I was so excited for this title, and it lived up to my expectations. I majored in physics, and fantasy is my favorite genre: this book was written for ME (or so I will tell myself). It was everything a magical book should be, include the narrative voice. I can see how for some it may feel like a lot of information (especially after the second half), but many books have their own systems of magic that require extra attention.

I've written two reviews. The shorter one is at Goodreads (included here, at the bottom).
The longer review is published at Newsblaze.com. Photos, hyperlinks, and formatting show up at https://newsblaze.com/entertainment/books/the-magick-of-physics_190750/ but not here.

Felix Flicker’s “The Magick of Physics” is Fun, Enlightening, Inspiring, Maddening, and Worthwhile
By Carol Kean -Tue April 25, 2023

Quick! Which would you rather read about today:

1) Magic
2) Condensed Matter Physics
3) Felix Flicker

I’d suggest Door Number Four, “All the above, and more.”

Magic is the easy one – at first glance, anyway.

Most of us would cast only a passing glance at physics. What even is “condensed matter” physics and how much do we need to know about it?

This brings us to Door Number Three.

Felix Flicker merits more than a glance. His name may conjure a comic book villain, but he is a brilliant theoretical physicist who teaches at Cardiff University in Wales.

Felix Flicker. video screenshot

Flicker asserts that magic is very much present in our everyday lives and that it is called condensed matter physics. Without it, we wouldn’t have radio, phones, computers, the internet, LED lights, and the world as we know it.

“I have written a book aimed at introducing condensed matter physics to a broad audience,” he explains at his website. “It is written as a manual for wizards.”

Yes, you read that right.

The Magick of Physics
In the UK, it’s The Magick of Matter: Crystals, Chaos and the Wizardry of Physics (Profile Books, 2022), and in the US and Canada, it’s The Magick of Physics: Uncovering the Fantastical Phenomena in Everyday Life (Simon and Schuster, 2023).

Magick, with a K?

Only in the title. In the text, it’s magic.

(Aleister Crowley put the “k” in magick in the 20th century to distinguish it from stage magic, which involves sleight of hand and audience misdirection. )

“The modern name for magic is physics,” Flicker keeps saying (and yes, I believe he does know the meaning of that word), and “by the close of the book I hope you will agree that the real world is as magical as the most enchanting tales it contains.”

I agree.

Now, for the hard part: Science “has been the preserve of a small elite,” Flicker says, “but anyone can learn physics.”

Even me? #disagree

People tend to think “mathematical skill is something you are either born with or not. I can personally attest to you that this is not the case: it is learned with practice,” Flicker writes.

The ways of math are beyond me, but call them “magic” and promise that even I can learn a little, and I’ll keep reading.

Flicker speaks so easily and enthusiastically of things like “quantum entanglement” and “special relativity.” A small number of brilliant people know what this stuff means. They are part of a high priesthood of science. People like me just have to trust them.

That troubles me. It reminds me of a verse I was indoctrinated with from infancy:

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord.
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways.” –Isaiah 55:8-9

The ways of math are as unfathomable to me as the ways of the Lord. Math rules the universe! (I have my doubts about “God” at the helm of any part of our world.)

The enmity between math and me seems as deeply ingrained as the Biblical enmity between Eve and the serpent. Equations make me squirm. (But I love spiders and snakes.)

Speaking of Eve, I say she was framed. Eve bargained for knowledge, but the one thing she apparently learned was that she and Adam were naked. Now that’s a raw deal. For the price of Eden, humans should be born with innate math and language skills. Birds hatch knowing how to build nests. Beavers don’t attend a trade school to learn how to build dams.

Unexplained Phenomena

But me, even with an arsenal of videos and books, and a relentless, masochistic urge to KNOW, will finally just write this book review even though I cannot summarize, coherently, the insights and wonders in The Magick of Physics.

I get this part: most of the magical properties of the world around us can be explained by the laws of physics. Flicker uses examples from everyday life, as well as from science fiction and fantasy, to illustrate his points.

In the past, people used magic to explain phenomena that they could not understand through science. These days, we understand many of these phenomena in a more empirical, methodical, technical, and verifiable way. Flicker discusses the relationship between magic and science, and he argues that the two are not as different as they may seem. His focus is a study of the physical properties of matter in its condensed phases.

You can see the mild-mannered, earnest, and impassioned Felix Flicker in the lecture hall in a You-Tube video, The Physics of Magnetic Monopoles (17/2/20). He sports a Victorian suit with a tilting bow tie and long, dark hair. Looking cool and calm, with a voice as soothing and reassuring as Mr. Rogers, but with a UK accent, he speaks of magnets, mysteries, the magic of piezoelectric crystals, and more.


In a second video, “The Magic of Physics,” the producers include a breezy little definition of condensed matter physics: It is the study of the world around us – the states of matter, how they emerge from the quantum realm, and how they can manifest exotic particles which cannot exist in the vacuum of space. It is one of science’s best-kept secrets: a third of all physicists work on it, yet its story has rarely been told. This talk was recorded at the Ri on 1 November 2022.


Is this Flicker character a marketing guru, all style versus substance?

No. He is the genuine article.

He is quick to credit others for their contributions. He engages with his students. He makes self-deprecating jokes. Nothing about him seems pretentious, pompous, or condescending. Like a 21st Century Carl Sagan, he speaks eloquently and with such conviction about the most complicated realms of science.

We need more teachers like him.

Flicker reminds me of my 1977 copy of Dragons of Eden, in which Ray Bradbury is quoted on the book cover: “The number of scientists who can speak in clear tongues and occasionally touch on near-poetry is small….To these names now add: Carl Sagan. Would that we could clone a dozen more like him in the next half-century.”

Add “Felix Flicker” to that pantheon. And get a TV series to bring the magic of physics to the masses. If my high school physics teacher had been more like Felix Flicker, I might not have dropped out after the first quarter before that D- could go on my report card.

Math is true. Math is universal.

“Once you understand a piece of mathematics, you understand it in exactly the same way as anyone else who understands it, regardless of what language you speak,” Flicker reminds us. “Two plus two equals four however you write it.”

Don’t try to tell me otherwise. I believe! Math = Truth.

Zoology is the study of animals.

Botany is the study of plants.

What is physics the study of?

“Perhaps the best answer is that physics is defined not so much by the set of phenomena studied, but rather by a distinctive approach and set of tools,” Flicker explains. The tools are experiment, numerics, and theory.

“Theoretical physics often comes close to mathematics; the difference enters via the gap between the mathematical model – perfect and predictable – and reality, the messy world we experience. Theoretical physics is the storytelling we do to make the mathematical model more intuitive.”

I’ve lost count of the number of times I paused, backed up, and listened again to the videos (there is now a third one, set at Harvard) – and how many times I have revisited the book.

“Magic is the ability of the world to inspire us.”

If a medieval peasant could time travel to our world, everything would look like sorcery or magic. Laser beams, remote controls, rocket ships, TVs, you know the litany of wonders.

Does it matter if I’ll never understand it? No more than it matters that most of us do not understand the working of the internal combustion engine, but we drive cars and rely on the skills and tools of others to keep them road-worthy.

“I did make sure to include some more advanced topics, so that everyone gets something from it,” Flicker tells a Reddit group. “For example, the fractional quantum Hall effect is often not covered in undergraduate textbooks, but I did what I could to explain it.”

That’s another thing I will have to revisit in my Kindle, but I probably didn’t highlight the Hall effect. I’m still hung up on the maddening mystery of Peredur’s sheep and how it illustrates the behavior of quantum particles. Not to mention the three crows delivering marbles to three towers, which leads to three pages of formulas on the odds of three separate friends guessing which hand of a trickster in each tower holds the marble.

Even the “easier” subjects elude me.

How do Peredur’s sheep illustrate the Isling model?

Does the mosh pit of a rock concert similarly manifest emergence?

“Hidden Variables” is the apparent explanation for three friends in three separate towers making the same guesses: is the marble in the left hand, or the right, of the visitor to the tower? The odds are always 50/50 of guessing correctly, right?

Not if the odds of a correct guess are affected by the choices made by the other guessers. If these guessers were in the same room, hearing each other’s guesses, it would make sense that their own guesses are influenced.

But these people are in three separate towers. They do not hear the other guesses. Left hand, or right? How does anyone come up with pages of formulas for supposedly random statistics?

[paragraph deleted here]

Back to the topic that set me off: how do the “local hidden variables” of quantum mechanics quantify our personal lack of knowledge?

I’ve read this chapter three times or more, but I never get past my annoyance with the moon, the marbles, the ravens, and the weird “night washers” of Celtic folklore cleaning the shrouds of the dead. This is one case where fictionalizing physics just obfuscated the lesson. Call me irremediable.

IrremeDIABLE

Blame the serpent. Blame Eve.

Or not. The Garden of Eden is just a story, not an explanation for why life is such a struggle.

A reader at Amazon UK included this disclaimer:
Unless we read a book, fully engaged with it, for a second time we hardly remember any of it, if anything at all. So does it really matter if we don’t understand the science although we feel we do as we read? Because it is full of wonder – tinglingly sometimes – if you are open to it.

I’m so open to it, my brain cells are falling out the portals and into the dirt.

Never mind my frustration: THE MAGICK OF PHYSICS is a GREAT BOOK!

If you won’t take my word for it, you might trust this Vimeo video review by Nobel-winner Fritz Kapra:

“The Magick of Matter” is a fascinating, enlightening and altogether delightful book. Once you fall under its spell, you will find it hard to put it down. – Fritjof Capra, author of The Tao of Physics (1975), which inspired dozens of popular books on quantum physics, string theory, cosmology, black holes, and other far-flung phenomena.

“A lively book,” yes, offering “a host of truly exotic materials.” To name just a few:

Superfluids climbing walls of containers.
Spin ice – a new type of magnetism – promises a huge increase in efficiency and effectiveness.
Topological matter – materials structures with large-scale entanglements between their parts – intertwine like the ribbons of maypole dances.
Capra notes “lots of stuff that makes your head spin,” yet “Flicker’s language is not highly technical,” and he “playfully and skillfully uses traditional terms of magic from fantasy and sci-fi.”

Each chapter opens with a fictional heroine, Veryan. Kapra calls it “quite a tour de force.”

I side with Kapra here, not science writer Brian Clegg, who publishes books and blogs at a site called “Popular Science” which apparently has zero connection to the magazine by that name. Clegg objects to the ways Flicker “regularly brings magic and woo in to give us reference points as he talks about physics … the whole point of the book should be that this topic doesn’t need gimmicks. It’s genuinely interesting in its own right. Why, oh why?”

Flicker tells us why in The Guardian:
“Some people don’t like science, or are told from a young age that it’s not for them, whereas everyone is interested in magic to some degree. By emphasising that connection, I thought there might be a way for a broader range of people to become interested in science.”

Kapra gets it. He calls Flicker’s book “a lucid review of extraordinary phenomena associated with the well-known states of matter,” which correspond well with the four classics of Greek philosophy. All these properties are emergent. I think this means they emerge out of a large number of atoms and molecules, but don’t quote me on that.

Math is magical. I learned this in the early 1970s when our sixth-grade teacher showed us Donald in Mathmagic Land, a film I should have seen in first grade, but that is a dark chapter we need not visit here and now.

Why, oh why, don’t more teachers inspire us with the magic of math?

The long, long chapter dedicated to crystals – “a natural embodiment of magic” – reminds us that gems are pulled from the dirt. They come with flat surfaces and geometric edges. They can be transparent, opaque, translucent (milky, dusty), or dull. They can light the dark, or fluoresce in neon. We can generate piezoelectricity by squeezing (Greek, ‘piez-“) a crystal – and this happens whenever we start an engine (don’t quote me on that) or turn the dial to ignite a gas stove.

Coincidentally, while reading and rereading this Magick of Physics stuff, I came across a guy on ebay selling The Wands of Horus. The “science” behind these wands of the ancient Egyptians sounded enough like Flicker’s physics, I invested $75 (including tax and S&H) on a pair of wands (copper in the right hand, zinc in the left).

Yes, I really did.

That was another reason I have taken so long to write a review of this book. If I wait for signs of the wands having any efficacy, you’ll never hear from me in this lifetime, so let us pass over in silence the idea the science of calcite crystals in our pineal gland that help us, um, well, they can help shamans and monks, who somehow tap into the piezoelectric crystals in their pineal glands as a transmitter to pick up susceptible frequencies from the environment, and from there, receiving and sending messages by the spirit.

Felix Flicker's "The Magick of Physics" is Fun, Enlightening, Inspiring, Maddening, and Worthwhile 1King Mykerinus and his queen, arms held straight at his sides, each one clenching a Wand. https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/imagenes_ciencia/wandshorus_intro01.jpg

Telepathy. Physics. Magic.

Nowhere does Felix Flicker advise the use of crystals to open the portals of our brains to telepathy or magic. His brain is apparently wired for this stuff without any “assists” that we know of.

So, I’ve stood barefoot at sunset gripping those Wands of Horus, trying to clear my head, and I also acquired a peach adventurine pendant which “enhances intellectual power,” but so far, this is pretty much all that I can recite from memory from this book:

Solids = earth
Liquid = water (the only liquid that can also appear as a solid, ice, or gas, steam)
Air = gas
Fire = plasma (nope, can’t explain)
Glass = somewhere between a solid and liquid

Oh. And this:

Liquid crystals are used in computers and TV screens, and if we ever manage to create superconductors at room temperature, some heavy magic will begin.

There! That’s how smart I am after some exposure to Felix Flicker, the Wands of Horus, and an adventurine pendant that I stopped wearing after one week.

Backing up a bit, to something Flicker wrote about

The room-temperature superconductor …

That’s probably the most pressing topic in condensed matter physics. Superconductors are one of the main routes to trying to make quantum computers. But also, they conduct electricity perfectly with no loss. If you built power lines out of them, you would eliminate the [loss] of energy as electricity travels down the lines. It isn’t a total pipe dream. Superconductors are starting to be employed to connect up bigger power networks to balance the load across them.

No, I cannot summarize that off the top of my head, but give me a few more months of practice, and I might internalize at least that bit about superconductors from this multifarious, multifaceted book.

Overall, The Magick of Physics is well-written, endearing, and engaging. Flicker is a gifted storyteller. His book brims over like the phases of boiling water (shrimp bubbles, fish bubbles, then raging torrent, a chapter you don’t want to miss).

I’ll bet none of his detractors could rock a Victorian tweed suit and bow tie like Flicker does.

This man of many talents also teaches kung fu and was a champion of shuai jiao (Chinese wrestling) and praying mantis kung fu.

felix flicker kung fu. image c/o felix flicker.
Felix Flicker Kung Fu. image c/o Felix Flicker.
But I will stop here, lest I sound like I’m fangirling. (I am, of course; I just don’t want to sound like a fangirl.)

“The whole world is a series of miracles, but we’re so used to them we call them ordinary things.” – Hans Christian Andersen


THE GOODREADS REVIEW:

Who is Felix Flicker?
Nope, not a comic book villain: Felix Flicker is the actual name of a brilliant theoretical physicist in Oxford. His first book earned high praise, and so will his latest, "The Magick of Physics: Uncovering the Fantastical Phenomena in Everyday Life," Pub Date 21 Mar 2023 | Simon & Schuster.

He's a teacher, and he's good at presenting incredibly complex science in layman's terms. Still, I found myself floundering, so I hurried over to his online videos. Oops, that kinda backfired.

"Physicists are not supposed to look like handsome Victorian vampires,” novelist Diane Ryan messaged me after I sent her a link to Flicker’s video. Not to mention the awesome accent.

Even though quantum entanglement is far beyond my intellectual capacity, and even though I’m a grandma, I caught myself fangirling with hashtags as I shared links on social media:
#GottaLove #felixflicker :)

Flicker is a professor at Cardiff University. He also teaches kung fu and was a champion of shuai jiao (Chinese wrestling) and praying mantis kung fu.

At 35, he published The Magick of Matter: Crystals, Chaos and the Wizardry of Physics, exploring the elusive and mystifying world of condensed matter physics.

(Yes, magick with a K, two books in a row, but in the text, it’s magic. Good call. A better call might have been no K at all.)

OK, is it "K" or no "K"?

Famed occultist Aleister Crowley put the "k" in magick in the 20th century. to distinguish it from stage magic, which involves sleight of hand and audience misdirection. Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.". (See: 10 Reasons Some Wiccans Don’t Use a "K" in Magic).

For two months, I've tried to get through every chapter in the book. My Kindle is filled with highlights.

It comes down to this:
Why should we care about condensed matter physics?
A: Without it, we wouldn’t have phones, computers, the internet, and the world as we know it. But those are just little perks. The big stuff is in the book.

Does it matter if I'll never understand it? No more than it matters that most of us do not understand the working of the internal combustion engine, but we drive cars and rely on the skills and tools of others to keep them road-worthy.

So what makes physics any more magical than driving a car?

It's a bit of semantic trickery. The magic I had hoped for is mostly human innovation and modern tech. If a medieval peasant could time travel to our world, everything would look like sorcery or magic. Laser beams, remote controls, electronics, radios, TVs, you know the litany of wonders.

Flicker employs an exalted vocabulary with elusive terms, such as “quantum entanglement” and “special relativity.” A small number of brilliant people know what this stuff means. They are part of a high priesthood of science, as mystifying as the Bible; we just have to trust them.

How easy is it to believe scientists who speak of Black Holes and invisible electrons? It reminds me of the Bible I was indoctrinated with from infancy.

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord.
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways.” --Isaiah 55:8-9

Why would our Creator endow some of us with math brains, leaving people like me blinking in confusion? I object! I want to read Felix Flicker and nod and comprehend and remember all the information he shares. Instead, I've accepted my inability to read "The Magick of Physics" and come away enlightened.

Robert Lanza and Deepak Chopra employ "New Age Physics" to convince us of such a thing as life after death. If we die and all our neurons stop firing and all our spinning electrons reconfigure into something else, how do we cope with the loss of our loved ones?

Nick Cave deal lost his son, Arthur, and wrote:

…. There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves. We are tiny, trembling clusters of atoms subsumed within grief’s awesome presence. It occupies the core of our being and extends through our fingers to the limits of the universe. Within that whirling gyre all manner of madnesses exist… I feel the presence of my son, all around, but he may not be there…
Create your spirits.
Call to them.
Will them alive.
Speak to them.
It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned;
better now and unimaginably changed.
Source: spin.com

This sort of thing is not addressed in The Magick of Physics.

Annie Dillard wrote in For the Time Being, "you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of material with God, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of material without God. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials."

Felix Flicker may not delve into the physics of humans having an immortal soul, but he does hint at a kind of clairvoyance with the chapter on probability. I really wanted to be able to summarize it from memory, but no, I'd have to reopen the book and read, read, read again, trying to grasp and retain the
Sorry, I have failed to copy/paste excerpts from the book, or summaries that would give you any idea I have actually read any of Felix Flicker. But if./when I finally do, I will post the review at Newsblaze.com.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for an ARC of this book.

I enjoyed this book but sometimes felt it was a bit disjointed. I love physics and in that aspect, the science didn't disappoint. The more narrative part wasn't as fully fleshed out as I had hoped it would be. Overall, would recommend this to someone with a baseline of physics knowledge, but it might be hard to follow without that.

I must admit, I'm not a huge fan of fantasy, but I was curious to see how someone might take something as... let's face it, staid as physics is wont to be sometimes and recast it in a more exciting light. I must also admit that the attempt is mostly successful, even for someone as fantastically disinclined as me. The author's unabashed love for their subjects is infectious. Moreover, the science is made accessible in a way that physicists rarely take the trouble to be. While I don't think I'll be rushing out to immerse myself in a literary world of witches and wizards anytime soon, I can definitely see the parallels the author is trying to draw, that in many ways, science can seem a lot like magic. It is amazing that the universe even exists, not to mention that we are able to prise apart its operational properties. While my personal scientific pursuits may not be part of this particular discipline, the idea that science can enchant and mystify is not foreign to me. It's a wonder-filled world out there, and it's great to see someone as avid a proponent of the sciences spreading that message.

Felix Flicker’s relatively unique take on popular science is right there in the title: The Magick of Physics: Uncovering the Fantastical Phenomena in Everyday Life. Taking Arthur C. Clarke’s old adage that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Flicker presents his layperson’s explanations of modern-day physics as a wizard’s manual of sorts, as in one scene where a wizard illuminates her path with a crystal spelled into glowing and then cuts through a bolt with a “stream of light.” In reality though (at least our reality), the magic crystal is “merely” an LED and the beam of light “just” a laser. How dully mundane.

But is it? Flicker’s argument is that “it takes work to see the magic in the familiar, but it’s there.” And from that premise, he’s off into the wild world of physics. Or, more specifically, condensed matter physics, a branch that in popular science often gets ignored, or at least gets far less shelf space than the two bookends of popular physics books: cosmology (the very big) and particle physics (the very small). Flicker speaks for the trees! Um, I mean, the middle realm of condensed physics, which he defines as the “study of what emerges when many elementary particles interact.” A study whose tagline, if it had one he says, would be “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”

Some of what he covers includes, but is not limited to: magnetism, crystals, entropy, thermodynamics, superfluids, superconductors, quantum physics, decoherence, and more. Being popular science, Flicker eschews math, equations, and too much specialized vocabulary. But while the book simplifies its subject matter, that isn’t to say it is simple. I read a lot of popular science and a good amount of popular physics, and this book is at the higher end in terms of the attention it requires. You have to think about what your reading here, and sometimes rethink it; I did a lot of pausing to more fully consider some of his points, and on occasion flipped back a paragraph or two and reread a bit more slowly to take another stab at comprehension. The subject matter can be tough, and the language can at times be dense, as with : “physicists refer to ‘real space’ as the familiar place in which we live and ‘reciprocal’ space as the world reached by Fourier transform, where lengths and times transform into their reciprocals” or “Through this magical act the emergent quasiparticles in the fractional quantum Hall effect breaks the rule that all particles must be bosons or fermions. They are something entirely new: anyons.”

Luckily, while the requirement to pay close attention is near constant, passage like these or pile ups of specialized terms/names are not particularly frequent. For the most part, Flicker does an excellent job of explaining what needs to be explained as introduction, then guides us lucidly through whatever is being described (an experiment, an effect in the real world, etc.), then explains it again in simpler terms, often using that old standby in the toolbox of popular science — the analogy. Mostly Flicker’s analogies do what they are meant to – make things clearer. Every now and then, though, I thought the metaphors were less than helpful and at times almost made things less clear. And while the “wizardry” references didn’t cloud comprehension, I have to confess I didn’t much care for them past the opening, where they’re used to make the point about how physics truly is as wonderful and awesome (in the literal sense of the word) as magic. Beyond the introduction, though, all the magic and spells felt superfluous (though I get the desire/need for a “hook”).

The Magick of Physics wasn’t an easy book, but it is an often fascinating one, filled with information (I highlighted many, many notes) and Flicker is a generally engaging tour guide. It's probably not the book I’d suggest to someone who hasn’t yet read popular physics books, but once you’ve read a few, I’d definitely recommend it as it will introduce some points those cosmologists and particle physicists don’t and will cement any prior learning of more basic/general concepts such as thermodynamics.

I’m not gonna lie- Physics is usually not on my short list of subjects to read about. The description of this book seemed so unique, it peaked my interest. I’ve gotta say, Dr. Flicker’s “The Magic Of Physics gave me a new found understanding and appreciation for this subject. This book emphasizes the “magic” in the mundane world around us, through emergence and condensed matter physics. Even if you think physics isn’t your thing, but you’re a curious person like me, give this a try! I Also think that if you’re into epic fantasy like Lord of the rings or Avatar, you will probably like this even more than I do!.