Finally, a revelation!
I was asking myself: Why do I often find ancient, terse, illustration-free textbooks easier to follow than their modern, friendly, playful, illustrated, multi-media-enhanced counterparts?
Case in point (and I know that not everybody will agree): Paul Dirac’s legendary Principles of Quantum Mechanics or the definitive course on theoretical physics, the volumes by Landau and Lifshitz. In modern lectures and articles such resources may be announced as “valuable but not easy”, “no hand-holding here”.
Yes, there is no hand-holding in terms of helpful illustration. Dirac also wrote a super brief book on General Relativity that does not have any figure at all. There are no extended explanations highlighting something from different perspectives.
There are certainly no jokes.
There are just very carefully crafted statements.
But also something else is missing nearly entirely: There is less hopping from text to table to illustration to an equation to a link to a box with THE MOST IMPORTANT STUFF to a comment in the margin. No “context-switching”.
There are no web-skimming skills required. You can just follow the flow of the self-contained text. There are even less equations, and more inline formulas or summarizing of the contents of equations in (terse) plain English. The text was written by a human being, for another human. Text designed for being read in a linear fashion.
Modern books on the other hand can feel like databases of content. You can jump so easily between sections and supplemental material – via internal links – so the author makes use of that. Probably not even consciously. I might do this myself with every document I write, heavily relying on my four levels of headings, using the navigation pane and lists of figures like a menu bar.
The tools you use for writing shape the output. Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains really resonated with me. Carr describes how a then-futuristic star-shaped typewriter changed Nietzsche’s writing:
One of Nietzsche’s closest friends, the writer and composer Heinrich Köselitz, noticed a change in the style of his writing. Nietzsche’s prose had become tighter, more telegraphic. There was a new forcefulness to it, too, as though the machine’s power—its “iron”—was, through some mysterious metaphysical mechanism, being transferred into the words it pressed into the page. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” Köselitz wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, “my ‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.” “You are right,” Nietzsche replied. “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
Dirac’s language is precise, intentional, and not a single word is superfuous. For me, it has a solemn quality, doing justice to the magnificent subject he was writing about.
I can’t imagine him typing his “content” quickly on a computer keyboard. And indeed: he wrote his PhD thesis (the nucleus of his masterful textbook) by hand – see his hand-writing here in this academic archive!
~
As it was once tradition, I am creating Found Poetry from one chapter of this book – Representations: I pick a short phrase from each page, processing one page after the other – not knowing yet what the next phrase will be.
~
to replace the abstract quantities
there is no need for
multiplying on the right
They may conveniently be labelled
With the help of this definition
any domain surrounding the critical point
one can write down
without getting a wrong result
set up an orthogonal representation
We shall continue to work
with an integral instead
Let us now pass to
some problems in which
make the diagonal elements all real
We can summarize our results
we secure complete parallelism
If any algebraic equation holds
rows in this matrix will be the same
~
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