My favorite textbooks
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010116
I earned my physics bachelor’s degree at Imperial College London in the early 1980s. Imperial’s physics faculty was, and is, impressively dedicated to teaching physics. Lecturers conceived self-contained courses, which they delivered, almost without exception, in an engaging, inspiring style.
Indeed, the lectures, problem sheets, and tutorials were so effective that my classmates and I didn’t need textbooks, although I did buy two or three. The best by far—and one of my two all-time favorites—is Frank Shu’s The Physical Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy (University Science Books, 1982). The title is apt. In 584 pages, Shu covered astronomy and cosmology with a physicist’s predilection for unifying, underlying concepts. Shu spelled out his approach in the preface:
Students are told what red giants and white dwarfs are, and why stars become red giants or white dwarfs. Similarly, the concepts of “black hole” and “spacetime curvature” are explicitly explained in terms of the geometric interpretation of modern gravitation theory. Most importantly, I have tried to emphasize the deep connections between the microscopic world of elementary particles, atoms, and molecules, and the macroscopic world of humans, stars, galaxies, and the universe.
My other all-time favorite textbook is Essential Cell Biology (4th edition, Garland Science, 2009), which was written by Bruce Alberts, Dennis Bray, Karen Hopkin, and Alexander Johnson. I bought the first edition in 2001 in the hope that the book would help me make better sense of the increasing number of biophysics papers I was covering for Physics Today. It did.
Like Shu’s book, Essential Cell Biology takes a conceptual approach to its subject. To prepare students for the unavoidable complexity of molecular biology, Alberts and his coauthors first describe the basic biochemical actors—proteins and DNA—followed by gene expression. Subcellular units and cells are covered next, and a culminating chapter discusses tissues.
When my fellow Physics Today editors and I solicit feature articles, we limit the number of authors to three. Multi-authored articles, we’ve found, are less successful at telling a compelling story. I’m not sure how the four authors of Essential Cell Biology worked together to produce their book. Their success, I suspect, lies in the same commitment Shu and my Imperial lecturers had for conveying not just facts but understanding, too.
