The year in reviews: Books and more that stood out in 2021

Who doesn’t love sipping a hot chocolate (or a hot toddy!) while curled up with a good physics-related book over the holidays? Here are five books reviewed this year in Physics Today that would make excellent holiday gifts for friends and family—or for yourself.

Operation Moonglow: A Political History of Project Apollo by Teasel Muir-Harmony (Basic Books, 2020, $32.00). You might roll your eyes at the thought of another book about the Apollo missions. Yet Teasel Muir-Harmony has managed to find an underexplored aspect of the Moon landings: the extensive international tours taken by Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts upon their returns to Earth. The trips were part of a larger effort to burnish America’s reputation abroad. Muir-Harmony outlines how the Moon missions were designed to demonstrate the superiority of American science—and liberal democracy—to a global public that was beginning to sour on Cold War entanglements, particularly the Vietnam War. The “universal kinship” experienced by millions of people across the globe as Neil Armstrong took his first step onto the lunar surface was, as reviewer and historian Ingrid Ockert described it, the “culmination of a decade of careful public relations strategy.”

Science and Cooking: Physics Meets Food, from Homemade to Haute Cuisine by Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz (W. W. Norton, 2020, $35.00). As the adage goes, baking is chemistry. But there’s lots of physics in the kitchen too. Over the last decade, Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz have developed an undergraduate course on science and cooking at Harvard University that features trendy chefs as guest speakers. It’s become a minor sensation in the food world, and the three have now distilled that class into Science and Cooking. Part cookbook and part popular science, the book gives anyone interested in the topic “plenty to chew on,” as physicist Rama Bansil put it in her review. (If you need convincing, try this annotated recipe for molten lava cake.) Physics enthusiasts will be intrigued by the authors’ food-based analyses of emulsions, foams, and gels. Foodies will love the exacting recipes for everything from garlic aioli to “thousand-year-old eggs.”

Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States by Alex Wellerstein (U. Chicago Press, 2021, $35.00). What’s the secret to building an atomic bomb? Is it the design of the bomb itself? Or is it the technological know-how that enables states to produce fissile materials like uranium-235 in large quantities? As historian Alex Wellerstein outlines in this book, postwar planners in the US settled on the former definition. They created the category of “restricted data” to describe any knowledge the government deemed crucial to bomb construction. But what exactly falls into that category has never been clear: As historian Benjamin Wilson noted in his review, Restricted Data outlines how nuclear secrecy has been “messy, inconsistent, and often self-defeating.”

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack (Scribner, 2020, $26.00). Brian Keating couldn’t have put it better at the beginning of his review in Physics Today‘s January 2021 issue: “Instead of agonizing over a pandemic, political polarization, and economic upheaval, why not fret over the end of the entire universe?!” We can take solace in the fact that, unlike those earthlier problems, the end of the universe won’t happen for at least another several billion years. It turns out, as Katie Mack illustrates, that studying such apocalyptic scenarios as the Big Crunch (the eventual collapse of the universe), the Big Rip (the tearing apart of the universe at its subatomic seams), and heat death (the universe reaching a state of maximum entropy) tells us a lot about the universe as it is now. Despite the seemingly dour subject matter, the book is a witty and fun read.

Vera Rubin: A Life by Jacqueline Mitton and Simon Mitton (Belknap Press, 2021, $29.95). When Vera Rubin died in 2016, she was acknowledged as an astronomical legend for both her contributions to the study of dark matter and her tireless advocacy for women in science. Rubin faced rampant sexism when she entered the field in the 1950s, an era when women were often forbidden to use major telescopes. Yet this full-length biography of Rubin is more than just an inspirational tale of defying the odds. It also details how, during the 1960s and 1970s, Rubin and her collaborators meticulously measured the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, producing data that ultimately convinced even the most skeptical observers that galaxies must contain sizable amounts of unseen “dark” matter. Reviewer and astronomer Alan Hirshfeld wrote that the book demonstrates that scientific transformation occurs, as Ernest Hemingway once said, “gradually and then suddenly.”

New Books & Media picks

Every month Physics Today‘s New Books & Media column highlights a range of titles—books, movies, TV shows, podcasts, and more—that pique our editors’ interest. Here are five notable selections (plus one bonus) from 2021.

1. 1. The My Nuclear Life podcast, hosted by Shelly Lesher, a nuclear physicist, examines the intersection of atomic science and society in its engaging six-episode debut season .
   2. Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know , directed by Peter Galison, is a fascinating documentary about the globe-spanning collaboration that successfully imaged the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87. It’s available on Netflix .
   3. How to Make a Vaccine: An Essential Guide for COVID-19 and Beyond , a book by John Rhodes, will tell you everything you need to know about the development of the COVID vaccines.
   4. Frequently Asked Questions About the Universe , by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson, provides an illustrated, lighthearted take on weighty cosmological questions, such as what would happen if a person were to pass the event horizon of a black hole.
   5. Astronomy enthusiasts are sure to enjoy Brave New Worlds , a board game developed by physicist Mickey McDonald that challenges players to send missions to targets across our solar system.
   6. When We Cease to Understand the World , by Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut, should not be missed. Anyone interested in literary depictions of physics and physicists will enjoy this nigh-indescribable meditation on science and its destructive potential. (This is technically cheating; the review will be in Physics Today‘s January 2022 issue.)