I have seldom struggled so much writing a review. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics, edited by Jed Z. Buchwald and Robert Fox, is a rare specimen. In their very short introduction, the editors express their intent to explore the complex history of physics, and therefore present a wide diversity of studies that aim to do justice to modern historiography. In a sense they have managed to do so: the handbook contains a number of excellent studies all focusing on one or more key aspects of how physics developed in the previous centuries. Some papers focus on particular theories, others on instruments and devices, formalisms, or key concepts. There are noteworthy essays by John A. Schuster on Cartesian physics, Niccolò Guicciardini on the mathematization of natural philosophy, and Sandro Caparrini and Craig Fraser on the development of mechanics in the eighteenth century. Other worthwhile readings include Hasok Chang's concise history of thermodynamics, and Suman Seth's excellent treatment of the early days of quantum physics. The editors' own contributions to this volume are fine examples of the current state of the historiography of electromagnetism.

However, there is also much wrong with this book. One would expect a handbook of the history of physics to include, well, the history of physics. For some reason the book omits everything that happened before Galileo, and stops in the mid-twentieth century, without the editors spending a single word to justify this choice. Apparently, there was no physics before Galileo. The general reader, whom the editors mention as their intended audience, will have a hard time understanding the scarce references to Kepler and Francis Bacon, whose contributions are entirely omitted, not to mention the approximately two millennia of physics before them. At the other end of the spectrum, the reader will be hard pressed to find a single letter on modern quantum field theories, particle accelerators, or string theory, topics that have been around for decades and should be included in a history of physics. Anyone ever heard of Richard Feynman, or Feynman diagrams, for that matter?

The editors state that as editors their aim has been to give authors as much freedom as possible in the handling of their chosen topics. While this is a noble attitude, there can be too much freedom. With both historians and philosophers of science contributing, it is a daunting task to balance a historiographical approach with a more in-depth treatment of particular theories and concepts. As a whole, the book seems very incoherent and fails to do either. Even the headers of the four parts into which the book is divided are a bit bewildering: why call the first part ‘Physics and the new science’ when it covers mostly seventeenth-century natural philosophy, when there was no such thing as physics, and the third part ‘Fashioning the discipline: from natural philosophy to physics', when that change had more or less happened in the period covered by the intermediate second part, ‘The long eighteenth century’?

Unfortunately, there is more. Even within the small time span covered by the book, many topics, for instance the highly influential phlogiston theory, are missing, while others are repeated over and over again. Some papers make extensive use of mathematical formulae when the topics they discuss do not seem to require so, while other papers omit ones that might be thought essential. Maxwell without Maxwell's equations? Einstein without Einstein's equations? I think it is rather odd that N.M. Swerdlow's treatment of Galileo's mechanics contains more mathematical formulae per page than Daniel Kennefick's paper on the origin of modern relativity theory in its totality: only one (guess which). It seems the editors have forgotten to edit the essays, including their own, to turn them into a more coherent whole. Fox has a nice treatment of the Laplacian programme, which for some reason includes a lengthy discussion of Malus's optics, relying heavily on a work by Buchwald. But two chapters further on we find Buchwald's discussion of nineteenth-century optics, again including the Malus episode. Earlier on in the volume the reader has encountered a paper by Giuliano Pancaldi on imponderable fluids, which starts around the year 1800. Not only is this a strange choice for a first paper in a section titled ‘The long eighteenth century’, but it also covers much of the Laplacian and Voltaic theories that the editors repeat in their own contributions later on in the volume.

From an aesthetic point of view, the fact that every essay uses its own style of referencing makes for some very uncomfortable reading, especially in a handbook where one compares various entries. One paper even has full-length URLs in the main text, which is downright ugly. The index seems very incomplete. And then there are typographical errors on virtually every page. To be honest, I feel that both the editors and Oxford University Press have let the reader down by publishing such an unfinished book.

There are some genuinely interesting essays in this volume, of which I mentioned a few above. Noteworthy contributions do also include Iwan Rhys Morus's chapter on physics and medicine, and Olivier Darrigol and Jürgen Renn's ‘The emergence of statistical mechanics'. But as a whole the book is rather lacking. Both as a handbook of physics, aimed at a general audience, and from a historiographical point of view it feels very disorganized and incomplete.