Since 1988 Physics World has boasted among its authors some of the most eminent physicists of the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as some of the best popular-science authors. But while I am, in principle, aware of this, it can still be genuinely exciting to discover who wrote for Physics World before I joined the team in 2011. And for me – a self-avowed book nerd – the most exciting discovery was an article written by Isaac Asimov in 1990.
Asimov is best remembered for his hard science fiction. His Foundation trilogy (1951–1953) and decades of robot stories first collected in I, Robot (1950) are so seminal they have contributed words and concepts to the popular imagination, far beyond actual readers of his work. If you’ve ever heard of the Laws of Robotics (the first of which is that “a robot shall not harm a human, or by inaction allow a human to come to harm”), that was Asimov’s work.
I was introduced to Asimov through what remains the most “hard physics”-heavy sci-fi I have ever tackled: The Gods Themselves (1972). In this short novel, humans make contact with a parallel universe and manage to transfer energy from a parallel world to Earth. When a human linguist attempts to communicate with the “para-men”, he discovers this transfer may be dangerous. The narrative then switches to the parallel world, which is populated by the most “alien” aliens I can remember encountering in fiction.
Underlying this whole premise, though, is the fact that in the parallel world, the strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together, is even stronger than it is in our own. And Asimov was a good enough scientist that he worked into his novel everything that would be different – subtly or significantly – were this the case. It’s a physics thought experiment; a highly entertaining one that also encompasses ethics, astrobiology, cryptanalysis and engineering.
Of course, Asimov wrote non-fiction, too. His 500+ books include such titles as Understanding Physics (1966), Atom: Journey Across the Subatomic Cosmos (1991) and the extensive Library of the Universe series (1988–1990). The last two of these even came out while Physics World was being published.
So what did this giant of sci-fi and science communication write about for Physics World?
It was, of all things, a review of a book by someone else: specifically, Think of a Number by Malcolm E Lines, a British mathematician. Lines isn’t nearly so famous as his reviewer, but he was still writing popular-science books about mathematics as recently as 2020. Was Asimov impressed? You’ll have to read his review to find out.
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