The Atom and the Apple

The Atom and the Apple: Twelve Tales from Contemporary Physics
by Sébastien Balibar

In 1999, a French official with the Ministry of Education asked physicist Sébastien Balibar to contribute to a “single manual” of “the whole of knowledge in a form accessible to students in middle and high schools.” The manual, the official said, was to be 200 pages long, and, of course, it had to “make sense.”

Unsurprisingly, the manual never came together. But Balibar packs quite a broad swath of fairly comprehensible contemporary physics in his 178-page The Atom and the Apple, taking on everything from extraterrestrials to chaos theory to the Fibonacci sequence. Breezy histories of major discoveries (Balibar even apologizes for his brevity) end in cliffhanger conclusions, in the unresolved questions driving study today. Mingled between are helpful analogies for the non-scientist (and interesting digressions on the problem of scientific analogies) and asides on the drama of scientific discovery, the competition for citations and Swedish prizes, set in the most traumatic and revolutionary of centuries for physics.

Balibar’s 12 chapters are arranged to answer the sort of questions that seem elementary – why the night is dark, why crystals have facets, whether a table is quantum, whether a cat can be dead and alive at the same time (that last question was answered, thankfully, by thought experiment). Answering the simple questions requires an understanding of big concepts, for which Balibar draws on his analogies: space curved by matter becomes a mattress sinking under a sleeping body; atoms are pearls on a necklace; the earth’s core and surface are a pot of water beginning to boil.

Throughout, he maintains both a sense of wonder and a sense of mastery. He tells with relish of looking through his first telescope as a child, and how superfluid helium, which can climb up and out of a container, “continues to surprise” him though he has seen it nearly every day for 20 years. He cheekily praises Eve for her curiosity. But he also mentions that he discovered the phenomenon of “quantum evaporation,” though his teacher named it so years later. He mocks the pseudo-scientific vocabulary of Jacques Lacan and Michel Houellebecq (especially Houellebecq). And he lectures alongside Steven Hawking, noting that “holding a conversation with him in person leaves one with the unforgettable impression that one is speaking directly with Hawking’s brain.”

And for those passages that are still somewhat confounding, he helpfully mentions, albeit in a footnote, that Richard Feynman once said, “no one really understands quantum physics.”

Excerpt: “There’s a good chance that physicists will discover other particles, the behavior of which will make the ‘standard model,’ which describes the currently known particles, evolve even further. And then perhaps we will have a better idea of the origins of the asymmetry that allowed us – and stars, black holes, and of course, our dear cousins, the leeks, all made of matter as we are – to exist, such that we can ponder the mystery at all.”

Further reading: The Universe in a Nutshell and Six Easy Pieces .


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