journal of science
education
Book Review
The Other Man
Alfred Russel Wallace
A Life
Peter Raby
pp. xii + 340
Princeton University Press, 2001.
Coincidences are not unknown in science. Newton and Leibniz
each invented the cal-culus; Correns, Tschermak and de Vries re-discovered
the laws of Mendel at about the same time; and Sudarshan and Marshak on
the one hand, and Gell-Mann and Feynman on the other, may have independently
discovered the basic form of the interaction that governs nuclear beta
decay. But for sheer implausibility, there is one coincidence that beats
all others. That is the apparently simul-taneous discovery of the central
principle in biology, the theory of evolution by natural selection. One
person, Charles Darwin, came to the discovery after long and patient thought
and analysis. He sat over it for years, refining his arguments all the
while and preparing to write a massive book in which to announce it to
the world. Another person, Alfred Russel Wallace, much the younger of
the two and nowhere as well-known as Darwin at the time, made the same
discovery, more or less in one bout of inspired creativity, when he was
laid low by fever in a tropical forest. This biography by Peter Raby shows
how the paths that lead to a great idea can be similar in some respects
and dissimilar in others.
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Introduction to Electrodynamics
A Z Capri and P V Panat
Narosa Publishing House
New Delhi, 2002, pp. 465.
The first thing that any teacher of electro-dynamics would do, when he
(or she) comes across a new textbook on the subject, is to compare it
with the immensely useful and hence popular book by J D Jackson. The book
under review appears to have been strongly influenced by Jackson’s
book in the selection of the topics and yet the authors have put a personal
stamp on the subjects they have chosen to cover. I find it particularly
interest-ing the way they have written every electro-magnetic formula
in the book to accomodate both MKSI and Gaussian units. It is a common
problem, when an uninitiated student tries to compare the formulae given
in different textbooks, he/she invariably finds it hard to do so. I hope
some curious student would look through the pages of Appendix I, which
not only addresses the issue of units but also gives a feel for as to
how modern techniques like the Quantum Hall effect and Josephson effect
are being employed to set the standards of the fundamental constants.
What I also find interesting is that throughout the book, references are
given to modern topics encouraging enthusiastic students to undertake
further reading. On the whole, the book is self-contained and would indeed
prove very useful to the students of Indian universities. Perhaps the
authors kept in mind the problems faced by students in the less privileged
institutions and hence introduced some vector calculus to start with in
Chapter I, although the material is expected to be covered in the BSc
classes. In subsequent chapters boundary-value problems have been addressed
with sufficient attention and clarity. I appreciate the large number of
figures that the authors have incorporated. The problems at the end of
each chapter have also been carefully chosen, showing wide applications
of electrodynamics.
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