Tying up the loose ends

The Elegant Universe

By Brian Greene

Although this book is for someone with more than just a casual interest in the nature of the universe, it is nevertheless an excellent account of the most challenging big idea of our time – String Theory. Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe proved very popular when it was first published a decade ago, and it is not hard to see why. His approach to String Theory is one of absolute wonder and, at the same time, the cool objectivity a decent teachers needs in order to explain it to his pupils.

Greene strikes this balance with perfection. His examples are tangible and understandable, his descriptions reasonable. And he weaves together some of the biggest ideas in physics beautifully: in Greene’s hands, you can hear the universe clicking together. No longer are Newton’s gravity and Einstein’s space-time and Feynman’s quanta locked in their contradictory silos. Greene shows how String Theory unites them. Tantalisingly, he even hints at discoveries expected but yet to happen as of the time of writing. It’s now up to me to find out what’s happened in String Theory over the last decade. Now that the Large Hadron Collider is warming up properly, what a great time!

Classic, but not timeless

A Brief History of Time

by Stephen Hawking

The wonderful thing about this book is that Hawking is smart enough to recognise that it is a snapshot. The book’s popularity and acclaim could lead one to the assumption that it will be a timeless contribution to science writing. It may stick around for some time, but much of what it says will be proven wrong or irrelevant. That, so I learn, is the nature of physics. And what an excellent basis for a non-fiction book.

The book itself is brilliant. Hawking’s writing is lucid, crisp and full of character. I particularly liked his little jokes (to himself more than the reader) at some paragraphs that detail the wacky properties of, say, quantum mechanics or the superstring theory. As a lay reader who has fallen out of the science world over recent years, this book was a very useful introduction to the history of physics, time and cosmology – and many other sciences. Hawking moves from Copernicus through Newton and Einstein and right to his own research in a seamless fashion. The reader is, crucially, helped to understand how all the great theories of physics have developed together – their overlaps, their clashes and their limitations.

Hawking even respects human culture enough to bring into his book non-scientific understandings of the world. He frequently refers to one “God” (presumably a Judaeo-Christian god), and how questions around the creation of the universe can be answered differently by different types of philosopher, including theists and physicists.

An extra note. I was reading the illustrated edition, which contains several hundred diagrams, illustrations and photographs. I cannot imagine reading Hawking’s text without these – articulate though it is. The pictures help a great deal in the understanding of the book’s big ideas.