KNOWLEDGE AND WONDER

By

Victor Weisskopf

In the preface of this book, published in 1962, the author states: “….was based on a series of lectures the author gave at the Buckingham School in Cambridge, MA., before an audience with no special grounding in science.  The idea was to sketch our present scientific understanding of natural phenomena and to try to show the universality of that understanding and its human signifance.”

The author, Victor Weisskoff, was a prominent nuclear physicist who had worked with great name physicists including Weiner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr. Erwin Schrodinger and Wolfgang Pauli, before becoming a Professor at MIT in 1946.  He was associated with the Manhattan Project during the Second World War and was appointed the Director General of CERN in 1961.

The book begins with two easy to understand chapters, entitled respectively, OUR PLACE IN SPACE, and,  OUR SPACE IN TIME.  It then goes into gravity and electromagnetism, atoms, the quantum, life and evolution.  While not using a single equation, these chapters are anything but easy.  Important but difficult concepts to explain the development of the Universe include the dual particle/wave nature of the electron and, there was nothing but hydrogen gas at the beginning.  Religious folks will be glad that the question of how the original hydrogen gas came about was side-stepped, thus leaving room for the existence of God.

As mentioned, the first two chapters are easy to understand.  Even if one stops at chapter two, one learns, among other things,

-The smallest visible distance is 0.1 mm

-The diameter of the earth is 12,000 km and the diameter of the observable universe is about 8.8x1026  (8.8 times 10 to the 26 power) m.

-If the age of the universe is taken as one day, mankind has existed only for the last ten seconds.

One also learns two memorable quotes which fit perfectly with the theme of “Knowledge and Wonder”

=”Our knowledge is an island in the infinite ocean of the unknown, and the larger this island grows, the more extended are its boundaries toward the unknown.”

-“It is not the vastness of the field of stars which deserves our admiration, it is man who has measured it” - French Philosopher Blaise Pascal

Five stars out of five.