It has to start somewhere! The physics curriculum at all levels needs revision to incorporate applications where the Earth is the system. Ask a random college student why the Earth doesn't get hotter and hotter as the sun shines on it, and you get a blank stare, or perhaps some reference to ice or ozone. We physics educators can do better than that—and teach about equilibrium and thermal radiation along the way.
The Physics of Energy, published last year, removes any excuses. It is at once a textbook and a book for self-study by teachers seeking material to embed in physics courses. It can enrich every part of the curriculum and at every level from graduate courses to the first course in high school. Heck, regarding the Earth's cooling by radiation to space, even for the general science course in third grade. What I hope this book launches is something like the overhaul of physical science curricula in the early 1960s, after Sputnik, when pulleys and Wheatstone bridges gave way to spectra and nuclei. The Earth is a system being modified significantly by human action, and numerous physics-based technological strategies can reduce the adverse consequences of these actions, from wind turbines to heat pumps. With the help of this book, the physics teacher can provide the whole package.
The book is a tour de force. It is almost 900 pages long. It introduces most of the modern physics curriculum, often within discussions of energy systems: the physics of fluids is introduced to understand wind energy and superconductivity to understand superconducting magnetic energy storage. At MIT, the book has emerged from a course that presumes a year of college-level physics, but it stimulates an important question: do we actually have here a better way of teaching physics the first time around? The question must now be debated.
The index of the book allowed me to play a game: What topic can I think of that is not here? One ground rules is established in the preface: “we focus solely on science.” So, no Paris agreement, no cap and trade, no Price-Anderson Act to limit the liability of nuclear power plant owners. Accepting that constraint, I rarely found a missing topic. Perovskites, yes; clouds, yes; the thermodynamic minimum energy required for separation, yes. “Lignite” is in the book (p. 648) but not the index. I think there is no treatment of the Allam cycle (a promising thermal cycle for CO2 separation during hydrocarbon combustion), no alkalinity, and nothing on offshore wind. Of course, there is no “lever,” but if there were, it would be slotted between “lethal dose” and “LHC” (Large Hadron Collider).
The book has many satisfying features, including chapter summaries that tell the reader which particular chapters should be read first, open-ended “Discussion/Investigation Questions,” many problems at the back of each chapter, and 311 references (judiciously chosen, only one every three pages). Some difficult physics that is often not included in physics books at this level is here too: for example, the spectrum of black-body radiation is derived.
I must note one extraordinary chapter, Chapter 21, which is devoted to cosmology. It sits at the transition between four chapters on nuclear energy and four chapters on solar energy, on the implicit grounds, I suppose, that the sun is a star and so let's learn something about stars and galaxies and the Big Bang and dark energy.
In short, The Physics of Energy has élan. The reader gets ferried into countless byways where some feature of science or technology previously only vaguely understood becomes accessible.
Usually, the ferryman provides numerical values of the relevant quantities, in context. As Jaffe and Taylor write in the preface: “we have chosen to try to educate ourselves sufficiently to cover the subject in its entirety,” rather than to farm out chapters to specialists. The authors' fortitude and curiosity are infectious. The teacher will pull this book off the shelf again and again.
Whom a science book is dedicated to reveals its field of science: physicists and mathematicians dedicate books to their parents; hard-rock geologists, to their spouses; and those trying to make sense of sustainability, to their children. My rule is confirmed here: the book is dedicated to all three generations, befitting its reach. Kids, however, warrant a “most of all,” and that's right too: this book is a gift to the future.
Robert Socolow is professor emeritus, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University. He was the editor of Annual Review of Energy and the Environment, 1992–2002. He received the 2003 Leo Szilard Lectureship Award from the American Physical Society (“for leadership in establishing energy and environmental problems as legitimate research fields for physicists, and for demonstrating that these broadly defined problems can be addressed with the highest scientific standards”). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Physical Society. His Ph.D. is in theoretical high-energy physics (Harvard, 1964). He joined the Princeton University faculty in 1971.