Art of Electronics

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in a foreword to Fritzsch's book that the
public has paid the bill for this research. Art of electronics does serve a scientific as well as a visual
appetite. Browsing through the 250-odd
So what goes wrong? You need an highly coloured reproductions gives a clear
irreducible minimum of terminology to W. Graham Richards idea of just what is possible with available
identify the most important particles and technology. Any specialist is likely to
the cardinal phenomena; every superfluous Computer Images: State of tbe Art. encounter some of the pictures from his
technical word beyond that will cost you a By Joseph Deken. own publicity calendar, but also to have his
hundred readers. It is also a matter of page- Thames & Hudson/Stewart, Tabor; & imagination stimulated with thoughts of
by-page comprehensibility. When Chang, New York: 1983. Pp.200. extra things one could achieve with the
specialists write for the general reader, they Hbk £15, $25; pbk £9.95, $16.95. appropriate facilities.
all too often assume that something The author suggests that the combin-
explained on page 10 can be referred to CLASSICAL painting never recovered from ation of computer and graphics display
freely again on page 110. These books the invention of photography. The fact may enhance our vision of the universe in
require the reader to have almost total that a near perfect reproduction of reality as dramatic a way as the telescope and the
recall of unfamiliar concepts. can be made has had profound influence microscope. Certainly to anyone working
Then the weird processes of the on the artist. Now the development of com- in science at a molecular level this must be
subatomic world have to be explained as puter image processing has expanded our true. At last the sterile language of mole-
limpidly as possible, to make it clear, for vision far beyond the range of human cular formulae on the printed page can be
example, that force-carrying particles are senses and is likely to have an even more translated into something which, even if
matter-antimatter combinations of the drastic impact on artists, photographers not' 'reality", is nonetheless a very accept-
kinds of durable particles on which they and film-makers. able and comprehensible metaphor.
act. Instead of any such illumination, the Images can be created with which the The format of a book can, of course,
reader of the two books under review finds observer may interact directly. Already it is only hint at the extra dimensions available
more than he is ever likely to want to know possible for trainee pilots to "fly" in when the images can be made both
about the decay of orthopositronium or the totally realistic simulated aircraft and for dynamic and interactive. Despite this
hyperfme splitting of quark clusters. video games to permit battles such as those necessary limitation, however, the illus-
Finally, you must jolly the reader along in the Disney movie Tran. The scope seems trations and accompanying text are suf-
- strew his path with flowers, as Faraday endless, and many of the contemporary ficient to stimulate both seasoned scientists
put it. The human adventure of high- results are quite lovely to behold. and graduate students whose careers are
energy physics, with its heroic experiments Deken has given an accurate title to his likely to be deeply influenced by colour
and its races for one Nobel prize after presentation of the state of the art. In no graphics. 0
another, provides a ready source of jolli- way a technical book, rather it is a collec-
fication. Frequent reminders that abstruse- tion of some of the finest current examples W. Graham Richards is a Lecturer in Physical
Chemistry, Oxford University, and a member of
seeming processes tell us why the universe is of computer generated pictures from a the editorial board of the Journal of Molecular
the way it is, and why familiar objects in it wide spectrum of sources and disciplines. It Graphics.
behave as they do, can also help. Close
works harder at trying to meet this
requirement than Fritzsch does.
There ought to be a society for the pre-
vention of mental cruelty to the general
reader. (Weare all general readers, outside
our own areas of expertise.) It took me
years to discover that relativity, for
example, is quite simple, despite the many
"popular" accounts that make it baffling.
Readers are too often left feeling stupid but
they don't complain because they have no
wish to parade what they take to be their
own deficiencies, rather than the authors'
and publishers'. I doubt whether the
publishers of these two books on particle
physics, who proclaim their clarity and
simplicity, could give any satisfactory
explanation of what the books are about. 0
Nigel Calder is a science writer. His most recent

book on fundamental physics was Einstein's
Universe (BBC Publications. 1979).
• We received a third book on elementary

particles for the layman after Nigel Calder's
review (above) was complete: The Quest for
Quarks by Brian McCusker (Cambridge Uni-
versity Press; £7.95, $14.95). Unfortunately,
it would appear to fall into the same errors
Calder criticizes - but it is relieved by the fact
that McCusker (of the University of Sydney)
believes he and others have discovered free
quarks. Most physicists would reject the claim,
but McCusker argues it well in a 32-page "The Second Nuclear Wars To create
chapter. This raises the book above the usual features of the leaders of the five countries possessing nuclear warheads - Reagan, Brezhnev,
run, and would make it worth reading, say, for Mitterand, Thatcher and Xiaoping. The extent to which each face appears is proportional to the
half-an-hour in the library. Robert Walgale number of warheads in that country.
© 1983 Nature Publishing Group

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_NA_ru_~--m_L_

Nigel Calder is a science writer. His most recent

• We received a third book on elementary

© 1983 Nature Publishing Group

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