My review for the Sunday Times before it was cut in half.

Knocking on Heaven’s Door

How physics and scientific thinking illuminate the universe and the modern world

Lisa Randall

£20

Bodley Head

464pp

The Magic of Reality

How we know what’s really true

Richard Dawkins

£20

Bantam Press

272pp

Four hundred years ago this year, the Catholic Church ruled that indirect observation of nature was an acceptable way of gathering evidence of how things are.  This seemingly innocent judgment – coming in response to singular events of the year before – set science on a course from which it has not wavered.  In 1610 Galileo had constructed – out of a verbal description of a modish plaything seen in Holland – what we now call a telescope. Rather than pointing it across the street to spy on neighbours, Galileo swung his crudely made device up into the night sky and described what he saw there. In accepting that whatever fuzzy things he witnessed were evidence of something out there and not something conjured up by a couple of lenses set in an adjustable tube, the Church effectively defined and approved what we now think of as modern science.

Galileo was also one of the first scientists to use a microscope. Since his day, in their various technological re-imaginings, the telescope and microscope have extended our reach into the universe in both directions, to the largest and to the smallest regions of space.

In Knocking on Heaven’s Door – an outstanding survey of the latest developments in physics and cosmology – Lisa Randall describes with dry wit and ice-cool clarity how the feed-back loop of model-building, theory, experiment and technology has written the history of scientific progress.

The telescope has become the space observatory, like the Planck satellite launched in 2009, sent out to look for the faintest evidence of radiation left over from the Big Bang, and which is not due to deliver its best data for several more years yet. The microscope has become the particle collider, most famously the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, which again will not be operating at full power for some time to come, and produces so much data that it may take years before any definite claims can be made.

The LHC experiment is simple in outline. Two beams of protons moving in opposite directions are accelerated around a circular tunnel.  Out of the combined energy of protons colliding head-on, it is hoped that exotic and previously unobserved particles will be brought into fleeting existence. In the strange world of particle physics, the tiniest constituents of the fabric of reality come into view only by injecting and concentrating large amounts of energy into tiny regions of space. Even more curiously, this process conjures up the conditions that existed close to the beginning of the universe. The LHC allows physicists to witness the universe as it would have been about a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. (Bizarrely – and I’m running out of words of astonishment – the Planck satellite, seemingly looking in the opposite direction, further and further into the outer reaches of space, looks further and further back into time, and so it too is leading us back to the origins of the universe.)

It is easy to be overwhelmed by Big Science, but, as Randall points out, scientists don’t usually set out to answer the Big Questions, they more likely become obsessed about some small question that they then worry at tenaciously, sometimes for years. Einstein didn’t set out to re-describe gravity, he was trying to solve specific problems in the then new theory of electromagnetism. But his insights led first to his special theory of relativity, which in turn exposed the need for a new description of gravity. The general theory came after much effort 10 years later.

The irony of the LHC is that although it is enormous – 27 kilometres of tunnel 4 metres wide built deep underground housing 1232 magnets each 30 tonnes and 15 metres long, and though the beams of protons contained and accelerated by the magnets are hugely energetic – what is truly jaw-dropping is the fineness of the measurements being made. Individual proton collisions carry no more kinetic energy than two mosquitoes flying into each other, and even then most of the energy of the collision is carried forward with the rest of the beam as it makes its 11,000 circuits of the tunnel every second.

And every second there are a billion proton collisions to be recorded and then analysed. It was because CERN was generating vast amounts of data in earlier days that Tim Berners-Lee invented a way for scientists around the world to co-operate. This system of electronic co-operation became the world wide web.  The superconducting magnets used in colliders led to the development of magnetic resonance machines now a feature of most major hospitals. It is too early to say what spin-offs the LHC might generate, but at $9 billion, or the cost of a pint of beer for every European citizen for each year of construction, it looks like good value for money.

Out of years of data, evidence from just a handful of collisions of the right sort may be all that is needed to point current theory in a completely new direction. The evidence will certainly be indirect. It will come as complex statistical patterns of energy from cascades of decay products decaying in turn into yet other particles.  The history of physics is one of increasingly subtle and refined measurement of a reality that is captured by increasingly ingenious and indirect means. Fortunately, the game is likely to be never-ending. The universe is subtlest.

Randall, a professor at Harvard, has made and continues to make her own, often significant, contributions to the rarefied world of theoretical physics.  Somehow, she has also found time to write a book that anyone at all interested in science must read, and which everyone ought to read. This is surely the science book of the year.

Richard Dawkins’ latest book is a surprise. The man who is fast becoming the nation’s irascible teddy bear has written a delightful book for children (that may tempt parents, too, after lights out). The Magic of Reality is a charming and free-ranging history of science. Go back through the family photo album and meet your 170,000,000 greats-grandmother, or learn how we come down with flu.  Imaginatively chosen detail – did you know that there’s an Alaskan frog that spends winter frozen into a block of ice? – keeps the narrative lively. I wish there had been such a book when I was a schoolboy.  I would have devoured it, and pored over the beautiful illustrations. I would probably even have enjoyed Dawkins’ re-telling of various ancient myths that he has collected from cultures around the globe and throughout history. As an adult these sections feel like mild propaganda. But that’s OK; as a teenager I loved the Narnia books and they’re propaganda too.

Milky Way

Amazing timelapse filming from Randy Halverson in South Dakota

Not James at his best, but it has its moments.

I had to look up the word eleemosynary, which means supported by charity. I can’t help feeling James thought of the word first and built the story up from there.

‘his heart began to grip him like a little ape clutching the bars of its cage.’ It’s phrases like this that make the reading of Flannery O’Connor such a delight. I laugh out loud even as I shudder at the thought of the impending and the inevitable.

The philosophy of a political prisoner named Simonson.

‘The doctrine goes as follows: everything in the world is alive, and nothing can be described as ‘dead’; every object thought of as inanimate, or inorganic, is only part of a vast organic whole beyond our comprehension, and it follows that the task of man, as one particle of this great organism, consists in preserving its life and the life of all its living parts. Therefore he considered it a crime to deprive anything of life, and he set himself up in opposition to war, the death penalty, and killing of any kind, of animals as well as human beings.’

Part III, Chapter 4

We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire; and poor old Featherstone, who laughed much at the way in which others cajoled themselves, did not escape the fellowship of illusion. Read on →

I’m particularly fond of numbers 20 and 23.

50 mysterious photographs

Octopus

I’ve been reading Jaron Lanier’s excellent book You Are Not a Gadget. He refers to this remarkable footage, which is, of  course, to be found on youtube. An octopus’s camouflage is so extreme that the boundary between body and Read on →

Quotations from Book III

Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love best. “The theatre of all my actions is fallen,” said an antique personage when his chief friend Read on →

‘[Walter] Benjamin reports on the surrealist poet with that lovely, indeed surreal, name, Saint-Pol Roux. He retires to bed about daybreak and fixes a notice to his door:

POET AT WORK.’

From What Colour is the Sacred, Michael Taussig

Some of my favourite lines saved.

Mr. Bulstrode had also a deferential bending attitude in listening, and an apparently fixed attentiveness in his eyes which made those persons who thought themselves worth hearing infer that he was seeking the Read on →

3-12 The Addict 1968

Sleepmonger,
deathmonger,
with capsules in my palms each night,
eight at a time from sweet pharmaceutical bottles
I make arrangements for a pint-sized journey.
I'm the queen of this condition.
I'm an expert on making the trip
and now they

Read on →

Has the theory of the solar system been advanced by graceful manners and conversational tact?

I.x

Mrs. Renfrew, the colonel’s widow, was not only unexceptionable in point of breeding, but also interesting on the ground of her complaint, which puzzled Read on →

[Will Ladislaw]

Genius, he held, is necessarily intolerant of fetters: on the one hand it must have the utmost play for its spontaneity; on the other, it may confidently await those messages from the universe which summon it to its Read on →

More favourite quotes from Book I.

[Casaubon on music]

“I never could look on it in the light of a recreation to have my ears teased with measured noises,” said Mr. Casaubon.

I.vii

“He has got no good red Read on →

Some favourite lines from Middlemarch saved.

Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable Read on →

‘What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?’

Chapter LXXII

A remark made by Dorothea

The Star-Splitter

Robert Frost reading one of his own.

‘[My] article of faith is that the human race will continue to live for ever and will develop and progress without limit. This is an assumption that I must make for my peace of mind. Living is worthwhile if one Read on →

‘I don’t see how you can work on physics and write poetry at the same time. In science, you want to say something nobody knew before, in words everyone can understand. In poetry, you are bound to say something that Read on →

From Chapter LIV.

Mrs. Cadwallader said, privately, “You will certainly go mad in that house alone, my dear. You will see visions. We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same Read on →

Play

A transcendent moment from Bach’s St Matthew Passion spotted by Karl Richter but missed by many other conductors.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8303730/Princesse-Ghislaine-de-Polignac.html

‘If less is more, is nothing too much?’

I don’t know who said it, or where I came across this remark, but I like it. I could claim it as my own.

‘the sanity of an expansive, disorderly existence.’

Philip Roth

We’re looking for life on Mars, and we don’t even know what’s on Earth

Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

Arthur C Clarke

Sir Paul Nurse the President of the Royal Society spoke in defence of the scientific method on last week’s Horizon. Why did the program leave me feeling uneasy? Certainly he comes across as a likeable man; dedicated to what he Read on →

Our lives are Swiss --
So still -- so Cool --
Till some odd afternoon
The Alps neglect their Curtains
And we look farther on!

Italy stands the other side!
While like a guard between --
The solemn Alps --

Read on →

At death, in the afterworld, the heart was weighed in a balance. On the other side of the balance is a feather. A life well-lived would have made the heart light. Lighter than the feather.

After death the brain was Read on →

According to the ancients, a vein from this finger runs directly to the heart, which is how it came to be the wedding ring finger. I got this from The Finger: A handbook by Angus Trumble. It sounds suspiciously like Read on →

My favourite index entry, a long ago gift from my friend H, comes from Boswell’s London Journal. I thought I could find it on line to cut and paste, but no luck. I’m going to have to type the whole Read on →

‘When you make a thing it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don’t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and Read on →

Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana

Groucho Marx

But then when I look on Wikipedia, I see that Groucho Marx probably didn’t say it. It’s a sentence used in linguistics to show how syntactically ambiguous sentences Read on →

The radio comes on around 8.15. Sometimes I notice and sometimes I do not. Certainly at that time on a  Sunday I’m a long way off getting up. I’ve never understood those who say, ‘I woke up so I got Read on →

Front page story in today’s Sunday Times: ‘Middeltons won’t meet Queen until wedding.’ I’d happily see the monarchy nationalised.  We’d all feel much more grown-up, HMQ herself not excepted.  And yet I do find myself drawn to the performance. It Read on →

Beckett said of old age: ‘I’ve been waiting for it all my life.’ And on another occasion that it was ‘ not to be embarked on lightly.’ Perfect, as always. Where did I find these quotations? Perhaps in one of Read on →

I wish I could stop looking at the comments underneath the day’s Guardian crossword, but I seem not to be able to look away; as if a crash had happened there. I’ve been waiting for nemesis to strike and today Read on →

Reading Middlemarch. Again. Why is re-reading so enjoyable? No anxiety? The author’s ability to sympathise is more apparent to me this second time round, or perhaps it is third time round; and if it is a third time, the first Read on →

Have already bought nine copies and will surely buy more.  And if you haven’t already, there is her earlier book Principles of Uncertainty too. What is it about her work that it is so enlarging? She creates out of her Read on →

I’m reading a mid-nineteenth century book titled Curiosities of History by Francis Buckland, alighted on in some second-hand bookshop. It must have been popular. This a condensed version of the eight volumes, published after the author’s death. Here you can Read on →

I only knew why I’d been driven to write You Are Here some months after I’d actually completed it. At the time, I was too busy worrying if I could write at all.  And if not worrying about that, worrying Read on →

One of the solutions was upas tree. Chambers defines upas as, ‘A fabulous Javanese tree that poisoned everything for miles around.’ Why are dictionary definitions often so satisfying? An art.

Here’s something I read in the current issue of the London Review of Books that took my fancy.

‘Yet it is the sense one has when faced with ancient or exotic things that there is something beyond what can be Read on →

Here’s something from my reading of War and peace, actually from the very good introduction by Richard Pevear to the wonderful translation by the same and his wife: the shortest sentence in War and Peace is kápli kápali, which is Read on →

Did I really manage to read the whole of War and Peace without making a single post. Looks like it.

‘Will they kill thee?’

‘Oah, thatt is nothing. I am good enough Herbert Spencerian, I trust, to meet little thing like death, which is all in my fate, you know. But – but they may beat me.’

p319 in my Read on →

I like this from Steve Jones: ‘philosophy is to science what pornography is to sex’. Quoted in Peter Forbes’ interesting review.

I met Steve Jones at the Dartington Festival last year, and I have to say I was rather terrified Read on →

‘as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other.’

‘Mrs Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.’ Read on →

I recently finished reading Proust (again). Wagner recommended a three-day diet of Bach canatas  coming down from his Ring Cycle. I’m reading Flannery O’Connor to come down from Proust. Certainly O’Connor shares with Bach a vision of the world that Read on →

Hard to know what to read after Proust. The harsh, rock-hewn sentences of Flannery O’Connor have turned out to be an ideal contrast. Amazingly, The Violent Bear It Away doesn’t seem to be in print in a UK edition. I Read on →

Can memory ever be truly faulty given that it can never anyway be faultless? Rather as we have learned to live with the realisation (discovery?) that there is no absolute space and time, we have also learned to live with Read on →

I’ve tried reading the Arabian Nights before, from a couple of selections that are around. Though the one selection started off promisingly (erotic and violent as we have been led to believe), I was soon bored, and the other volume Read on →

We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us – and if we do not agree, seems to puts hands in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does Read on →

Virginia Woolf’s New Year resolutions for 1931 as noted in her diary:

Friday 2 January 1931:
Here are my resolutions for the next three months…
First to have none. Not to be tied. Second to be free and Read on →

DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN

A music drama performed over three days and a preliminary evening

Running time 14-16 hours (depending on the conductor: Keilbert ultra fast, Goodall ultra slow.

Synopsis

Wotan and Fricka are about to move into their lovely Read on →

In the Guardian the other day I read about Anthony Matthews aged 20 a trooper in the Light Dragoons who survived a grenade hit. He was quoted as saying that the experience had been ‘like a scene from Saving Private Read on →

Salley told me afterwards about her friend Brian and what happened as he was sitting down to take his place in the audience. The man next to him lent over and said: ‘I don’t hold with all this Big Bang Read on →

I  wish I could say that I when I travel I am perfectly happy cocooned in a cashmere shawl (no one should travel without one the smarter magazines tell us), absorbed in the penseés of some French philosopher or other, Read on →

One of the reasons I had to give up ashtanga yoga was I getting too competitive, which is hardly the point; looking around to see how deep my neighbour’s down dog. My friend Jane has taken to blogging like the Read on →

THE WAVES (1931) and COLD COMFORT FARM (1932)

‘…that pleasure [of reading] is so great that one cannot doubt that without it the world would be a far different and a far inferior place from what it is. Reading has Read on →

Temenos (τέμενος,[1] from the Greek verb τέμνω “to cut”; plural: temene) is a piece of land cut off and assigned as an official domain, especially to kings and chiefs, or a piece of land marked off from common uses and Read on →

Today the world’s press is dominated by news of Ida, who if nothing else, is an astonishingly well-preserved fossil. Of course she is claimed to be more than that: what the popular media still wants to name THE missing link, Read on →

I was intrigued by a brief editorial comment in this week’s New Scientist. Apparently ‘There is now a CCTV camera that monitors people who are employed to watch CCTV footage… This, though, raises the question of who is monitoring this Read on →

I like curious words, and/or curious definitions. It was my friend Hazel who first alerted me to the word ‘mallemaroking’ as defined in Chambers dictionary. It is a curious word and has a curious definition. Mallemaroking: the carousing of seamen Read on →

Thanks (I think) to quickiebooks for the blog review

http://quickiebooks.blogspot.com/2009/04/you-are-here.html

I’m not quite sure what to make of the statue of Christ posed next to my book, but I like the photographic composition.

It’s obviously a day for surreal blogs, Read on →

In his inaugural address, President Obama told us that his administration ‘will restore science to its rightful place’. If we can agree that former-President Bush’s administration sowed confusion about the nature of science, and confounded its free pursuit, we might Read on →

http://www.rslit.org/content/events/1144

My science round-up of the year was in the Sunday Times dated November 27th 2011, not quite in this form, but these were my overall choices from the year almost past:

Science book of the year:

Knocking on Heaven’s Door

How physics and scientific thinking illuminate the universe and the modern world

Lisa Randall

464pp

Bodley Head

£20

The book that impressed me most this year is Knocking on Heaven’s Door by Lisa Randall, a professor of theoretical physics at Harvard.  Written to vent her frustration about ‘the way science is currently understood and applied,’ it is, in part, the story of the world’s largest and most expensive piece of experimental equipment – the Large Hadron Collider. But more than that, and what makes this book essential reading for anyone interested in science, is Randall’s subtle understanding of how science works. This is an insider’s story. Science is not all about the Big Idea. In fact scientists are much more likely to become obsessed by some small question that they then worry at tenaciously, sometimes for years. Single-minded concentration makes great science, and great art.

The best of the rest:

Emperor of All Maladies

A biography of cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee

592pp

Fourth Estate

£25

The Beginning of Infinity

Explanations that transform the world

David Deutsch

496pp

Allen Lane

£25

The Immortalization Commission

Science and the strange quest to cheat death

John Gray

288pp

Allen Lane

£18.99

Moonwalking with Einstein

The art and science of remembering everything

Joshua Foer

320pp

Allen Lane

£14.99

Incognito

The secret lives of the brain

David Eagleman

304pp

Canongate

£20

Science writing just seems to get better and better. This has been another bumper year. Many familiar names have offered new, sometimes very fine, books – Brian Greene, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Richard Fortey, and Brian Cox have all pitched in – but the very best writing I’ve found elsewhere. Perhaps the finest written of all science books published this year– and remarkably his first book – is The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee, a practising oncologist who has somehow also found time to write a moving and personal history – he calls it a biography – of cancer. ‘To confront cancer,’ Mukherjee writes,  ‘is to encounter a parallel species, one perhaps more adapted to survival than we are.’ Spanning several millennia, this is a narrative filled with heroes – male and female, patients and doctors – and it grips like fiction from the first page.

Oxford professor David Deutsch is a theoretical physicist’s theoretical physicist. He may well be one of the most intelligent beings in the universe. In his latest book – a superb investigation of scientific explanation – Deutsch often comes to what at first feel like counterintuitive conclusions. It is commonly said, for example, that there is nothing particularly special about our earth, an argument meant to bolster the idea that there is life profligately spread across the universe. Deutsch wittily shows us what a typical place in the universe really looks like:  ‘The nearest star would be so far away that if it were to explode as a supernova, and you were staring directly at it when its light reached you, you would not see a glimmer. That is how big and dark the universe is. And it is cold…cold enough to freeze every known substance except helium…And it is empty: the density of atoms out there is below one per cubic metre. That is a million times sparser than atoms in the space between stars.’

I know I’m in the grip of exceptional minds when I find myself moving seamlessly between opposing views as I switch from one science writer to another. Utterly convinced by Deutsch’s scientific optimism when I’m in his company, I find myself equally entranced by John Gray’s exhilarating nihilism when I’m in his. In the Immortalisation Commission, Gray is at it again, this time exposing the dangers of science’s curious obsession with eternal life: ‘In this materialist Rapture the dead will be resurrected as “pure thought,”’ he tells us, and all lower forms of life will be left behind.  ‘The resurrection of the dead at the end of time is not as incredible as the idea that humanity, equipped with growing knowledge, is marching towards a better world.’ ‘No form of human behaviour is more religious than the attempt to convert the world to unbelief…’ As grim as they usually are, Gray’s brisk, provocative, and beautifully written assertions often make me laugh out loud with delight.

The most entertaining science book of the year is another first book, Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. Though he claims to have an average memory, Foer became America’s Memory Champion after just a year in training. Memory techniques, it seems, haven’t changed much in 2,500 years. The best way to recall an array of disparate objects is to place each object within some bizarre visual narrative. The more bizarre the better, hence the title. Fantastical erotic associations seem to work best.  Foer’s personal story frames a history of memory from early hunters needing to find the way home, through oral traditions of poetry and religion  (the Buddha’s teachings were passed down orally for 400 years) to modern-day investigations – still very much in their infancy – of memory’s neural underpinning.

I also very much enjoyed Incognito by neuroscientist – and bestselling fiction writer – David Eagleman. We have known we are not at the physical centre of the universe for centuries, now brain science threatens to remove us even from the centre of ourselves. Our conscious self is underpinned by many unconscious selves doing all the hard work; which explains, apparently, why we are statistically more likely to pair up with someone whose first name begins with the same letter as our own.  Eagleman’s book is full of the latest research. It’s breezy, fun and optimistic. John Gray would hate it.

My review in the Sunday Times 30th November 2011

The Quantum Universe

Everything that can happen does happen

Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw

£20

??pp

Allen Lane

Professor Cox’s northern burr, floppy hair, boyish charm, and infectious enthusiasm have made him the poster boy for popular science.  But popular science is a broad church. Writing with Andrew Cohen, Brian Cox has produced two unashamedly popular books that tie in to his TV series: Wonders of the Solar System, and Wonders of the Universe. For tougher intellectual assignments he calls on the assistance of fellow professor of physics, Jeff Forshaw. As a double act they wrote Why Does E=mc²?, an engaging investigation of the famous equation that underpins Einstein’s theory of special relativity, a book which judged the aspirational end of the popular science market well. In the Quantum Universe, the duo take on an even tougher challenge: to explain quantum physics to a lay reader.

Quantum physics – the theory that describes the forces and particles that make up the physical world – is famously challenging. Richard Feynman once claimed that no one understands quantum mechanics, Einstein famously refused to believe in it (‘God does not play dice’), and Niels Bohr wrote that ‘those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum mechanics cannot possibly have understood it.’ It was Heisenberg who realised that it was necessary to abandon the idea of commonsense when describing the world of small things. As Cox and Forshaw point out: ‘The physics as understood by Newton emerges out of the quantum description, and it is important to realise it is not “Newton for big things and quantum for small,” it’s quantum all the way.’  This doesn’t mean that our world of large things isn’t real, just that the reality that underpins it is quite different from how it appears to be. This kind of thinking, the authors acknowledge, is ‘a doorway through which all sorts of charlatans and purveyors of tripe can force their philosophical musings.’ Cox and Forshaw, needless to say, are not big on philosophical musing, though they do pause, now and again, to throw in something mind-blowing. It is wrong, they tell us, to think that definite things are happening in our world, such a view is  ‘a consequence of our crude perceptions of the world. It really is conceivable that, at some time in our future, something can happen to us which requires that in the past we did two mutually opposite things.’ To understand why, in the event, this hardly matters, you will need to read the book.

There are many ‘popular’ books on quantum physics, but what makes this attempt novel is that the writers take an intellectual rather than historical approach, reducing the world not just to elementary particles, but to the faces of clocks. Quite why this is possible is hard to say in a few words. In quantum physics, elementary particles are no longer separate things, but are, instead, waves of probability that unfold in time. It is the undulating, phase-like nature of these waves rolling forwards in time that can be related to clock faces. It’s a surprisingly rich idea that allows the authors to avoid using too much mathematics, but it does make for a generally rather dry read. Profuse apologies for sections that come with the whiff of ‘tweed and chalk dust’ aren’t quite enough to expel either. The nice Professor Cox shows a sterner side when writing with Professor Forshaw: ‘That should be no surprise,’ they warn us, ‘If if is, then you’d better start reading the book again from the beginning.’ I felt like I was being sent to the back of the class. The authors protest too often that this is not a text book. It would make a great text book. It’s hard going as entertainment.

My review in the Sunday Times, 11th September 2011

Knocking on Heaven’s Door

How physics and scientific thinking illuminate the universe and the modern world

Lisa Randall

£20

Bodley Head

464pp

The Magic of Reality

How we know what’s really true

Richard Dawkins

Illustrated by Dave McKean

£20

Bantam Press

272pp

Lisa Randall – a professor of particle physics and cosmology at Harvard – needed to vent her frustration about ‘the way science is currently understood and applied.’ Knocking on Heaven’s Door – written with dry wit and ice-cool clarity – is the result. Modern science, as Randall tells it, is the story of how humans have used technology to extend the reach of their senses.

Four hundred years after Galileo placed a couple of lenses in a tube and swung the crude device up into the night sky, the telescope has become the space observatory. Galileo was the first human being to see clearly the mountains on the moon. The Planck satellite, launched in 2009, was sent out to look for the faintest evidence of radiation left over from the Big Bang.  It is not due to deliver its best data for several more years yet.

The microscope has become the particle collider, which, by injecting and concentrating large amounts of energy into tiny regions of space, occasionally and fleetingly calls into existence the tiniest constituents of the fabric of reality. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, will not be operating at full power for a year or two yet, and produces so much data that it may take several more years before any discoveries can be claimed definitively.

It is easy to be overwhelmed by Big Science, but, as Randall points out, scientists don’t usually set out to answer the Big Questions, they more likely become obsessed about some small question that they then worry at tenaciously, sometimes for years. The irony of the LHC is that although it is enormous – 27 kilometres of tunnel 4 metres wide built deep underground housing 1232 magnets each 30 tonnes and 15 metres long – what is truly jaw-dropping is the fineness of the measurements being made. Individual proton collisions carry no more kinetic energy than two mosquitoes flying into each other, and even then most of the energy of the collision is carried forward with the rest of the beam as it makes its 11,000 circuits of the tunnel every second.

Out of years of data – the accumulated record of a billion collisions every second – evidence from just a handful of collisions of the right sort may be all that is needed to point current theory in a completely new direction. The history of physics is one of increasingly subtle and refined measurement made by increasingly ingenious and indirect means. Fortunately, the game is likely to be never-ending. The universe is subtlest.

Knocking on Heaven’s Door is a book anyone at all interested in science must read, and which everyone ought to read. This is surely the science book of the year.

Richard Dawkins’ latest book is a surprise. The man who is fast becoming the nation’s irascible teddy bear has written a delightful book for children (that may tempt parents, too, after lights out). The Magic of Reality is a charming and free-ranging history of science. Go back through the family photo album and meet your 170,000,000-greats grandmother, or learn how we come down with flu.  Imaginatively chosen detail – did you know that there’s an Alaskan frog that spends winter frozen into a block of ice? – keeps the narrative lively. I wish there had been such a book when I was a schoolboy.  I would have devoured it, and pored over the beautiful illustrations. I would probably even have enjoyed Dawkins’ re-telling of various ancient myths that he has collected from cultures around the globe and throughout history. As an adult these sections feel like mild propaganda. But that’s OK; as a teenager I loved the Narnia books and they’re propaganda too.

My review in the Sunday Times, Sunday 14th August 2011.

Shooting Angels

Christopher Hope

Atlantic Books

272pp

£17.99

Christopher Hope’s latest novel – his ninth – is certainly ambitious. It is set in an archetypal and unnamed country, whose history could well be read as the history of all nations: ‘Ours is a land marinated in aggression, hatred and anger. We follow a pattern of destruction which began in the time of the indigenes, who were wiped out by the incomers, who were in turn massacred by the settlers. Then came the colonialists, who decimated the settlers, and who were then stamped upon by the imperialists, and so on. Subjugation, followed by oppression, followed by a succession of tyrannical ventures passing themselves off as governments, culminating in a religious tyranny, when the imperialists were eliminated by a small band of despotic zealots.’

Christopher Hope has created an engaging narrator in Charlie, a droll and hard-bitten outsider who in late middle age finds himself living in a ‘dump in the desert, chasing shadows.’ He has reluctantly taken a job teaching remedial English to children interested only in speaking the local patois, and who wear T-shirts that read: ‘Speak the mother tongue or drop dead’. Charlie’s pupils live only for Hollywood violence: ‘they cannot endure for long anything that can’t be viewed on a screen.’  Charlie, too, with his mordant and swaggering tone, is presumably meant to recall the archetypes of Hollywood gumshoe and cowboy.

When a childhood friend with the portentous name of Joe Angel comes to town with an unspecified mission, to be revealed only if Charlie will meet him at an agreed time in the country’s unnamed capital, the novel takes on another archetype: that of the mystery story. And when Charlie reluctantly turns up to the meeting – only to discover that Joe has been killed – the mystery soon turns into murder mystery.

In the decades since Joe and Charlie were at school together – taught by a band of eccentric Catholic brothers, Joe has made a fortune out of cement, worked his way through many wives, and, somewhat improbably, become a virtuoso on the flute, as well as media tycoon and supporter of the disadvantaged. Saint or sinner? it is, unfortunately, hard to care when so many of the secondary characters are as thinly drawn as they are here. It is not often I wish a novel longer than it is, but Shooting Angels could have benefitted from being twice the length.  These pages feel like sketches towards a much longer novel.

Odd sentences shine out. Charlie remembers the statue of the Virgin Mary in the school chapel, with its ‘halo tilted slightly over one eye, rather like the skeletal remains of a celestial straw boater.’ But these few beacons cannot save a narrative that becomes overburdened with signs and symbols. Hope needs more room if he is to properly integrate material that veers from photography and terrorism to the lives of Al Capone and John Calvin. Rather than adding depth, references to quantum entanglement and angelology feel pretentious: ‘In fact, we were all elementary particles assigned a value by those who observed and plotted our paths in an experiment they controlled.’

Hope’s characters are left flailing for answers long after this reader had ceased to care. ‘It was a strange feeling, terrible but somehow full of – what – light?’ At some point a novel has to stop asking questions and begin to answer a few.

My review in the Sunday Times 15/5/2011.

The Death of the Adversary

Hans Keilson

Vintage Classics

£12.99

224pp

Anne Frank’s diary and Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, two classics of Holocaust literature, were both published in 1947. After a slow start, Frank’s diary became an international bestseller in the 1950s, but history took longer to grant Levi’s book classic status, and only in the late 1980s did his account of his experiences at Auschwitz find its rightful place in the canon.

Is something similar about to happen to Hans Keilson? A German Jew who trained as a doctor but was not permitted to practise, Keilson fled to the Netherlands in 1936, where he spent the war in hiding. For most of his long life since he has practised as a child psychiatrist, specialising in trauma.

Quite how many novels Keilson has written is unclear. Last year, to mark his 100th birthday, Hesperus Press issued, for the first time in English, his 1947 novel Comedy in a Minor Key. A short, mordant tale of the Dutch resistance, the novel was published in America alongside a reissue of The Death of the Adversary, which was written in 1942, buried for safekeeping and didn’t find a publisher until 1959 (an English edition followed three years later). Reviewing the two together in The New York Times, Francine Prose called them masterpieces, and Keilson a genius. In response, Keilson said that genius is what Americans call you when they like your work. Now that The Death of the Adversary has found a UK publisher, we can make up our own minds.

Separating Keilson’s great age and life experience from his fictional writings makes critical judgment more perilous than it usually is. The Death of the Adversary subtly undermines any attempt to review it. The novel purports to be a journal that had been buried by its unnamed author. That he is a German Jew in hiding from the Nazis, and that his adversary is Hitler, is not made explicit. A Dutch lawyer who comes into possession of the papers two years after the war asks an unnamed reader — perhaps a client, perhaps an acquaintance — to read them and give his opinion. It is unclear what kind of opinion is being asked for. Is it the manuscript’s veracity that is being questioned, or is a literary judgment being sought? In this intense, profound novel, the questions posed in the unearthed pages are as elliptical as the attempts made to answer them. Yet, taken together, it is clear that Keilson means to try to shed light on perhaps the most vexing of all human questions: what are we in relation to evil?

By removing historical markers, Keilson turns the struggle between the narrator and his adversary into something Manichean: “I could not give him up; I needed him.” At times the writing takes on an almost biblical quality: “A rushing in the sky, as when a strong ancient tree is cut down, an arrow, shot into the glittering blue of winter: my mind is in festive mood, my enemy is entering the white land of his death.” But the writer’s brilliance — perhaps, yes, genius — is to ground the cosmic in the human scale. The description of a department store seen as a microcosm of the world, of the misery of possessions and the suffering of desire, is unforgettable, and funny. The scene in which the narrator helps his father pack a rucksack for the dreadful journey coming somewhere in the future is almost unbearable.

Sentences of high poetic fancy are counterbalanced by ones of utter simplicity. “They took the old people away” – that plain sentence, when it comes, quietly dropped into the narrative, goes off like a bomb.

Keilson’s parents were killed in Auschwitz.

My review in the Sunday Times, 1st May 2011

In 1899 the commissioner of the US Office of Patents declared that “everything that can be invented has been invented”. The founder of Warner Brothers wondered in 1927 “who the hell Read on →

My review in the Sunday Times April 9th 2011.

There are five pages of source notes at the end of this long and puzzling novel. They list the many and various reference materials David Lodge has drawn on to Read on →

My review in the Sunday Times 27th March 2011

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan

Corsair

£14.99

288pp

One of the pleasures of good writing is being taken to a world we might otherwise have no experience of, Read on →

My review in the Sunday Times 6th March 2011.

Unfortunately in the printed review what should read as 10⁵⁰⁰, comes out as 10,500, which rather dilutes my point.

The Book of Universes

John D Barrow

368pp

£20

Bodley Head

The Read on →

My review in the Sunday Times, 6th February 2011

Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Jonah Lehrer

Canongate

£16.99

256pp

Science writing today is a broad Church. It has its engaging popularisers (Marcus Chown, Ben Goldacre and Simon Singh spring to mind), Read on →

My review in the Sunday Times/July 2010

Drawing the Map of Life:

Inside the Human Genome Project

Victor K McElheny

Basic Books

UK price not on jacket, says £16.99 on Amazon

376pp

The Human Genome Project  (HGP) was the name Read on →

My review in the Sunday Times July 2010

Things We Didn’t See Coming

Steven Amsterdam

Harvill Secker

£12.99

208pp

For over a century now, the dystopian novel has often proved itself to be both a commercial and literary success. From Read on →

My review in the Sunday Times/September 2010

The Grand Design

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow

Bantam Press

£18.99

208pp

‘When I find myself in the company of scientists’, the poet W H Auden once wrote, ‘I feel like a shabby Read on →

My review in the Sunday Times/September 2010

Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe

Roger Penrose

Bodley Head

£25

300pp

In 1988, Stephen Hawking, the most famous living physicist, and Roger Penrose, the most famous living mathematician, Read on →

My review in the Sunday Times/31st October 2010

The Finger: A Handbook

Angus Trumble

Yale

320pp

£18.99

We’d be nothing without our fingers, and yet most finger expressions are pejorative: pull your finger out, get your fingers burned, be light-fingered, Read on →

My review in the Sunday Times/7th November 2010

Hand Me Down World

Lloyd Jones

John Murray

£14.99

320pp

In capable hands – I’m thinking of, say, Henry James in The Turn of the Screw, Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita or Kazuo Read on →

My review for the Sunday Times Xmas round-up of science books 2010.

Alex’s Adventures in Numberland: Dispatches from the Wonderful World of Mathematics

Alex Bellos

Bloomsbury

£18.99

448pp

Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe

Roger Penrose Read on →

My review in the Sunday Times 9th January 2011

How to Read the Air

Dinaw Mengestu

Jonathan Cape

320pp

£16.99

Dinaw Mengestu’s acclaimed first novel, Children of the Revolution, was in part the story of an Ethiopian refugee living in Read on →