by Don S. Lemons
I picked this up a couple of years back, I think while I was Christmas shopping? That’s usually when I get to the bookstore in question.
It’s an interesting, odd little book, a sort of snapshot-series survey of physics down the centuries. Each short chapter presents a theory or discovery, a drawing of the related experiment or proof, and some biography of the thinker. Given this compressed and scattershot approach, I can’t say it’s a useful book. As the author notes in the afterword, he was constrained to discuss concepts that can be represented visually. If you don’t know much about physics, it will give you a few starting points but not a full education, and if you do, you already know all of this stuff.
I enjoyed the eccentric premise, the historical notes, and the simple clarity of the diagrams. It’s probably not a book for everyone, but nice to dip and out of at leisure and of course useful if you need to explain the wave theory of light to someone.
R Jean Stevenson 