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

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 ...

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...

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...

Search This Blog