by Harry B. Gray, John D. Simon, William C. Trogle

Staff,

Name not available

Books 
Six Easy Pieces 
Essentials of Physics Explained by Its 
Most Brilliant Teacher 
by Richard P. Feynman 
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 
Reading, Massachusetts, 1994 
The six easiest ofFeynman's Lectures 
on Physics (actllally five easy ones and one 
hard one) may not provide much food for 
thought for Cal tech graduates who have 
tasted the real thing in two years of the 
famous three red books. The editors 
intended this to be a physics primer for 
a wider nontechnical audience and to 
introduce the nonscientific public to 
. Feynman's genius as a teacher. But the 
book comes with an added bonus: six 
tapes or CDs of Feynman himself, origi-
nally recorded on reel-to-reel tape in 
20l East Bridge when Feynman began 
the course. The old tapes, which have 
languished in Caltech's Archives for 30-
something years, have been digitally 
remastered; the sound quality leaves 
something to be-desired by today's 
standards, but Feynman's unique style 
(and his Brooklyn accent) come through 
loud and clear. 
The five "easy" lectures (atoms in 
motion, basic physics, the relation of 
physics to other sciences, conservation 
of energy, and the theory of gravitation) 
were recorded in September and October 
1961. Then it's fast-forward to April 
1962 for quantum behavior, which he 
describes to his class as an "entertain-
ment lecture." He admits in his preface 
to the original edition of Lectures on 
Physics, which is included in this vol-
ume, that his experiment to describe the 
principles of quantum mechanics in a 
way that did not require partial differen-
tial equations was not entirely successful. 
But it is entertaining. 
In addition to Feynman's own 
original preface, the book comes with an 
introduction by Paul Davies, and a 
special preface, by David Goodstein and 
Gerry Neugebauer, to a commemorative 
edition of Feynman's Lectures on Physics 
published in 1989. Goodstein and 
Neugebauer call Feynman "a truly great 
teacher, perhaps the greatest of his era 
and ours," and also "an extraordinary 
teacher of teachers." They note that in 
1961-62 students began dreading the 
class (it was not known as "easy"); as 
their numbers dropped off, their seats 
were taken by more and more faculty 
and grad students. If you want to relive 
Freshman Physics with Feynman for 
yourself, the set can be ordered from the 
Cal tech Bookstore (with tapes, $49.95; 
with CDs, $59.95; the book alone is 
$22.00). 
Braving the Elements 
by Harry B. Gray, John D. Simon, and 
William C. Trogler 
University Science Books, 
Sausalito, California, 1995 
Mter the nonscientific public has 
mastered physics with Feynman, it can 
take on chemistry with Harry Gray, 
Caltech's Beckman Professor of Chern is-
try and director of the Beckman Insti-
tute, and his two coauthors from UC San 
Diego. Ostensibly a textbook for 
nonchemists, something with the title 
Braving the Elements has to be-you 
would think-livelier than an ordinary 
textbook. And indeed it is. Anyone 
"interested in learning about modern 
chemistry and how it relates to the 
environment, energy, health, and other 
areas of human concern" should find it 
readable. This includes, according to the 
authors, lawyers, media people, "and 
even physicists." 
Under the chapter heading "News-
worthy Molecules" the reader can 
discover the chemical structure of, 
among many others, ibuprofen, sun-
screen, vitamin C, testosterone, AZT, 
LSD, caffeine, TNT, and sarin (but this 
isn't a how-to book; it doesn't tell you 
how to make them). You can learn the 
chemistry of indigestion and of book 
decay; read about the chemical industry, 
including titanium alloy bike frames and 
composite tennis rackets, in a chapter 
called "Wall Street Chemistry"; and 
discover everything a potential juror 
should know about DNA; not to men-
tion the chemistry of nuclear power, 
ozone depletion, global warming, smog, 
cancer treatment, and just about every-
thing else an informed citizen, who 
doesn't happen to be a chemist, might 
just be curious about. 
The book is briskly and entertaining-
ly written, sprinkled with historical 
sketches of great moments in modern 
chemistry-the first controlled nuclear 
fission reaction, the invention of nylon, 
the cleanup of the Love Canal. Chemis-
try is alive and well, say the authors, and 
to prove it they have written what might 
almost qualifY as a page-turner. 
Engineering & Science/Spring 1995 41 
Books 
continued 
The Art of Alessandro 
Magnasco: An Essay in the 
Recovery of Meaning 
by Oscar Mandel 
Leo S. Olschki Editore, 
Florence, Italy, 1994 
The immediate subject of Professor of 
Literature Oscar Mandel's monograph is 
a rather peculiar painting by Magnasco 
(1667-1749) that hangs in Pasadena's 
Norton Simon Museum. Labeled 
Calefactorium with friars, the painting 
depicts a ragtag bunch of gaunt, hooded 
Capuchin friars untidily, and unreli-
giously, warming themselves around a 
monastery fireplace; the disorderly-
some would say decadent-scene was 
described, even in Magnasco's time, as 
"bizarre." Mandel begins his search for 
the painting's meaning by querying 
present-day museumgoers on their 
perception of the painter's attitude 
toward his subjects; although opinions 
varied widely, a clear majoriry thought 
it hostile or at least uncomplimentary. 
After comparing these responses to the 
opinions of "experts" (i.e., art critics), the 
majority of whom found the painter 
either sympathetic to his Capuchins or 
morally neutral (only a few thought it 
scornful), Mandel reveals that he himself 
lines up with those who consider the 
painter neutral or uncommitted. He 
then procedes to marshall the historical 
and textual evidence for his view. He 
explores Magnasco's own and his con-
temporaries' attitude toward the church 
42 Engineering & Science/Spring 1995 
and compares the painting with tradi-
tional representations of monks and 
friars in Italian art, concluding that 
Magnasco's painting, while perhaps 
eccentric, is devoid of any moral or 
ideological viewpoint and represents 
no negative propaganda. 
Why bother to go to such lengths to 
recover the meaning of a work of art? 
Mandel approaches this question from 
an aesthetic point of view: perceiving the 
meaning of a work adds to the pleasure 
of viewing it. But he's also using 
Magnasco's friars to illustrate a larger 
point about art (and, one presumes, 
literature). A work's meaning often 
"spreads out" during the intervening 
centuries; why is it important to recover 
the artist's original intent rather than to 
adopt an interpretation that speaks to 
our own times? Mandel maintains that 
we normally dislike separating the work 
of art from the "hand" that gives it to us. 
We labor to recover original meanings 
because aesthetic pleasure is embedded 
in the larger pleasure of grasping the 
whole human act of creation: the 
creation and the creator bound together. 
Nano 
by Ed Regis 
Little, Brown and Company, 
Boston, 1995 
This is not another book about 
Richard Feynman, although his ghost 
hovers protectively over most of the 
story. Subtitled "The Emerging Science 
ofNanote€hnol\Ogy: Remaking the 
World ---'-M9letuIe by Molecule," it's 
mostlyabout+K. Eric Drexler, who, as 
an MIT undergraduate in the seventies, 
conceived the visionary idea of a molecu-
lar nanocomputer and,'ultimately, a 
molecular manufacturing machine: a 
little black box that "will make for you, 
atom by atom, everything you ever 
wanted." He was chagrined to discover 
in 1979 that Feynman had thought it 
all up first-two decades earlier. In 
"There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," 
Feynman's talk to the American Physical 
Society in December 1959 (and reprint-
ed in the February 1960 E&S, where, 
over the past 35 years, it has become our 
most requested article), he prophesied 
building on an atomic scale: "I am not 
afraid to consider the final question as 
to whether, ultimately-in the grand 
future-we can arrange the atoms the 
way we want; the very atoms, all the way 
down! ... The principles of physics, as 
far as I can see, do not speak against the 
possibility of maneuvering things atom 
by atom." 
The grand future was not so very far 
off. Feynman never bothered to think 
up a way to use his atomic machines, but 
Eric Drexler did. He started by design-
ing atomic bearings and gears. Working 
scientists greeted his work with some 
skepticism-atoms, after all, aren't 
marbles. He also had to fight the sci-
ence fiction label and the ridicule of 
a "Captain Future" image. By the 
beginning of the nineties, however, 
which was coming to be known as the 
nanotechnology decade, Drexler had 
written a book full of equations. He 
then was pronounced sane and even 
testified before Congress. Nanotechnol-
ogy is the future, it is now assumed, and 
all that remain are the philosophical 
questions: Will nanomachines take over 
the world? And what will people do 
when work becomes unnecessary? 
Ed Regis, the author of Who Got 
Einstein's Office, has previously written 
about the weirder fringes of science in 
Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman 
Condition, in which Drexler also appears. 
He writes with humor but treats his 
subject seriously at the same time. It 
may sound like science fiction, but it 
isn't anymore. 


Braving the Elements

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