Skip to main content

Big Bang – Simon Singh *****

The cover of this big book is rather disconcerting. It looks like a pack of washing powder. And like all the best washing powder, it is splashed with a remarkable claim: “The most important scientific discovery of all time and why you need to know about it.”
All I can say about that is don’t be put off by it! It’s very hard to see anything in cosmology could ever be “the most important discovery”, as to be honest it’s not going to do an awful lot to change anyone’s life. It may well be the most fundamental discovery – and it’s certainly one of the most fascinating, but surely not most important. And for that matter, do we really need to know about it? Well, no. But that’s not the point of popular science. It’s about the delight of discovery, the wonder of a very wonderful universe – in terms of need-to-know it’s in the “doesn’t amount to a hill of beans” class.
HOWEVER this is all the packaging, and I stress that you shouldn’t let it put you off the contents, because this is one of the best popular science books of the year. It’s page-turning readable, it’s enjoyable and it is pitched just right to provide plenty of knowledge and that essential wonder without baffling. Simon Singh has confirmed his position as one of the top science popularisers alive.
The aim of the book is to help us understand what the Big Bang is all about. Singh takes the reader back to the earliest theories of the universe and gradually builds to the present day with plenty of enjoyable excursions. Just occasionally the historical ventures don’t feel quite right – Galileo, for instance, is so well documented that a pocket biography feels uncomfortably restrictive and there’s something odd about the description of how Einstein came to conceive of Special Relativity, but these are tiny niggles. It looks like it’s going to be too long as well, but this is an illusion. They’ve used quite big print, unusually well spaced, perhaps because a “big” subject needed a big book or even (God help us) because the success of Bryson’s doorstop of a book has started a trend towards big fat popular science.
It’s a delight to find out more about the renegade cosmologist Fred Hoyle, both as a person and as a genius. Hoyle’s outspoken views (a Yorkshireman – need we say more) and refreshing tendency to come out with original and exciting ideas without too much concern about whether or not they are right have tended to obscure what a big contribution he made to the understanding of stellar formation of the elements and cosmology, despite backing the wrong horse on the Big Bang versus Steady State controversy.
Singh leads us beautifully through the Big Bang’s transit from vague theory to one that was almost universally (sorry) accepted, finishing with the impact of the cosmic background radiation studies, particularly the results from the COBE satellite. The supporters of the alternative Steady State theory would throw up one last alternative, but there was little enthusiasm for it: Big Bang had won.
One last thought – if you’re reading it in public, you might like to reassure everyone in a loud voice “it’s about the origin of the universe” – or the title might make them suspect you of reading something a little less salubrious. But whatever you do, read it – this is a great popular science book from a master of the craft. If it whets your appetite and you want to read further on the origins of the universe and matter, consider going on to Marcus Chown’s excellent cosmological duo, Afterglow of Creation and the Magic Furnace.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you 
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...
Post a Comment
Read more