Mr Tompkins in Wonderland

Abstract

MR. TOMPKINS was a bank clerk seeking distraction at the end of a heavy day. Bored almost to tears by the inevitable Hollywood stuff at the ‘movies', and attracted by the title “Space, Time and Cosmology” which he thought might offer something in the Jules Verne vein, he drifted into one of a series of lectures at the local university on topics in modern physics, and that was where his troubles began. He did not understand the lecture. In fact he was not able to follow it sufficiently well even to misunderstand it, and retired to bed in that state of mental depression which is not an unusual aftereffect of attendance at lectures on mathematical physics. His rash experiment, however, gave rise to the series of dreams, one might almost say nightmares, retailed in the first half of the book. The second half contains the lectures out of which the troubles arose. Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland Or Stories of c, G, and h.By Prof. G. Gamow. Pp. x + 92. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1939.) 7s. 6d. net.