1960s Physics Book

How I loved that book! I hope it is not lost to the ages, or more precisely, lost to me for the ages. May I describe it to you? All right, and if you can help out with a title or anything, any clue or hint, well, I’d be more than obliged. I’d be indebted.

It was a physics book, one aimed at kids, printed sometime in the middle 1960s. Hardcover, oversized. It had about a hundred pages, maybe a little more. On each and every page were colorful illustrations and diagrams. Little stick figure men danced around contemporary models of atoms. Pre-Apollo rocket ships illustrated relativity. Two whole pages devoted to the Periodic Table.

The text was aimed right at me at this age, I’d guess, a ten-year-old boy, and it didn’t talk down to me. Nothing was cutesy or overtly simplified to spare my self-esteem or tainted by political correctness. It had a utilitarian, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-to-work, pre-Hippies-1960s-America attitude about it. You know: Science can do everything and anything It set Its mind to, and didn’t have to declare war on Faith to do it. But perhaps my overfond memories are reading too much into it.*

My mother, working as a librarian, brought it home for me one late spring day, and I kept it within arm’s reach through the long, hot, air-conditioner-free summer. While the family watched one of the three or four stations on TV, I laid on the floor and thumbed through it. I must have read it a couple dozen times. Not sequentially, but subjectively, that is, by subject. But I read, studied, analyzed, and practically memorized every page in that book. I loved the texture of the pages, the age-faded colorful hues, the smell of the binding glue.** For all I know I slept with it.

Around this time I started reading science fiction. I got a five-book paperback set of Isaac Asimov for Christmas that year that I read through systematically.*** I began my methodical attack on the SF section in the local library. I would page through the two sets of encyclopediae we had at home and study every science-related article that had a chart or table or color plate. I think this lost physics book started that whole ball rolling.

Fifteen years later I would attend Seton Hall University as a physics major. I only lasted three semesters before dropping out for ultimately unimportant reasons, but I still had the physics bug (and still do). I loved the classes – the classrooms, the chalkboards, the lecture halls. I loved getting the textbooks the first day of classes; I often ignored assigned homework and read different chapters. I loved the theory behind the phenomena and the theory behind the equations. However, I had absolutely no hands-on ability, and no patience for solving problems-at-the-end-of-the-chapter. I just wondered at the ideas which encompass the subject of physics.

I’ve spent about three hours total online searching for it over the past couple of years. A few minutes here, twenty minutes there, that sort of thing. Whenever I remember. So far, no luck. I don’t even recall what the cover looked like, but if I saw it again I would recognize it instantly. Maybe I’ll go online later today when the little ones are napping and search again. Once I get a title, an author, a publisher, I would expect to be able to buy it from any one of those rare book sites, or even eBay. I’d skip lunches for a week and drop $50 on it if I could find it. Maybe even more.

Man, I loved that book.


* Though I don’t think so.

** I realize I may have mentioned my enjoyment of the smell of binding glue more than once on this blog, and I hope it doesn’t come back and haunt me when I go up for a trumped-up morals charge sometime in the next ten or twenty years. Just to be absolutely clear, this has nothing whatsoever to deal with altered states of consciousness. It refers much more to the fact that some scientific research suggests smells can contain the strongest triggers for our memories.

*** The Bicentennial Man, The Caves of Steel, The Gods Themselves, Nine Tomorrows, and Pebble In the Sky.