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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.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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Comments

  1. Rationalist12 February 2024 at 21:11

    It is extremely rare to find book by layman reviewed by you on this site.What is the justification for this?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Brian Clegg13 February 2024 at 00:25

      Many of our reviews are of books written by people who aren't working scientists. What is unusual is to review a self-published book. We get sent review requests for many of these. We don't review any that are covering new theories, but we will occasionally if they cover something that is within the remit of mainstream science in a different way. Given all the sources here were scientific and the fine tuning problem is well-established, it proved interesting. You may be interested in a blog post I'll be publishing later this week on my blog http://brianclegg.blogspot.com that looks into the surprising origins of a Fred Hoyle quote in this book.

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