Skip to main content

The Universe in a Box - Andrew Pontzen ****

Our attention was drawn to this book’s existence by a helpful nudge on Twitter following the review of Romeel Davé’s Simulating the Cosmos a few weeks ago. I gave that book four stars, as regards its appeal to a general audience, while saying that my own personal rating was a full five stars. That’s because computer simulation is, in a sense, my own specialist subject, and I thought Davé did a great job of explaining how cosmological simulations work, and what they can tell us about the universe. At the same time, I acknowledged that not everyone is going to be enough of a space or computer geek to care about such questions in the first place.

Pontzen’s book deals with essentially the same subject, but approaches it from such a different angle that there’s very little overlap between the two. I’m giving this one four stars, too, but for pretty much the opposite reason. Personally, I found it frustratingly tangential to the subject it was ostensibly about, never really getting to grips with the nitty-gritty of simulations and constantly drifting onto bigger, more philosophical, questions. But I can see that Pontzen’s approach may well have more appeal for general readers. In any case, the book’s back cover is splattered with praise from the likes of Philip Pullman, Hannah Fry and Jim Al-Khalili, so I’m sure it can withstand a tad less than total enthusiasm on my part.

The fact is, reading a book is a subjective experience. Coming to it so soon after the one by Davé, who tackled the field of cosmological simulation so directly and incisively, Pontzen’s offering can seem rambling and waffly, never quite hitting the target. Yet the various sidetracks he takes, into surrounding areas like the history of computing, weather forecasting and artificial intelligence, might have seemed like welcome context-setting if I’d been less familiar with the subject to start with.

And although I tend to use the word ‘philosophy’ as a pejorative, some of his remarks in this area are genuinely intriguing, such as when he says ‘a simulation doesn’t have to be literally true for it to upend our ideas about the universe’. That sounds like nonsense, but it’s completely true in the specific instance he’s talking about. This was back in the 1960s, when Beatrice Tinsley found it was impossible to create a galaxy simulation that produced a constant amount of light over billions of years. Her simulated galaxies looked nothing like real ones, but that wasn’t the point – she’d shown that the prevailing wisdom, that galaxies don’t change on cosmological timescales, had to be wrong.

There’s another reason I prefer Davé’s book over Pontzen’s, and that’s simply one of style. This is another area of subjectivity, of course, but I felt Davé’s approach – with plenty of diagrams and a chattily direct writing style – was better suited to a technical subject like this one. In contrast, Pontzen’s book has no illustrations at all, and a distinctly ‘literary’ writing style (sorry, but ‘literary’ is another pejorative word, at least when it’s used by me). Maybe I’m a bit backward in this respect, but it did mean I had to read some of his sentences several times before I got them. Here’s one that’s 46 words long, and actually makes a good point when you battle your way through it: ‘Disentangling what is a prediction from what is an assumption, what can be trusted from what cannot, takes an expertise of its own and can often be controversial; there are still a few experts out there who question whether simulations can tell us anything at all.’

When I reviewed Simulating the Cosmos, I made the point that astronomical computer simulation is something that’s hardly ever touched on in popular science writing. So the fact that we’ve suddenly got two brand new books about it can only be a good thing. Which of them you go for is purely a matter of taste. Anyone who’s already deeply into computers and astronomy, and maybe even thinking of taking up this sort of thing as a career, is probably going to prefer Davé’s book. But everyone else – the great majority, in other words – should probably go for Pontzen’s.

Hardback:   
Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Andrew May - See more reviews or subscribe to a weekly email 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 ‘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...