Getting an Author’s Help in Making Sense of Confusion

A good book, it is often said, is a window to another world.

That window is especially welcome when the world one wishes to spy on is otherwise secret, inaccessible, forbidden. Sex comes immediately to mind. (Think “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”) But so, for most people, does physics.

The first book I ever stayed up all night to read was “Knowledge and Wonder: The Natural World as Man Knows It,” by the great MIT physicist Victor Weisskopf. Like falling in love for the first time, it altered my entire universe. I read it and sighed. So this is what it’s all about!

There, laid out in loving, simple English were atoms and stars, time and space, even chemistry and quantum mechanics--in ways a neophyte could easily understand. I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t stop talking about it. (Thirty years later, it seems I still can’t.)

Since then, there have been many other books. Some were more than I could handle at the time; I had to return to them when I was older, wiser, more mature. Looking now at my yellowed copy of “The Universe and Dr. Einstein,” by Lincoln Barnett--every page nearly obliterated by a graffiti of scribbles--I find it hard to believe I ever found these words too rich to digest. But so it was.

Some, on the other hand, produced an immediate rush: George Gamow’s enchanting “Mr. Tompkins” stories about the nerdy bank clerk who falls in love with the physicist’s daughter; the clerk sleeps during her father’s lectures--dreaming of lands where people bicycle about at the speed of light, grow young when their train brakes to a stop, or converse with dolphins who live in a sea of “holes in nothing.”

Still others produced a kind of altered state, bringing about a literal “change of mind.” “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions,” by Edwin A. Abbott, stretches the imagination by compressing it, first, into a universe where only points, lines and planes are possible. Living in (or on?) the page as a literal “square” made it possible to enter a universe of four dimensions--or even more.

The best books reframed questions, offering intellectual tools to get a grip on confusion. Once, for example, I was hopelessly mired in the whole messy business of cause and probability. If a thing is random, does it mean it hasn’t a cause? If God plays dice, does it mean that purpose has succumbed to chaos?

“Never write anything about cause until you read Max Born’s ‘The Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance,’ ” a physicist friend told me--letting me in on the famous Born-Einstein correspondence about dice, god and causality in all its glory.

None of these books was an obvious choice, a book I would have discovered myself. Each was recommended by a friend or colleague. There is, I have come to believe, no greater gift.

Of course, there are many more: Erwin Schroedinger’s “What is Life?” (how a physicist anticipated DNA); Richard Feynman’s “The Character of Physical Law” (What is a law of nature? And why?); Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld’s “The Evolution of Physics” (where you’ll learn about the ‘e---r’ problem); “Physics and Philosophy” by Sir James Jeans and “Time, Space and Gravitation,” by Sir Arthur Eddington--perhaps the two most eloquent attempts to place modern physics in a philosophical and perceptual context.

For those who would feel at home in the world of mathematics, there’s “Number: The Language of Science,” by Tobias Dantzig; for those who would “size travel” inside the atom and out into largest realms of the cosmos, there’s “Powers of Ten,” by Philip and Phylis Morrison; for those who would stumble along with scientists on the crooked road to truth there’s Arthur Koestler’s “The Sleepwalkers.”

Many of these books are out of date; all are by dead white males, and so reflect the prejudices of their times (with the exception of the Morrisons, who are seemingly--and happily--immortal); some are out of print. I mention them because these are books people do not tend to find on their own, don’t get to know until they are introduced--fixed up, as it were--by a friend.

Now that I’ve done my part, I hope you’ll do yours: hook up a friend with a book and see what chemistry happens.

Meanwhile, I should probably confess that I, too, have a new book coming out this week. It’s about “The Hole in the Universe.”

And what is a hole, after all, but a drafty version of a window?

Cole can be reached at kc.cole@latimes.com