Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics by Jennifer Ouellette. Penguin Original, $15 paperback, 320 pages.

San Francisco Chronicle

December 22, 2005

Black Bodies' experiments with the physics of pop culture

By PHILLIP MANNING

How does an English major and "self-confessed 'physics phobe' " construct a book about the history of physics? Well, Jennifer Ouellette -- an editor and columnist at the American Physical Society's APS News -- uses characters from television shows, books and movies to introduce most of her 38 chapters, each of which explores a breakthrough in physics. For example, she calls on Pugsly and Baby Pubert from the movie "Addams Family Values" to illustrate the ideas in Newton's "Principia." A character from the sci-fi cult film "X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes" helps familiarize readers with Wilhelm Röntgen's contributions to physics. Surprisingly, this oddball juxtaposition of serious science with pop culture works -- at least much of the time.

"A giant killer amoeba from outer space ..." is the lead in the chapter about the cosmic microwave background radiation, the discovery of which affirmed the Big Bang theory. In a "Star Trek" episode, Capt. Kirk destroys the amoeba with a bomb made from the starship Enterprise's fuel. The stuff that powers the starship is antimatter, which is ordinary matter with some property reversed. The antimatter equivalent of a negatively charged particle, for example, would be an identical particle with a positive charge. Antimatter combines with ordinary matter to produce energy -- and lots of it.

What's that got to do with microwave background radiation? Simple. Shortly after the Big Bang, matter and antimatter existed side by side in the primordial universe, and just like in a starship's warp drive, the two annihilated each other, producing a great blast of energy. If the Big Bang theory is true, then the radiation from this cataclysmic event should still be around. In 1960, scientists discovered this remnant radiation, now known as the cosmic microwave background radiation.

But weaving together science and popular culture in a way that amplifies or illustrates the science is difficult to maintain for an entire book. In some chapters, the two are not as neatly entwined as Capt. Kirk's fuel and the confirmation of the Big Bang. For instance, the relationship between comic book villain Magneto and the discovery of electromagnetism seems nonexistent except for nomenclatural overlap. And it's a stretch to use the movie "Pleasantville" and its magical television remote to introduce J.J. Thomson's discovery of the electron, just because the picture on your television comes from electrons striking a phosphor-coated screen.

In a few chapters, Ouellette dispenses with the ploy of marrying science to pop culture. The chapter on the famous invitation-only physics conference at Shelter Island in 1947 is straightforward and informative. Science historians considered the conference "a turning point for postwar theoretical physics," writes Ouellette. She explains how it led to Richard Feynman's work on quantum electrodynamics, or QED, "the crown jewel of modern physics." She relates how QED predicts the properties of an electron so accurately that Feynman "likened the feat to measuring the distance from Los Angeles to New York City so accurately that any remaining discrepancy would equal the thickness of a human hair." So successful is that chapter that one wishes the book had less pop culture artifice and more physics. But Ouellette seems more comfortable with the former than the latter. When she digs into the science, the nugget around which each chapter is built, her writing is sometimes stilted and occasionally misleading.

In the chapter on entropy, for instance, Ouellette cleverly draws on a fantasy novel to begin the story. Then, using a bicycle for an example, she introduces the concept of entropy. A bicycle is energy efficient, she writes, "but its wheels won't turn indefinitely unless its rider keeps pedaling." Friction and aerodynamic drag slow you down. "It takes extra energy to overcome those opposing forces and maintain forward momentum. This phenomenon is known among physicists as entropy."

These are not graceful sentences. Furthermore, they leave the impression that friction and entropy are the same thing. That is not so. Friction is a force present in all nonideal machines. Entropy is the tendency of a closed system to become more disordered. It is true that the entropy of a closed system increases as work is done, even if the only work done is overcoming friction. But that's quite different from equating the two.

The conflation of friction and entropy is a minor stumble but not an isolated one. In another chapter, Ouellette writes of a process "that emits radiation in the form of light waves in the radio frequency of the spectrum." In fact, light and radio waves are both part of the electromagnetic spectrum. But these are nitpicks, and overall, Ouellette manages to pull off an entertaining guide to the history of physics that should interest science buffs. Scientists can have fun with the book, too, getting acquainted with the Addams family and other staples of pop culture.
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