Skip to main content

On Being – Peter Atkins ***

This isn’t so much a book as a musing. It is easy to imagine the author, seated comfortably in a leather armchair in the Senior Combination Room (or whatever they call it at his institution), sipping vintage port and holding forth on his topic, which the subtitle refers to as ‘the great questions of existence.’ Whether or not this slim volume works for you depends on how you react to that concept. I’m not saying it’s high falutin’ – the book is written in an approachable, chatty style – but the reader has to be in the mood for some contemplation, rather than an exploration of the history of science or an explanation of scientific fact.
Peter Atkins covers the beginnings and end of the universe itself – and also of a human being in birth and death. It’s a vast scope and the book works better in some sections that others. (It’s strange, incidentally, that a book that is ‘On Being’ concentrates on the beginning and the ending but not on the being bit in the middle.) I found the universe-focused chapters more interesting than the human-centred ones. In fact the chapter on human death, essentially describing what will happen to Atkins’ own body after death, seemed out of place. This was really just a description of a biochemical process happening to a piece of meat. It didn’t seem to have lot to do with ‘being.’
I found this book very interesting but I did have a problem with the approach. There is a fundamental assumption in the preface that sets up the book’s premise: Atkins tells us that he believes that the the scientific method can be applied to everything. I find the idea of basing an argument on a belief that there is nothing supernatural no better than basing an argument on the belief that the supernatural exists. It seems a little flimsy (which is, perhaps, why it is tucked away in the preface).
What comes across, oddly, is an approach that feels unscientific. Surely to be truly scientific (at least, when taking a wide, philosophical view like this book) we should start with the possibility of a creator god as one option. Saying, as Atkins does, that ‘even if in due course science has to throw in the towel and, heaven forbid, concede that the universe was created by God’ exhibits the sort of prejudice that science rightly condemns in religious believers. He hasn’t come at this with an open mind. It’s telling that in the final chapter Atkins spends a fair amount of time attacking millennialism and the concept of the rapture, which is hardly mainstream. This is a bit like picking on some silly goings on at the University of East Anglia to attack climate science as a whole. It seems to suggest a lack of a cogent argument.
This is not by any means a bad book – its great strength is that it really does encourage the reader to think about some deep issues. But the danger of straying into the old folly of attempting to prove or disprove the existence of a deity through scientific argument is too close to the surface for me.

Hardback:  
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

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more