Skip to main content

The Beginning and the End of Everything - Paul Parsons ****

It's a brave science writer who puts into a single, not over-long book, the entire cosmology of the universe from beginning to end, all the physics required to support it, and some of the history of science of the development of both the physics and cosmology. Luckily, Paul Parsons is a steady and highly experienced hand, who is able to introduce some of the most esoteric aspects of modern science while still leaving the reader feeling that they have a grasp of what's going on.

The individual components of the book - the big bang, the formation of stars and galaxies, black holes, dark matter and dark energy, the general theory of relativity and quantum physics, and all the rest - have been well covered in separate books many times, but what Parsons is able to do is to give us the latest information, including material from 2018, and to pull the whole together impressively well. So, for example, along with the more traditional means of exploring the universe through electromagnetic waves, we are able to discover the importance of the discovery of gravitational waves and can see how future gravitational wave observatories will help us to firm up and expand some aspects of cosmology.

It would be impossible to cover so much ground without a very light touch - this is a book that is rarely going to add much for the experienced reader of cosmology titles - however, for the relative beginner it's an absolute wonderful introduction to our current view of the universe, how it formed and where it's going. (This being the case, a further reading section would be good in the next edition.)

The two areas there are bits of extra material that older hands might not be so familiar with is the coverage of inflation and the work of Stephen Hawking. Parsons has some personal history from his time at university on the inflation front and is able to give one of the best descriptions I've seen of inflation and some of the variants thereof - the only slight oddity is that this gives us rather more depth on this topic than the rest of the book has. Similarly, Parsons is clearly a huge Hawking fan and gives quite a lot of detail on relevant aspects of his work, even if this does perhaps over-emphasising the significance of Hawking's final paper.

If the book has a weakness it's a tendency not to make clear which bits of what we're being told are solidly supported by additional observational data, and which are theories (or even philosophies) for which there is little confirming evidence, or are based on very simplified models of the universe. We're told, for example, 'the anthropic principle falls flat without a level II multiverse to back it up... if there's only one universe, the the fact that we find it to be suited to the emergence of life - especially when physics says this is unlikely - is genuinely baffling.' But (one version of) the anthropic principle exactly reflects this - it's not at all baffling, because we wouldn't be here to observe it were it not the case. And it doesn't matter how unlikely a particular universe is. If there is only one universe, that whichever one it is has to be very unlikely - making it a bit of a 'so what?' point.

Apart from a desire for a little more clarity in separation of the inevitable speculation that accompanies cosmology from the science (and a wish that we could have avoided the old chestnut that Giordano Bruno was martyred for his scientific views - he wasn't), this is a wonderful introduction to one of the most exciting and engaging aspects of science. It's doubly impressive that Parsons does so while covering so much, leaving little space to meet the characters involved, which is often used to give more engagement. I will be recommending this book to anyone looking for an introduction to cosmology.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
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

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more