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
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero Degrees of Empathy [The Science of Evil] – Simon Baron-Cohen ***

I’ve been a real fan of previous books by Simon Baron-Cohen like  The Essential Difference , so opening this was one was a pleasant prospect. What I found was a book that wasn’t  bad … but that could have been a lot better. I got the impression of a book that had been rushed out without a lot of work going into it. The thesis at the heart of the book – that one of the important ‘circuits’ of the brain is the one dealing with empathy, and that individuals sit on an empathy spectrum, with some residing at zero degrees of empathy – is an interesting one. Baron-Cohen introduces us to three key personality types he defines as ‘zero-negative’ including psychopaths, plus types that are ‘zero-positive’ like those with Asperger’s. In a way both of these definitions are odd, in that his zero-negatives can actually have a lot of the kind of empathy that involves being able to read another person’s emotional state, and his zero-negatives can have a lot of the kind of empathy i...
Post a Comment
Read more