Skip to main content

Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them - Antonio Padilla ***

I expected this to be a popular maths title, so was somewhat surprised to find it's actually a physics and cosmology book, but using the hooks of interesting numbers. As well as being slightly thrown by the title, I thought the introduction was remarkably similar to Douglas Adams' description of the way that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy gets far too over-excited about how mindbogglingly big the universe is, but eventually it settles down and you get some useful stuff. Antonio Padilla's introduction was loaded with rhetoric on how biggly wonderful it was all going to be.

Once we get into the chapters proper, though, it does settle down a bit and Padilla gives us a whole range of mathematical insights to physical theories. We start with time dilation and relativity more generally before leaping to supermassive black holes. From here the dance of ideas continues - googols and googolplexes bring up the possibility of cosmic doppelgängers, while we then jump again to thermodynamics (with no numbers for quite a long time until statistical mechanics brings those big numbers back). Of course the next leap to quantum physics gives us whole new reasons to think in terms of big numbers... and so it goes.

A section on small numbers is mostly concerned with particle physics (with a lot on the Higgs boson) before we finally plunge into infinity. Here we get a nice gallop through the history of infinity - mostly mathematical without much physical context (perhaps surprisingly the role of infinity in calculus, so central to physics, hardly gets a mention). Things get interesting when we get to the problems of infinity for QED and how they were dealt with, finishing with a paean to string theory.

One problem I had with all of this is there's a kind of forced quirkiness throughout that never quite works - from the title's play on the Harry Potter spinoff title to, for example, the idea of using the number 1.000000000000000858 as a 'big number' because this is the time dilation factor that Usain Bolt would have undergone when racing in 2009, which feels arbitrary to the point of... pointlessness. I also really disliked the way that Padilla treats speculative theories such as what he refers to in the introduction as 'the holographic truth' (what's usually called the holographic principle), something that is largely self-referential maths driven by the increasingly doubted string theory and that has no current way of being tested. He later rather fudges the answer as to whether or not the holographic principle is real, but unconvincingly calls it 'the most important idea to have emerged in physics in the last 30 years.'

I didn't dislike this book, and there were indubitably some interesting bits and pieces in it, but it was all far too Tiggerish for me.

Hardback:   
Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 â€˜Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...