Skip to main content

The Cosmic Web - J. Richard Gott ****

This is a book about the large-scale structure of the universe. It’s a subject Richard Gott is particularly well qualified to talk about, having been associated with it since the 1970s. When he was still a graduate student he did pioneering work on the gravitational clumping of galaxies into galaxy clusters. Initially it was believed that this clumping tendency would repeat itself in an ever-ascending hierarchy, with stars clumping into galaxies, galaxies into clusters, clusters into superclusters and so on up to the very largest scales. In time, however, both observational and theoretical work led to a much more complex picture – the ‘cosmic web’ of the book’s title.

 Topologically, the universe resembles a giant sea sponge. Unlike the hierarchical model, the high density concentrations of matter (corresponding to the body of the sponge) are not isolated clumps, but a single intricately connected structure. At the same time, the low density ‘voids’ running through it are likewise continuously connected – in contrast to the holes in a Swiss cheese, which was another early model that had to be discarded. Gott was among the first people to recognize the sponge-like structure of the universe – in part because, as a precocious high-school student back in the 1960s, he had done a science fair project on topological models of exactly that kind.

 There’s no question that Gott is one of the world’s leading experts in this subject – but is he the best person to write a popular science book about it? I think the answer is a qualified ‘yes’. I really enjoyed his writing style, which is as lucid and unadorned as I’ve ever come across in an academic author. The theory never gets too difficult, either – mainly classical dynamics and statistics, with no relativistic or quantum complications. Nevertheless, Gott is not one of those writers who pretends you can have mathematics-free physics. There are no actual equations (except in the small print at the end of the book), but there are plenty of graphs, Greek letters and powers-of-ten numbers. This is not a book for people who are scared of such things.

 At one point, Gott recounts an amusing anecdote he heard from the great Russian physicist Yakov Zeldovich, highlighting the benefits of using the median rather than the mean as a statistical measure. Yet he tells it to the reader exactly the way Zeldovich told it to him – without explaining how the mean and median are defined, or what they are used for. If those things are second nature to you, then you’ll appreciate the anecdote… and you’ll probably enjoy the whole book, too. If not, then you may find it heavy going.

 This is the sort of book I would have loved when I was an undergraduate, or possibly even as a mind-stretching read in high school. It’s a young audience of future scientists who will probably get the most out of it today – not just for the picture it paints of how the universe is made, but for its unique inside view of four decades of cutting-edge research.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Andrew May
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more