by David Kordahl
In popular media, physics often comes up for one of two competing reasons. The first is to introduce a touch of mysticism without labeling it as such. Whether it’s Carl Sagan talking about our bones as stardust, or Lisa Randall suggesting some extra dimensions of space, these pronouncements are often presented to evoke the listener’s primal awe—an ancient and venerable form of entertainment. The second reason is just as venerable, and often as entertaining. Sometimes, physics just gets results. Think of MacGuyver in MacGuyver, Mark Watney in The Martian, or those stunt coordinators in Mythbusters—characters whose essential pragmatism couldn’t be further from the tremulous epiphanies of the theorists.
Dramatically, the esoteric and the everyday can seem like opposites, and many fictional plots seem to advise against bringing them together. Mad scientists, those cautionary anti-heroes like Drs. Frankenstein and Manhattan, are often characters who both stumble upon hidden truths and put them to terrible use. But in the real world of physics, it’s common to forge connections between the realms.
Physical analogies, examples that link unfamiliar physics to everyday experience, are important in forging such connections. Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean, a new book by the physicist Matt Strassler, is an impressive attempt to explain contemporary physics using little math but many analogies. Strassler mainly goes against the archetype of the theoretical physicist as the purveyor of primal awe. Instead, he’s a practiced teacher, more interested in accuracy than amazement. In seven concise sections—Motion, Mass, Waves, Fields, Quantum, Higgs, and Cosmos—he covers the basics of physics with minimal fuss, but with a charmingly dorky earnestness. Read more »