Is the Universe a Hologram? - Adolfo Plasencia ***

This is a very strange book - it reads like a cross between a collection of totally unrelated science essays and Waiting for Godot. Each essay is in the form of an interview with a scientist (the term is stretched a bit to include architects and human resources experts) and the Beckett-like nature is occasionally emphasised by interviewees who don't have English as a first language who scatter the unedited interviews (complete with painfully polite introductions) with interest terms such as 'teletransportation.' Even the book's subtitle 'Scientists answer the most provocative questions' has a touch of the Google Translate about it.

In his introduction, interviewer Adolfo Plasencia explains the use of dialogue in teaching. He tells us that when Lewis Carroll has Alice think 'what is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?' Carroll was criticising the teaching of his day which 'ignored the example of great teachers such as Plato and Rousseau, who considered dialogue to be essential for sound education.' What this misses is that teaching dialogues were carefully written, not a verbatim transcript of a conversation - and that there's a very good reason why we don't find them in popular science books. Because even the best science-teaching-by-dialogue, such as Galileo's three-way version, feel stilted and dull by modern standards. What we understand now (and what Alice had in mind) is the importance of narrative in good science writing. Alice's conversations were those in a well-written fictional narrative, not the real life, stultifying version.

It's not all bad. Each time I came close to giving up, I'd hit on a little nugget of really interesting content, whether it be on Casimir forces or graphene. But I suspect you could edit the good bits out into a single article. It wasn't helped by the quite long interventions for the interviewer, who seemed determined to get across his political message that Europe is better than America, and that scientific cooperation is leading the way to the European unification, which must surely follow from the wonderful EU.

This book must genuinely have seemed a good idea as a proposal, but the heavy-going dialogue combined with the weak format of a collection of unrelated essays from different sources makes it a noble failure.

Hardback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

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...

Search This Blog