A Chorus of Big Bangs - Adam Susskind ***

This is an oddity, which is trying to do something that scientists usually avoid at all costs: making us think about what we take on faith when we consider cosmology. If the 'F' word is a problem for you, I wouldn't bother to read any further, but Adam Susskind is certainly right to point out it is not just the religious part of the world population who rely on faith - to take the atheist standpoint that most scientists espouse also requires faith in the adequacy of sometimes tenuous theories when dealing with a science as hands-off as cosmology.

Susskind does a good job of identifying a range of cosmological theories that have been repeatedly patched up when holes have been found, to the extent that some now feel quite flaky. Many of the theories Susskind identifies are indeed currently problematic, but easily replaced by a better future scientific theory - for example dark matter, dark energy and inflation. Others are more fundamental and we genuinely don't have a particular good approach, for example for how the universe came into existence (unless we follow Fred Hoyle's lead with the steady state theory and find a mechanism for an eternal universe) or the remarkable fine tuning of the universe, for which the only scientific 'explanation' I've seen to date is the multiverse theory, which Philip Goff's Why? demonstrates so impressively is a misuse of probability.

A Chorus of Big Bangs is not without issues. It's self-published and it feels like it. The book is very thin with just 83 pages, and Susskind admits he has no science background, basing a lot of what he includes on TV science documentaries, which can be distinctly trivial in their approach. It's clear he is coming at this from a religious standpoint, though, to his credit, he does not explicitly bring this in - he merely points to the big holes that remain in cosmology. I think it might have had a better audience without that subtitle.

If I'm honest, I expected to find this book totally lacking in value, but it was surprisingly useful to have the various potential problems highlighted, using quotes from well-known scientists along the way to emphasise this.

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

Luna: Moon Rising (SF) - Ian McDonald ****

I'm not the natural audience for this book. Game of Thrones l eaves me cold - and it's hard not to feel the influence of GoT (and a whole lot of Dune ) underneath a veneer of science fiction and the trappings of a South American drug cartel in the cod-medieval family power battles and chivalric details. There are even dragons (of a sort). I'd be really sad if the future did involve this sort of throwback feudalism. However, remarkably, despite this I found Luna: Moon Rising kept me engaged. The fact is that Ian McDonald can put together a good plot with intricate machinations, which is enough to carry the reader through what can be a bewildering collection of characters. The two page scene-setter saying who did what to whom at the start was useful, but I could have done with family trees for the main family as I was constantly forgetting who was who - especially easy as McDonald endows many families with characters with the same first initial (e.g. Ariel and Al...

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...

E=mc2: A biography of the world’s most famous equation – David Bodanis *****

David Bodanis is a storyteller, and he fulfils this role with flair in E=mc2. The premise of the book is simple – Einstein himself has been biographed (biographised?) to death, but no one has picked out this most famous of equations, dusted it down and told us what it means, where it comes from and what it has delivered. Allegedly, Bodanis was inspired to write the book after hearing see an interview with actress Cameron Diaz in which she commented that she’d really like to know what that famous collection of letters was all about. Although the book had been around for a while already when this review was written (September 2005), it seemed a very apt moment to cover it, as the equation is, as I write, exactly 100 years old. So when better to have a biography? Bodanis starts off by telling us about the individual elements of the equation. What the different letters mean, where the equal sign comes from and so on. This is entertaining, though he seems to tire of the approach on...

Search This Blog