Galileo’s Pendulum by Roger Newton, Harvard University Press, £14.95/$22.95, ISBN 067401331X Reviewed by Marcus Chown
THIS book, Galileo’s Pendulum, reminds me of a London cabbie “doing the knowledge”. Rookie drivers must convince an examiner they can get from Fleet Street Hill to Heathrow Terminal 1 in a handful of steps. Roger Newton set out to convince a reader he can get from Galileo’s pendulum to superstring theory in eight chapters. At times I found myself asking, “How did we get here from Galileo’s pendulum?”
The connection, it turns out, is the harmonic oscillator, a kind of Platonic ideal that in…
