have been made this way for centuries. Only recently, since about 1920, have methods for making aspheric lenses been developed. Aspheric lenses have non-spherical curvatures which correct for the aberrations caused by spherical surfaces. A common aspheric lens is the Schmidt corrector lens used in many reflecting telescopes.

My credentials? I worked for American Optical Company as a lens grinder. Later, as a TV science writer, I wrote a TV script in collaboration with Dr. John strong, physicist at the Johns Hop0kins University. Strong put the aluminum reflecting surface on the Hale telescope at Mt. Palomar and was known world-wide for his design of a diffraction grating ruling engine capable of making 6 inch gratings.

I have also written a column on science and natuire for a weekly newspaper for over 15 years. Like Ms. Ouellette, I try to keep my science writing light enough to be interesting to a general readership, but I try very hard to get my facts straight.

Perhaps the author and her publisher should employ the services of a scientifically trained editor to pick out the mistakes before publication.

For better science writing, Ken Volduzi

Real science made fun.In easy bites, she starts with an anecdote, like SJ Gould and teases you into understanding principles of physics you never thought you coud learn. In an antiscience age, in an antirational age, this is to be cherished

Marvin Thalenberg MD

Things I did not understand at all prior to reading this book: why static electricity works, how microscopes and telescopes work, gravity, electricity, how cameras work, why airplanes fly, how telephones work, roller coasters, the advent of cinema, x-rays, "blackbodies", relativity, rockets, photocopies, atomic bombs, foams, Velcro, lasers, fractals, microwaves, all of whatever Chapter 33 is about, and string theory. Things I still don't understand after reading this book: "blackbodies" and Chapter 33. Things I partially understand, but not completely: relativity, electricity, string theory.



Ouelette's text is intelligible, though, even to a layperson such as myself. By incorporating examples from popular media, she is able to apply things one is already familiar with to a completely unfamiliar subject. The only difficulties I had were in understanding terminology that was born from physics and been subverted to refer to more simplified and common experiences. For example, my concept of the word `frequency' has to do with the number of times a certain thing occurs, i.e. the frequency with which I am able to wear jeans to work. In physics, frequency apparently refers to the lengths of waves and oscillations in electric currents.



The chapters are relatively short, and cover an entire theory or invention, and the order is loosely chronological. The earlier chapters, because they dealt with simpler inventions such as the telescope and cameras, were easier to digest. I was able to make it about a third of the way through before I had to put it down and read something else, just to give my brain a rest. For this reason, I suggest reading it in small chunks, but not, say, in a waiting room or on the subway because it does require concentration and distractions can cause a person to have to start the whole chapter over. I hate to tell people 'read this on the toilet,' but that seems to be the best place I can think of in this instance.


As always, extra points go to any book that references Buffy the Vampire Slayer which this one does twice. Bonus!