Commentary: The joy of textbooks

On the 11 November broadcast of the business and economics radio show Marketplace, host Kai Ryssdal interviewed John Becker and Megan Scott. The two guests had just published the ninth edition of Joy of Cooking. Becker’s great-grandmother, Irma Rombauer, wrote the first edition of the cookbook in 1930–31.

From Ryssdal’s introduction, I learned that my much-consulted 1975 edition of the book, the sixth, has become a collector’s item. Edited by Rombauer’s daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker, the book is 915 pages long, contains 4300 recipes, and sold 6 million copies, the most of any edition. Its popularity, I think, arose from its comprehensiveness and its retention of Rombauer’s concise, conversational style. The 1997 edition, which followed, was ghostwritten by committee. I doubt it included Rombauer’s recipe for opossum, which begins, “If possible, trap ‘possum and feed it on milk and cereals for 10 days before killing.”

Some notable physics textbooks have also run to multiple editions. The Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics (the publisher of Physics Today) has six of the seven editions of Max Born and Emil Wolf’s Principles of Optics (1959–99) and seven of the eight editions of Charles Kittel’s Introduction to Solid State Physics (1953–2004).

The reasons for all those editions can be found in the prefaces. When Born and Wolf wrote their first edition, the most significant optical invention of the 20th century, the laser, was a year away. They included it in their second edition, in 1962. Kittel updated the seventh edition in 1996 to include, among other advances, LEDs and high-T_c superconductors. He also added a new section, cowritten with Herbert Kroemer, on statistical mechanics. His wry justification: “A vague discomfort at the thought of the chemical potential is still characteristic of a physics education.”

I did my bachelor’s degree in physics at Imperial College London. Teaching undergraduates was highly valued by the physics faculty, and they prided themselves on their courses. Professors recommended textbooks, but students didn’t need them. Pretty much everything was in the course, spoken in the lecture hall and written on the blackboard.

My third-year astronomy course met the ideal of being self-contained. Nevertheless, I bought the recommended textbook, Frank Shu’s The Physical Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy (1982). Among the book’s many qualities, the lecturer, Peter Meikle, told us, was its emphasis on explaining astronomical phenomena and bodies in terms of physics.

The book remains my favorite textbook, although I no longer have it. However, thanks to Amazon’s Look Inside feature, I was able to reread the book’s preface, first chapter, and table of contents. Shu based the book on a course of lectures and wrote it at the urging of students and colleagues. Why add to the pile of existing introductory astronomy books? Shu answered his own question by identifying the need for a book that explains how objects like black holes and red giants come to be the way they are; that connects the microscopic world of nuclear and particle physics to the macroscopic world of the cosmos; and that includes both the old astronomy of planets and stars and the modern astronomy of galaxies and cosmology.

A sense of the book can be gained from its opening paragraph:

Shu never wrote a second edition. Exoplanets, dark energy, and other momentous discoveries of the past three decades are absent. Even so, the book remains in demand. Pristine copies of the hardback edition are available on Amazon from 14 vendors for a remarkably consistent price of around $134! Perhaps, like the 1975 edition of Joy of Cooking, it has become a collector’s item.

When I looked up the book on Amazon, I discovered an epilogue that I had forgotten or perhaps never read. Shu devoted the final pages of his book to an essay on the importance and value of science, which he regarded as underappreciated among the nonscientist public. His jumping-off point was C. P. Snow’s 1959 lecture (later a book) The Two Cultures, in which the British scientist and author decried a widening gap in understanding between scientists and humanists. To bridge the gap, Shu urged scientists to write about science in accessible, nontechnical language.

His essay also contained a warning: “There exists today an urgent need to dispel an underlying fear and distrust in science, at least in the United States.” Unfortunately, Shu’s 1982 epilogue requires no update.