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 find out how best to secret jewels about the person to avoid highway robbers (bury under the flesh of the left arm and let the skin heal over, apparently: ‘I fear, however, that if his precious depot were suspected, any robbers into whose hands he might fall would fairly mince him to pieces in search of further treasures.’ Or how about the efficacious properties of dugong oil, as good as Cod Liver oil but without the nauseous taste or smell: ‘Messrs. J Bell & Co., 338 Oxford Street, have a large stock of it on hand at the present time.’ Then there’s the moss called Usnea that ‘is found on the heads of men that have been hung in gibbets, or the like. The English druggists  generally bring these heads from Ireland…This moss was used in the composition of the “sympathetick ointment” available in the cure of “falling sickness”. Giants, mummies, penny microscopes made from a drop of heated tree gum and a matchbox, Natator the Human Frog, Natator eats a bun under water, the performing Bull, performing fleas, the monster pig, Blondin’s imitation of an ape, fossil butter, fossil pork, and much much more!
I’ve long been a fan of the Bucklands, who as a family dedicated themselves (among other things) to eating their way through the animal kingdom. Father William was Dean of Christchurch Oxford, where he kept crocodiles in the round pond in the quad. Notable visitors have recorded being served such things as mice on toast for breakfast. Francis tells how, on hearing that a nearby zoo had burned to the ground, father and son rushed to the scene in the hopes of tasting rare flesh. Unfortunately they were some days after the event and the cheetah steaks were already rather high. William said the worst thing he’d ever tasted was a mole, though I think he changed his mind when he ate a bluebottle. In Italy they were shown the miraculous patch of stone eternally wet from the blood of some saint. Before he could be stopped William was on his hands and knees licking the ground. Bat’s urine, was his laconic response. He was also a noted geologist. Once when his driver got lost, he stopped the coach, picked up a handful of earth, sniffed it, and declared, ‘Ah, Uxbridge!’

Even the appendices of this book are fascinating. Though why I say that I don’t know. Appendices are often the best parts of a book. Ancient deposits of buried butter occasionally turn up in Irish bogs. (Well they did then, I don’t know if they still do.) Bog butter is very old butter that has turned to adiopocere. Under the right -damp – conditions animal flesh can turn to adiopocere too. Adiopocere is a kind of fossilised fat. Buckland speculates that bog butter may in fact be the  product over time of some bog-stranded cow. In the appendix, however, he notes that in fact bogs have the opposite effect on flesh. The acidic conditions tend to preserve it. Bog butter turns out to be indeed just butter. The ancient Irish had a pension for rancid butter. They used to bury it, but sometimes must have forgotten where.

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 about how I was ever going to organise the ridiculously free-ranging material I’d collected. Actually, it was the working out of a structure for the book that distracted me from the fear of writing it. Once I knew what I had to say, I just got on with saying it. Seems like an obvious strategy, but it took me by surprise. (In that perennial argument  about style versus content I’ve always been a style man. I can’t imagine how a writer who knows how to say something hasn’t also got something to say. Whereas the reverse is certainly not the case. Plenty to say but no style, no thanks.)

I’ve always been interested in science. As an editor at Fourth Estate  I worked with many science writers: Simon Singh, Matt Ridley, Peter Singer, V S Ramachandran, Peter Forbes, Marcus Du Sautoy, Henry Gee, Timothy Taylor, James Gleick, Eric Drexler, and Dava Sobel, among them. Some of these writers are also actual scientists. I am not a scientist of course, and it’s over thirty years since I read mathematics, and then history and philosophy of science at university. I never thought I’d end up writing a science book myself. Not in a million years (or even a billion years now that we know what a really long time looks like). Despite my science-based education, I’ve always felt like an outsider from the world of the arts daring to peek in. I haven’t had a mathematical thought since I left university, and even during those years long gone, I spent most of my time reading novels and going to the opera. (Mathematics is the perfect subject for the lazy student.) I like that thing Auden said about scientists, that whenever he found himself in their company he felt like some shabby curate who had stumbled into a drawing-room full of dukes. There’s something about the way scientists think that can be really intimidating. It’s hard to live in a world in which even one’s most casual remarks are liable to be scrutinised for logical inconsistency.

What really interest me, and interests very few scientists, is what it is that they are doing when they do science, and whether it leaves room for anything else. Scientists are just happy to get on with what it is that they do. And very successful they are at it too. But I’m interested in the philosophy of what that is. On the whole, scientists despise philosophers. As the biologist Steve Jones once remarked: ‘philosophy is to science what pornography is to sex.’ He’s not being complimentary.

Science really got going 401 years ago when Galileo first raised a telescope to the Heavens and described what he saw there. What he saw was a reality made out of things that move. Science tells us what the stuff of reality is made out of, and what we mean by motion. It turns out that it is hard to answer these questions. The material of reality takes us on a voyage down to ‘virtual’ particles that exist (if they can be said to exist) in a so-called vacuum of writhing energy. And what we mean by motion takes us in both directions: out into a possibly infinite universe in which all motion is related to the motion of light in a four-dimensional space-time continuum, and back down to a quantum world in which the motion of even a single atom is unpredictable (and where space and time may exist in 11 dimensions). But for all the subtlety of our current scientific theories, the story of creation can be reduced to a single sentence: The universe is a patch of radiation that expanded. Alternatively, we can say that the universe is a patch of radiation that evolved. The expansion and evolution are equivalent terms. Evolve is merely what radiation does in an expanding universe. Various fields, including the famous Higgs field, explain how radiation becomes matter. As the expanding space cools down, these primeval parts of matter coalesce into atoms, and eventually under the force of gravity into large agglomerations that ignite, and which we call stars. Some of the larger stars explode and spew heavier elements into the universe for the first time. Simple compounds like water and carbon dioxide emerge, and other more complicated molecules like hydrocarbons. And if the conditions are just so on small planets that are not too cold, and not too hot, with just the right sort of gravitational stability, and protected from damaging radiation by a strong enough magnetic field, then just possibly these conditions are fair for life to emerge. These so-called goldilocks conditions have existed at least once in the universe, and perhaps exist prolifically across  it. The jury is still out on that one. An opinion either way has to be a matter of belief at this point.

Science is about separating and naming, and looking and describing. Science isolates phenomena and names them before it attempts to describe them. The world is a world ‘out there’ of separateness. This is very different from, say, a Buddhist description of nature, which tells us that the separation is an illusion. Curiously, the different stances aren’t as far apart as it seems. What science does is relate separate phenomena together into descriptions, or theories. Science advances by relating more and more things together into a unified whole. The methodology is one thing, and what comes out of the methodology something else altogether. If you like, the methodology is the illusion, and the wholeness the reality. Such a philosophical understanding of what it is that science does, also helps to explain why science can make us feels so isolated from nature. The separation is the starting point, but not where the end point. Ultimately, science has to account for us – we human observers -  at the end (as far as we can tell) of a chain of complexity that stretches from the Big Bang to what  we call ‘now,’ the present moment. After four hundred years science has only just begun to understand how to address such complexity as we are.

Science has a methodology that it uses to approach the truth. Observation, measurement, theory and technology feed into each other into a positive feedback loop that we call progress. Finer measurement leads to deeper theorising. Theories come and go, each encompassing the one that precedes it, showing where the previous theory holds and why it breaks down. The current theory is always truer than the one that came before because it has greater explanatory power. Science moves from true to truer. It’s great strength is that it never has to use the demon word ‘truth’. There is no such thing in science as ‘the truth’ only theories that are truer than what has gone before.

In his wonderful The God Delusion Dawkins distinguishes between deists, theists and atheists. For atheists there is nothing other than the evolution of stuff. Theists believe that God created and continues to interfere in his creation. And for deists, God created the universe and stepped back from his creation. Dawkins writes of his youthful attraction to deism, before his later adherence to full-blown atheism. In typical Dawkins fashion he is most scornful of those who claim to be agnostic. He tells us that science has no need of a creator only an explanation of the universe’s starting conditions. Well, I don’t see how this gets us very far. The starting conditions merely get more elusive, as indeed does the universe itself, the more we know about those conditions.

God simply has got nothing to do with a scientific description of the universe, the only real question is whether one believes, or not ,that a scientific description is all that there is.

Well, there’s art. Here’s Peter Campbell writing in the London Review of Books about the current exhibition of Henry Moore at Tate Britain:

‘Yet it is the sense one has when faced with ancient or exotic things that there is something beyond what can be grasped by mere inspection, if only some priest or shaman could give the correct interpretations, that makes the obscure impressive. We don’t necessarily need to know what things mean, but we do like to think they mean something: we want to know what Stonehenge was for.

No modern sculpture is embedded in systems of belief of that sort. With Moore you must look to your own responses for explanations of what you see and feel.’

Agnosticism is the acknowledgement that there things  – most things I would say – that are beyond what can be understood, and always will be.  A certain kind of rationalist will put aside the unknown and be happy to wait for a rational, scientific description later. I say,  if we wait too long we might forget what the questions are that we don’t know the answers to. I’m happy to stand up for agnostics.

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 grasped by mere inspection, if only some priest or shaman could give the correct interpretations, that makes the obscure impressive. We don’t necessarily need to know what things mean, but we do like to think they mean something: we want to know what Stonehenge was for.

No modern sculpture is embedded in systems of belief of that sort. With Moore you must look to your own responses for explanations of what you see and feel.’

London Review of Books 25 March 2010 Peter Campbell reviewing an exhibition of Henry Moore at Tate Britain.

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 translated by the Pevears as drops dripped. Richard Peavear uses this example to illustrate the quality of their translation, that it pays close attention to the musicality of the original. Interestingly, none of the other translations translate these two words with such poetry or with the same attention to the rhythm of the original words.

‘Drops dripped. Quiet talk went on. Horses neighed and scuffled. Someone snored.’

Wonderful stuff.

The death of Andrei is of course a highlight. I was shocked to hear him say the words Piti, piti, and boom, boom. I immediately heard the Prokofiev music that accompanies these words in the opera, without having been aware what was going on in the opera. I’d assumed they were Prokofiev’s invention and not Tolstoy’s. Such an odd and miraculous passage both in the novel and in the opera.

I’ve got behind. Perhaps I won’t say anything about reading Pnin. Disappointing. There I’ve said something. Too clever by half. There’s something else.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle was recommended by a friend and all I can say is that I wish I’d written it myself, or that I’d read it as a child. Loved it. Amazing what  writers for children can get away with.

I read all 620 pages of American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. Didn’t mean to but couldn’t put it down.

And I read a Canadian novel that my paperback publisher Stephanie Sweeney gave to me, and for the life of me I can’t remember what it’s called, which ist errible of me but not untypical. I left my copy with my mother and can’t check just at the moment. It has a really wonderful opening, and again I devoured all 480 pages of it in a day or two.

I read Tolstoy’s last short story Hadji Murat. It could have been written yesterday the style is so fresh and the content so relevant.

And I never got back about finishing Proust again. My memory wasn’t entirely at fault. Marcel does not go back to venice, but I had forgotten that physical travel is not the only kind of travel available to him. He does go back in memory as he steps on the threshold just before the long amazing last scene called le bal de tetes.

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 old Macmillan 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 that 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.’

The use 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 kindly with myself, not goading 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 new home, but first 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 changed 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, or is that 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 →

UK REVIEWS

One of the best popular science books I have ever read. It fully lives up to the hype generated by the pre-publication reviews and by Stephen Fry’s blurb on the dustjacket.

Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

One of the most entertaining and thoughtful pop-science books to be published for years.

The Sunday Times Summer Reading top 6 choices in non-fiction

Erudite, elegant and thoughtfully constructed.

Wonderful stuff, the most thoughtful pop science book of the last few years.

Rod Liddle, The Sunday Times

In this book, which is hugely fun to read, Christopher Potter, who is not a scientist by trade, tries to explain everything — by which I mean everything in the universe — in slightly less than 300 pages. I read it in an evening, with a sense of increasing excitement, and then vertigo, and finally a sort of stunned awe. Potter has written a wonderful account of the universe we live in, which is also a history of science, and touches, in some places, on a philosophical investigation.

Potter will inspire lots of people.

William Leith, The Standard

With marvellous clarity, compassion, erudition, humour and open-mindedness, Potter blasts us through the vast vacuum of space. Packing in facts about satellites, planets and rotating black holes, he takes us to the outer limits of an expanding universe. Then he sucks us back through the mini-universes inside ourselves, to atoms and their component particles and on into quantum theory. He explains the theories of Aristotle, Newton, Einstein, Darwin and Dirac, giving the “unfeeling” science a human context by quoting from poets, prophets and philosophers of all eras and ethnicities. We’re guided through the mysteries of the Large Hadron Collider and asked to consider forces deemed “unworthy” of science, like love. We’re reminded that all knowledge is provisional and reassured that: “To be at peace with the universe is not easy.”

Helen Brown, The Telegraph

He effortlessly transcends any nonsense about CP Snow’s “two cultures” (science vs humanities) as he weaves together physics, philosophy, palaeoanthropology and Proust into a grand synthesis. Although a mathematician by training, he eschews equations and is disarmingly honest about his (and our) limitations. Potter has a relaxed, man-in-an-armchair voice and an urbanity that put me in mind of Alastair Cooke, but talking about pulsars and genomes rather than American politicians.

Andy Martin,  The Independent

We are waltzed through a history of scientific thinking, a brief history of human development (with genetics thrown in) and a brisk briefing on the formation and history of our galaxy.

Less folksy and biographical than Bill Bryson, less zany than a Bluffer’s Guide. But many a bang for your buck, washed down with quotations from the greats.

Almost no scientific knowledge is required because it is all supplied by the book itself, though a familiarity with arithmetic would come in handy when those big numbers are being bandied about.

Potter has an engaging style, with many an entertaining diversion.

Rita Carter, The Mail

This “Portable History of the Universe” is awe-inspiring in its reach. It ranges easily over millions of miles and takes in billions of centuries at a stroke, yet at the same time it’s somehow intimate and conversational in its manner.

His book opens up to us the vastness of the cosmos.

Michael Kerrigan, The Scotsman

Christopher Potter’s new book sweeps across both space and time in an ambitious attempt to show what science has revealed about our place in the cosmos in a way that is accessible and yet doesn’t skimp on the science.

Potter’s crisp, authoritative writing and his deft handling of difficult subjects makes this a book worth reading.

Anyone drawn to “the big questions” will enjoy this latest synthesis.

Dan Falk, New Scientist

‘Hottest page-turners this season’.
[Chosen as the perfect book to take away on a romantic weekend!]
‘This surprisingly entertaining layman’s guide to the universe will put petty squabbles into perspective and provide you with something to discuss over dinner.’
The London Paper

An immensely enjoyable, accessible and enlightening explanation of 13.7 billion years of history.

You’ll feel a whole lot cleverer once you’ve read this entertaining and informed labour of love from a man who draws on his wealth of literary and intellectual experience to illuminate a lifelong interest in trying to understand where nature and science collide.

Robert Gwyn Palmer, Angel & North magazine

CANADIAN REVIEWS

An idiosyncratic, encyclopedic blitzkrieg of a book.

Even if you already know the science Potter surveys, his speed and style will keep you reading. He’s a clean, swift writer, as likely to quote John Updike, Thomas Mann, or Friedrich Nietzsche as he is Richard Feynman or Isaac Newton. And this book is very briskly paced; in less than 300 pages, he left me dizzy.

Anthony Doerr, Boston Globe

Reading “You Are Here” is like taking a guided tour of the universe with a private car and driver. Potter discourses with ease while all the grand theories and grand thinkers – relativity, evolution, quantum field theory, string theory, Pythagoras, Galileo, Einstein – flash by the window. He meditates on the origins and ascent of life through the eons, on the infinitesimally tiny atom systems within our bodies and the infinitely vast galactic systems beyond our own, cavorting on the edge of the space-time continuum in a way that tends to make people unbearably nervous: to induce existential vertigo, as he puts it more elegantly, giving us in the course of a few hours’ time quite an advanced education in certainties and their opposite.

Amanda Heller, Boston Globe

You’ve got to love a man who sets out on a journey of the impossible and kindly invites you along.

You Are Here is a fun, accessible read that will satisfy any explorer’s curiosity.

Shelley Bindon, Edmonton Journal

Straddling the divide between philosophy and literature, and contemporary scientific ideas, You Are Here is an inspired, erudite and, for the benefit of the less mathematically inclined, equation-eschewing layman’s guide to the evolution of the universe.

Laced with insightful quotations from Proust, Thomas Mann, John Updike and dozens of other seminal writers and philosophers, Potter’s work deftly meshes together a small encyclopedia of astronomical facts, figures, and theories into a cradle-to-grave story of the universe — an evolutionary expansion over more than 13 billion years from what he terms a minuscule “patch of light” to the heavens as they appear today.

Robert Scott, The Gazette (Montreal)

You Are Here is a fun, accessible read that will satisfy any explorer’s curiosity. Buy it.

National Post (Canada)

AMERICAN REVIEWS

One of the best short surveys of science and its history in recent years.

Kirkus Review

Fun, highly readable guide to the origin’s of the universe

New York magazine

For those who found Stephen Hawking as clear as a black hole, Christopher Potter’s You Are Here offers a friendly, poetic introduction to our current understanding of the big bang, relativity, evolution, life, particle physics and the universe in general.

Potter is here to hold our hands and walk us through the universe, and he is an excellent tour guide.

Potter has created a friendly and poetic introduction to the current understanding of the universe. He begins by mapping out the heavens, light-year by light-year, and then turns his gaze to the minuscule and the quantum (admitting, even, that some scientists think quantum physics makes no sense). He covers evolution and explains the birth process of a star, all the while sparing us from feeling like idiots if we get lost in the theory.
“Nature resists our attempts to uncover her secrets,” the author writes. That she does — but at least we have writers as patient and clever as Christopher Potter to translate those secrets we have uncovered.

Jessa Crispin, Books We Like, NPR

Potter’s genial exegesis of the mysteries of the universe, in which quarks, squarks, and “vibrating lengths of pure energy” are elegantly expounded.

He gives a foothold to the floundering with evocative description—“A beard grows a few nanometres in the time taken to raise a razor to the skin”—and with liberal doses of trivia. Among other things, he notes that the moon was formed when a huge planetary collision blew the crust of the earth into the atmosphere, and that the human body contains ten times as many bacterial cells as human ones. Most compellingly, Potter examines the provisional nature of scientific inquiry, in which conjecture can lead to insight and a weakness of a hypothesis can become a strength.

New Yorker

Any reader who has avoided science for fear of being overwhelmed will find a friendly guide in Potter.

This clear and smoothly written look at the mind-boggling history of everything is both informative and provocative.

Publishers Weekly

Christopher Potter is a skilled writer with a sincere interest in the search for the secrets of the universe, and his book is a layman’s compelling journey that succeeds in mapping out the complicated evolution of science and its quest for knowledge.

You Are Here is a triumph of popular science that clearly and succinctly elucidates the significance of the subject at hand. It is a book that should be put into the hands of every high school freshman, so they may better understand the goals and purposes of physics, astronomy, biology, chemistry, and anthropology before their leaden, lifeless textbooks chase them out of science classrooms. It is a book that should be read by adults, to attain a fuller picture of how our world works, so they may take some time to fully contemplate the enormity of what surrounds them and the improbability of their own existence.

Michael Patrick Brady, popmatters

Potter explores relativity, quantum theory, evolution, antimatter, the big bang, the nature of being and the ultimate destiny of our species. It all sounds quite heady, but it’s actually accessible and entertaining as Potter wittily clarifies the links between the immense universe and the infinitesimal quantum world. We are all connected.

Smart Money

Every thing you need to know about science.

There’s too much in here to internalize on one reading, so — and what more praise does a book need — you’re going to have to read it again. Even then, to paraphrase Potter’s quote of the wise Thomas Edison, you probably still won’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.
The Verdict: Read.

Gilbert Cruz, Time magazine

For his elegant debut, Potter set out to write a history of the universe. And if that project sounds ambitious to you, imagine pulling it off in less than 300 pages.

Like the Powers of Ten postcard books you sometimes find in museum gift shops, Potter’s book, You Are Here, begins with impossibly small things (like quarks and electrons), ends with incomprehensibly large ones (stars, galaxies, and the universe itself), and considers string theory, general relativity, and the paradoxes of quantum mechanics along the way. Potter has a knack for rattling off the latest scientific facts without eliding the deeper questions they raise, and he ends up with the mother of them all: Why is there something rather than nothing? That, Potter admits, is a cosmic mystery that science may never solve.

Very Short List

Kirkus review January 15, 2009
(STARRED) Potter, Christopher
YOU ARE HERE: A Portable History of the Universe

A well-executed, consistently readable layperson’s exposition of the state of scientific knowledge.
Potter, the former publisher of Fourth Estate, opens his authorial debut by providing readers with a sense of scale. Starting with the human body as a reference point, he expands the measuring rod by orders of ten, moving from large animals to the tallest buildings up through planets, stars and entire galaxies, to the largest of all objects, the universe—more than ten billion light years across. He then steps back to consider the origin of our units of measuring length and time, and how they relate to our place in the universe. The meter and second were both originally defined in terms of our local environment, he notes, but science is focused on looking for measurable phenomena that are repeatable and presumably universal. Potter takes a tour through early history, noting the attempts of previous thinkers to arrive at universal truths. He notes the Greek fascination with geometry and the Copernican revolution, which removed humanity from the center of the universe. A jump ahead leads to Einstein’s recognition that the speed of light is a constant and that gravity can be described as a distortion of space-time caused by mass. This opens the door to a journey in the other direction, to the very small—from men to mice to microbes, down past subatomic particles to the quark, which has no meaningful dimension. The nature of light opens another window on the universe, one of random phenomena on the quantum scale, where measurement itself becomes problematic. Potter then turns to the history of the universe since the Big Bang, plotting the origins of the macrocosm in the interactions of the smallest particles. Finally, he examines the origins and development of life, leading to—but not culminating in—the human species. Drawing on everyday experience to put the most esoteric phenomena in perspective, he makes his subject clear without dumbing it down.
One of the best short surveys of science and its history in recent years.

For the past 20 years or so, popular-science books have attempted to explain to an incredulous public the latest preposterous theories concocted by scientists to explain mystifying stuff such as quarks, God particles, matter being in two places at the same time, or nowhere at all, electrons on the far side of the universe that seem to know what you’re up to, cats that are simultaneously alive and dead, or neither, and so on. Reading these noble attempts to get the message across – in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, or Martin Rees’s Just Six Numbers – you occasionally note a tone of slight impatience from the author when the really tricky stuff comes along. “Look, you dummies, it just is, ok?”

Or, as Christopher Potter repeatedly puts it in this erudite, elegant and thoughtfully constructed contribution to the genre: “Shut up and calculate!” This is a faux-ironic quote from the greatest and least austere pop scientist of them all, Richard Feynman, who tried to get the message across a generation or so ago in Six Easy Pieces. But even Feynman, a brilliant Nobel prize-winning physicist, struggled; not all of those pieces are that easy, to be honest. More recently Bill Bryson, who is not remotely a scientist, attempted to do the same thing with A Short History of Everything; but you occasionally got the suspicion that Bill didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

Potter’s book works because he is not (quite) a physicist, but nor is he merely a layman. He is a publisher with a fairly modest (he suggests) academic background in mathematics and the history of science. And this is the root of the book’s brilliance; Potter becomes a link between the bizarre and abstruse world of the quantum physicists and our own rather more confined imaginations.

The problem with quantum mechanics was never the maths, brain-twistingly complex though it may be. The maths can be quickly put to one side by the lay reader and taken as a sort of given. The real problem is the imaginative leap required once the maths has been excised (which it certainly has in this book). Potter handles this with breathtaking resourcefulness; he softens the sheer befuddling nature of the numbers involved in a series of sections that take us from the world we know and recognise – everything around us for ten metres, for example, from the size of a giraffe to the size of a human being – in stages down to things so infinitesimally small that size has no real meaning, and upwards to distances that, without his canny and easy guidance, would seem so great as to be meaningless.

This is a clever and comforting confection: it works, even when we are down at the sub-sub-subatomic level of the Higgs boson or considering a quasar billions of light years away. The distances and the scale suddenly become comprehensible.

He also has an agreeable scepticism towards scientific theory. These things we are talking about, be it the semi-existence of virtual particles or string theory, are simply ideas, unobservable in the material world. But he also has little time for the simple homely analogy – such as the old adage of comparing the respective sizes of an atom and its nucleus to a pea inside a cathedral. “An atom is not a cathedral,” he writes, before quoting Freud: “Analogies prove nothing.”

Potter begins by taking us gently beyond the realms of the solar system, past the chilly rock Sedna (a Pluto-like object 13.5 billion kilometres away), past our nearest neighbouring star Proxima Centauri (four light years away), beyond the outer boundaries of our galaxy, the Milky Way, until, near the end, we hit a mysterious structure, the Sloan Great Wall, a solid supercluster of galaxies one billion light years away. And then, a little later, we are dragged through ever-diminishing stages back down to the quarks, with their strangeness and charm, which are at the very boundary of what we might call both “size” or “reality”.

As you might expect, he is very good on the philosophical implications of the science that we find when we venture beyond the comfort zones of the stuff we can readily see. Science has proved ingenious, he suggests, but “the outcome, however, is a kind of materialism that is so bizarre – the belief in an infinite number of parallel worlds, for example – that the gap between mystery and mystical barely seems apparent. What divides now the mystic and the materialist?”

It is interesting, too, that no matter how strenuously we attempt, in good Copernican fashion, to remove ourselves from the centre of everything, somehow we still end up there, in the centre of a universe, midway between a galaxy and a quark.

This is all wonderful stuff, the most thoughtful pop science book of the last few years and, along with Richard Dawkins’s fine compendium, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, the most useful to the layman.

Original article