The Wizard of Quarks: A Fantasy of Particle Physics

  • Robert Gilmore
Springer: 2000. 202 pp. £14.95, $24

When Dorothy sets off on a subway ride in the Big City with Uncle Henry and Aunt Em, she little expects to find herself in a land of witches, with a scarecrow, a tin man and a lion for company. Even less does she expect to learn about wavefunctions, amplitudes, nuclear binding energy and gauge theory.

If the setting sounds familiar, that is no mistake, for Robert Gilmore has chosen L. Frank Baum's children's story, The Wizard of Oz, as an allegory of our present understanding of the elementary particles of matter and the forces that act on them. The result is a strange (pun intended) mélange of corny humour and rather laboured analogy, interlaced with some excellent non-mathematical explanations of a broad range of sub-atomic physics.

Can Dorothy's celluloid progress work as an allegory for the discoveries of modern physics? Credit: KOBAL COLLECTION

Like her earlier namesake, Gilmore's Dorothy makes a journey through an imaginary land populated by remarkable characters. But, rather than learning to appreciate home life in Kansas like the original Dorothy, she finds out about many of the major discoveries of modern physics. From an encounter with the Witch of Mass (“You may call me G”), via the Wizard of Quarks, the travellers follow the Building Block Road until they arrive at the Planck Energy.

Their route mirrors the twentieth century's journey from atoms to quarks, during which particle physicists have discovered that matter is more peculiar than they could ever have imagined. Tiny quarks lie imprisoned within protons and neutrons, to be freed only in the company of additional quarks (or antiquarks), in the guise of new particles. The quarks (and the seemingly unrelated leptons) interact through forces that are understood in terms of further particles, the gauge bosons, which act like balls in a game of quantum catch. So does it help to have the fabulous reality of particles and forces explained in terms of a storybook fantasy?

There is little to fault in Gilmore's non-mathematical descriptions of difficult physical concepts, and he succeeds in covering a great deal of ground, from atomic spectra to the Standard Model. But the descriptions — whether voiced by Dorothy's erudite companions or set out in separate explanatory paragraphs — are not for someone with no previous knowledge of the basic ideas of atomic physics and quantum theory. A story that has introduced the four fundamental interactions and Planck's constant by page 13 is not for the faint-hearted.

Similarly, the attempts at humour will often be lost on a reader who does not already know the physics, and the simple punning begins to wear thin — for example, the half-man, half-horse that the travellers meet in the Kingdom of CERN is the Visitor Information Centaur.

So, if not for the complete beginner, will the allegory work for someone who already knows a little modern physics? Even then, there is a danger that the effort to recall Judy Garland's celluloid progress down the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City will distract from the careful explanations of concepts in theoretical physics.

This is the third book by Gilmore that seeks to explain modern physics through characters from familiar stories; readers previously joined Alice in Quantumland and were treated to Scrooge's Cryptic Carol. So it must be an allegorical style that works — but for whom? Or does this reader lack a sense of humour? Bah, humbug!