William A. Hogan, early on a physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory working in the Thermonuclear Division, later a successful business entrepreneur and now an art-painter, has gifted us with a most readable account of modern physics which us lay people, feeling unwittingly enveloped by that forbiddingly complex science, one that is changing our world drastically, can now grasp in its most salient aspects in a narrative that eschews equations and “insider” talk and ultimately puts things in the context of practical issues.
Physics for Artists and Poets and You, including some fine art pieces by Hogan (for example, as chapter headings), contains fifteen short, pithy chapters–The Truth in Physics, Travelling at the Speed of Time, The Tyranny of Entropy and Chaos Theory, Quantum Physics and Cosmological Time, Trip the Light Fantastic, Gaia and the Physics of the Earth, Quantum Computing Decoded, Fusion Confusion, The Etiology of Life, The Drones are Coming (Holy Cow Batman–Flying Robots), Alphabet Soup, Monism and Quantum Physics, What is “Intelligence”?,Our Interconnected World, and The Really Hard Questions in Physics. The chapter titles alone reassure one of much of the spirit of Hogan’s popular account.
Better yet, Hogan’s narrative is not in the form of a traditionally printed book–one surmises (and correctly) that in the exploding reality of modern physics such book forms in their lengthy journeys to publication would be dated in crucial places in short order–but, rather, in a blog in which Hogan, a veteran of traditional publishing on strictly scientific matters, can rapidly make changes and immediately signal to his readers particular narrative portions they might wish to revisit in light of new breakthroughs. (See below for details about such aspects.)
It is difficult to single out specifics in a narrative like Hogan’s: The whole is greater than the parts.
One abiding reason is the interplay among the various aspects of today’s physics–the impact of breakthroughs in one area on developments in others.
But perhaps a proper overall sense of Physics for Artists and Poets and You is to quote an endearing passage from Stephen Hawking which Hogan tells us “helps set the tone”:
When we see the Earth from space we see ourselves as a whole. We see unity, and not the divisions. It is such a simple image with a compelling message; one planet, one human race.
But there are certainly portions of Hogan’s account which can be singled out. His straightforward and eminently clear exposition of the varieties of time–eleven in all!–is riveting and an analysis after which, I confidently predict, you will most usefully enrich your thinking as well as experience the relief which comes from demystifying physics.
But especially important, I think, is Hogan’s writing on that monster of modern science, Quantum Physics.
As Hogan puts it in the famous (or should it be infamous) observation by Niels Bohr:
Anyone not shocked by quantum mechnics has not yet understood it.
Quantum physicists do what they do: So ask yourself: Was the atomic bomb inevitable?
In short, it is essential that scientists and non-scientists alike have a sense of what we are discovering and what it may portend. The great value of Hogan’s account of quantum physics is that it helps make such possible.
Of special importance here likewise is Hogan’s very balanced view of artificial intelligence. There is considerable hype these days about AI and its threat to humanity, perhaps even to civilization itself. Hogan calmly makes an excellent presentation about the nature of intelligence, the promising but still restricted “intelligence” in machines, and human capacity for controlling this development.
The late pioneer of AI, Marvin Minsky, once posed to other famous scientists the question, What would you most value if you were blessed with considerably more longevity? The answer invariably was the joy of working much longer on scientific problems.
Science is a public matter too. William A. Hogan’s narrative is an indispensable gift. Read it at all costs.
POSTSCRIPT