The Sunday Times – by Rod Liddle
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.