Eureka! Physics of Particles, Matter and the Universe

Exam time in school has a funny effect on you - after a day of marking physics scripts it is quite a therapy to read some real physics of a night. The end result is that I can say that everyone should have a copy of Eureka! and should read it. What R J Blin-Stoyle has tried to do with Eureka! is to write a compact companion to the whole of physics. This he has done remarkably well. As an apology for physics (in the best sense of the term) it is excellent. He starts with a brief account of what physics is and what it attempts to do and then moves through several chapters taking significant parts of physics in turn. There are chapters on force and motion, matter, electromagnetism, quantum physics of the atom, quantum physics of matter (not just superconductivity, etc - it is nice to see someone trying to explain resistance as a quantum effect), relativity, nuclear physics, particle physics and cosmology. Each of these is a concise survey of the important results in the field. There is a good balance between the practical and the abstract - almost as if the author was trying to appeal to all tastes (which I think he was). The tone is light but informative and the explanations remarkably concise. Occasionally I felt that they were a little too concise and that the reader was left to fill in out of their own knowledge, which is OK if you have already studied the subject. However, this can also be viewed as a spur to readers to find out more. In any case he has tried to squeeze as much as he has into a slim volume, so areas are bound to be sketched out rather thinly and I can't blame him for that. Perhaps the most interesting thought that occurred to me while reading this was that I could not tell from the book what Blin-Stoyle specializes in. I think this is testimony to his writing skill. This book is ideal for a sixth-former considering reading physics at university (or even at A-level). Indeed I suspect that the book was written with just this idea in mind. The final chapter is a series of general reflections on the physics and the people who live the subject. It takes the reader into the anthropic principle and theories of everything. This is exactly the sort of end that is likely to catch the interest of an intelligent sixth-former. I am going to buy a set of these books and `seed' them about my school. It is an absolute must for any departmental library.