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Impossible, Probable and Improbable - John Gribbin ****

This is a compendium volume, bringing together three short books by the man who Americans would probably term the dean of British science writers, John Gribbin. These were Six Impossible Things, Seven Pillars of Science and Eight Improbable Possibilities. (Seeing a theme here?)

The first of these parts is my favourite, which is odd because it focuses on the interpretation of quantum theory, a topic that can veer towards 'angels dancing on the head of a pin' territory. This is not the detail of quantum physics itself, but rather the attempts to provide theories, mostly incapable of being disproved scientifically, that will explain how the apparent probabilistic nature of quantum reality somehow translates into the apparently non-probabilistic everyday world. These are often complex ideas that are difficult to get your head around, but Gribbin's coverage is as simple as it possibly could be.

The second section effectively builds the pillars not so much of science as the science of life, starting from the origins of atoms and leading through to the genetic code and hydrogen bonding. Although these stray from Gribbin's core subjects of physics and cosmology, he still is able to give excellent insights, particularly where the two fields overlap, such as his description of Fred Hoyle's contribution to our understanding of the way that stars created the elements.

The third section takes in theories that are the best we have, but seem unlikely or surprising. Some of these really stood out for me, notably how unusual the Moon is (and how that influences the environment on Earth), Newton's bucket - which is a brilliant introduction to consider a really difficult physical conundrum, and the origins of complex life on Earth. If I'm honest, I couldn't get as excited about, say, ice age rhythms and human evolution, or dark energy - in the case of the latter because it has been so widely covered - but everything here was worth reading. I do have one significant moan (about something I didn't notice when reading the individual title). At one point, Gribbin says that 'The only possible explanation' for the way galaxies rotate is huge halos of dark matter, where there is a perfectly good explanation in modified Newtonian dynamics. Neither explanation works perfectly as yet - but it simply isn't true that dark matter is the only possible explanation.

If you don't have any of the component titles, this is a handy way to get all three in one go. Having said that, I much preferred the individual books. In part this is because they were handsome little hardbacks which were just nicer to hold and read than this big lump of a book. But it's also because there's almost an element of the whole being less than the sum of the parts. The 21 topics (as Gribbin points out, half of Douglas Adams' 42 number, providing presumably half the answer to the ultimate question) might feel a little heavy going by the end because there are just too many different components, where reading each of the individual books was a delight. If you go for this compendium, I'd consider reading something else between each of the three sections.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here
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