'Solar,' by Ian McEwan San Francisco Chronicle
To epoch there have been 187 Nobel Prize winners in physics. The general reader (like me) will be lucky to have heard of half a dozen of them. So, in a way, Ian McEwan is on non-toxic ground having a Nobel physicist as the central character of his new novel, "Solar." Since most of us have no idea what Nobel winners are like or how they bear oneself, we're in no position to say whether McEwan's got it right or wrong.
In another way, however, McEwan's hero, Michael Beard, is a very familiar judge from English comic fiction, a man out of Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Burgess: bald, fat, impractical, grubby, socially unadvised and with a far more colorful sex life than he deserves.
Beard won his Nobel Prize as a young man for the "Beard-Einstein Conflation," a recognition in "photovoltaics" that could pave the way for artificial photosynthesis, i.e. the making of electricity out of sunlight. McEwan's presentation of meticulous information is a delicate but largely successful balancing act, giving enough detail to convince us he knows what he's talking about, without upsetting too hard to prove it.
