Breakfast with Einstein: The Exotic Physics of Everyday Objects

Orzel (How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog) offers another helpful guide to modern physics, using an especially creative hook. After describing in the introduction a typical morning routine—waking up, making breakfast, checking his computer—Orzel breaks those actions down in order to “show how an ordinary weekday routine depends on some of the weirdest phenomena ever discovered.” For example, his alarm clock allows him to discuss, cogently, how the “modern accounting of time” that the device embodies is “deeply rooted in the quantum physics of atoms.” He concisely summarizes the history of timekeeping, which evolved beyond reliance on physical objects, such as pendulums, susceptible to even small variations, to measuring time by counting light wave oscillations caused by moving electrons. Orzel provides similar explanation for such phenomena as the different colors of light emitted by objects heated to different temperatures, using as an entry point the glowing coils of the burner on his stove top. The science is not intuitive, and readers will need to pay close attention to follow Orzel’s points, but that required effort is unavoidable with such a complex subject. This erudite book will be best read in multiple sittings by curious readers keen on absorbing all the weird science on display all around them. (Dec.)