The Big Questions of Science - Antonino del Popolo ***

For a particular audience, this is an interesting book. Specifically, popular science readers who want to get their hands a little dirty - to dig in a little more to what is happening in the science than a high level overview. Antonino del Popolo (an Italian physics professor) addresses a range of 'big questions', though apart from one about life it would have been more accurate to call this The Big Questions of Physics.

The topics covered include big picture items, such as 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' and 'Are there other universes?' and more focused questions such as 'What is a black hole?' and 'Can we travel through time?' These queries (strictly, one section 'What the World Looks Like Seen From a Ray of Light' isn't a question - and is really more 'What's the special theory of relativity about?') get about 20 pages each - enough to give an effective overview and sometimes to dig in with some alacrity.

The writing style can feel somewhat textbook lite. For example, when dealing with the relativity of simultaneity there is a paragraph that begins: 'Consider a train moving with speed v to the right. Consider an observer S', standing inside the train, and another, S, standing on the platform. Two lightning bolts simultaneously strike the train at points A and B. Suppose that when this happens, the observer on the platform is at the midpoint M, between A and B, and the observer on the train is also at the midpoint M', between A and B...' and so on. One of the lessons of making science accessible is to move away from the obscure-feeling labelling used in more rigorous approaches, but here it is a little turgid.

Like many academic writers, del Popolo falls for the error of making practically every sentence a fact statement, so it can sometimes feel like reading a set of bullet points, rather than proper writing with narrative flow. If the reader can cope with this, though, we get a good picture. Unusually, del Popolo even gives a quite balanced picture of dark matter - admittedly that section is almost all on various dark matter particle possibilities. But in the final page he admits 'the situation is complex: we have no certain proof of the existence of dark matter, and at the same time, we do not have a modified theory of gravity that could replace dark matter.' It would be interesting to see if recent discoveries on early universes would sway this opinion at all.

A tiny minority of academics are really good at communicating with the general public. This isn't always a limit on the success of a book (think A Brief History of Time), but it can make for dry reading. I wouldn't say that del Popolo is a natural communicator, but he gets the message across and delivers a surprising amount of detail without getting into mathematics. This definitely isn't for everyone - but for someone who doesn't want to go to textbook level, but would like to know a little more on a range of physics and cosmology questions, this is an effective vehicle. Sadly, though, Big Questions is ludicrously expensive even as an ebook, so likely to be one to get from the library.

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