Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The recent marriage of particle physics and cosmology has spawned a number of popular accounts of the ways in which physicists are trying to link the earliest history of the universe to the fundamental processes of microphysics. Among these, Pagels's book is the most comprehensive. Unfortunately, it is also the most likely to bewilder the average reader, for the author seems to have made no effort to distill his exposition to its essentials. His chatty prose is cluttered with incidental remarks and littered with names. A few digressions provide welcome changes of pace, but this book strays so often that it is difficult to discern main ideas. The forays into Koch curves and solitons, trendy though they may be, do little to illuminate the basic features of gauge field theories. Pagels seems fond of anthropomorphic analogies of physical phenomena; to this reviewer analogues constitute admissions of defeat in the attempt to convey the flavor of physical theories. Although some of the diagrams are helpful, about a third of them are so badly overinked as to be virtually illegible. There are better books that cover the same fundamental ideas. Steven Weinberg's classic, The First Three Minutes (CH, Jul '77), is still the best by far. Of the more recent volumes, Harald Fritzsch's The Creation of Matter (CH, Mar '85) and Paul Davies' Superforce (CH, Feb '85) are particularly clear.-H.S. Picker, Trinity College, Conn.