Skip to main content

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.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more