From Clockwork to Crapshoot: A History of Physics

  • Roger G. Newton
Belknap Press: 2007. 352 pp. $29.95, £19.95, €27.70 0674023374 | ISBN: 0-674-02337-4

If you have just an afternoon to spare for your first visit to the British Museum in London, you have a choice to make. You can trot smartly up and down the corridors, trying to glimpse as many items as possible, or you can choose to linger thoughtfully in a handful of rooms, hoping to absorb a sense of the entire collection's scope. In his role as tour guide to the complete history of physics, Roger Newton seems to have had trouble deciding which strategy to adopt. Sometimes he pauses to reflect on the meaning and significance of the most crucial exhibits; at other times he seems determined to march briskly down the centuries, ticking off names and discoveries great and small with bewildering haste. As a result, the truly interesting perspectives that he points out along the way get lost in the confusion.

From Clockwork to Crapshoot begins by defending Aristotle against the bad press he sometimes gets in histories of science. While Plato mused abstractly about the ideal nature of things, Aristotle turned his attention to the 'efficient causes' of empirical phenomena — meaning, in a nutshell, that if something happens, there must be something else that makes it happen. That is a modern philosophy of science, but in his specifics, Aristotle was mostly wrong. It was medieval scholars, rediscovering Aristotle from Arab writers, who treated his writings as a revealed truth, insisting on scrupulous adherence to his incorrect explanations but failing to grasp his style of reasoning.

After dropping in on Roger Bacon, William of Ockham and Nicole Oresme, we're onto Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton — the beginning of science as we now understand the term. This is familiar territory, and although the author's travelogue is fluent and intelligent, the narrative interest starts to flag. With the basic method of science settled, the story is one of advancing enlightenment on many fronts, and our guide is determined to give at least a brief wave to everyone who contributed. Taken individually, his sketches of Laplace, d'Alembert and Gauss, of Henry, Faraday and Maxwell, and of Rumford, Joule and Clausius, are engaging enough. Thrown at the reader one after the other, they become rather wearisome.

The story picks up again when the author tackles the emergence of statistical mechanics and then quantum mechanics. As the book's title suggests, the evolution away from strict determinism into a world governed by laws of probability marked a tectonic shift in the foundations of science. Quantum theory raised questions about the meaning of physical reality that remain unresolved today. And of late, Roger Newton suggests, Plato is staging a comeback against Aristotle. Now that we have a pretty good understanding of how electrons and other particles behave, we are returning, in attempts to find a 'theory of everything', to the deeper problem of understanding why these particles exist, and what determines their qualities.

The author is most compelling when he tackles these broad historical trends in the scope and purpose of physical theorizing. But these large themes only occasionally come to the fore. It is also unclear what kind of reader he imagines he's writing for. Discussing the emergence of quantum mechanics, for example, he observes in passing that Dirac's formulation derived more from the poissonian than the hamiltonian version of classical mechanics, a remark that will mean something only to those who already know what it means.

Readers with some general knowledge of the development of physics will find in Roger Newton a companionable guide who points out familiar and vaguely remembered landmarks and offers occasional illuminating commentary. If his aim was to enlighten a less well-versed audience, he could have said more by saying less.