Selected reviews of books
about science, 1992-2000
Reviews by Damien Broderick
PERFECT SYMMETRY: The Search for the Beginning of Time
by Heinz Pagels, Penguin, 390pp
THE FRAGILE SPECIES
by Lewis Thomas, Scribners, 193pp
A HISTORY OF THE MIND
by Nicholas Humphrey, Chatto & Windus, 230pp
Do you ever yearn to peer at the bookshelves of the great and near-great? It's a more decorous voyeurism than gazing through their bedroom windows, or delving in their garbage bins. A recent Weekend Australian photo of cosmic physicist Paul Davies thwarted this yen, putting his books just out of focus--except for one: the late Heinz Pagels' wonderful Perfect Symmetry. Like Davies' own popularisations of science and the arcane techniques behind the theories, it's at once fetching, exciting and comforting. We'll never grasp these ideas, any more than the monoglot English speaker can swoon at Arabic or Vietnamese poetry--but if secondhand understanding is feasible, such books are its ideal medium.
Pagels, who died at 49 in a climbing accident, wrote his fine study of the new cosmology eight years ago. `I wish this book could be published like a loose-leaf notebook,' he wrote then. `Pages could be discarded and replaced with new pages describing better ideas when they come along.' Yet its freshness, and Pagels' sweet humanity, make it an ideal entry-point for those still fearful of dipping a toe into the vortex of the Big Bang.
Isaac Asimov, who died in April [1992], offered a tribute to Pagels in his The Secret of the Universe (Oxford, 240pp) a reliably engaging collection of essays on the solar system, the universe at large, and more human issues like drug abuse and its links with social inequity. Asimov's friendly self-regard shines through, as ever: `I have discovered that people more intelligent than I (and Heinz was the third of the sort I had met) are extremely kindly and pleasant, and besides I have found that if I listen carefully to them, I am stimulated sufficiently to work up useful ideas'. It's not the worst reason for reading books like these, in the age of the allegedly Clever Country.
Another gifted essayist, Lewis Thomas directed the famous Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York while writing eloquently for 20 years in the New England Journal of Medicine about whatever took his fancy, which is rather a lot: medicine, of course, both bedside and hi-tech; immunology, cancer research and cell biology especially; ecology; the roots of words. His first collection, The Lives of a Cell, bowled me over in the 1970s. Musical and learned, gentle-voiced and tough-minded, Thomas craves the global generosity of holistic approaches while admitting candidly that ruthless reductionism remains the successful method of choice in science.
A recurrent theme in his essays has been Lynn Margulis' wonderful conjecture that the complex cells we're made of are themselves colonies. The mitochondria, which power life, have their own DNA, and seem to have gone into symbiotic partnership with larger protocells when the world was much younger. So too, perhaps, Thomas muses, might we stand within the economy of Gaia, our planet viewed as a self-sustaining quasi-organism. Here he ventured close to gibberish, in my view, but it might be the kind of gibberish we need to get us through the horrors of the next century:
`Given brains all over the place, all engaged in thought, and given the living mass of the earth and its atmosphere, there must be something like a mind at work, adrift somewhere around or over or within the mass... It is, if it exists, the result of the earth's life, not at all the cause. What does it do? It contemplates, that's what it does.'
No hypothesis could be more repugnant to Nicholas Humphrey, a lucid research psychologist. Strictly materialist, he recently accepted a fellowship funded to study psychical phenomena--so as to learn why otherwise rational people hold to such doctrines as post-mortem survival. A disembodied mind is a contradiction in terms, for Humphrey, since the mind is exactly the activity of a brain in a body built by evolution to deal with the teeming reality of the physical world.
Humphrey's work with philosopher Daniel Dennett was warmly acknowledged in the latter's splendid Consciousness Explained. Here, he continues that same toughest of all assignments: a satisfying account of consciousness. Even if the structure of neurons and chemical transmitters is clarified, even if PET scans literally show a thought passing through a brain, how can a sack of atoms add up to feelings, to sensations and awareness?
His answer is simple enough: consciousness is sensation--not `perceptions, images, thoughts, beliefs'--become self-aware in feedback loops inside the brain. (Hence robots, lacking the evolutionary history of our senses, will never attain consciousness.) Sights feel different from sounds and touches because we need to tell them apart in an instant (for our survival). Feelings are `activities that we ourselves engender and participate in--activities that loop back on themselves to create the thick moment of the subjective present.' His rich argument can hardly be summarised so curtly. Still, while I sense that it's persuasive enough, I perceive, think and believe that, in exalting sensation over the rest, Humphrey may be too hastily in flight from reigning computational accounts of mind.
Edited By Paul Davies, Cambridge University Press, 516pp
SUPERSTRINGS: A Theory of Everything?
Edited by P. C. W. Davies and J. Brown, Canto, 234pp
IN SEARCH OF THE EDGE OF TIME
by John Gribbin, Bantam, 264pp
`Physics is the most pretentious of the sciences,' Paul Davies admits disarmingly, `for it purports to address all of physical reality.' Snowflake to galactic cluster, all is controlled by bureaucratic regulation. `The physicist believes that the laws of physics, plus a knowledge of the relevant boundary conditions and constraints, are sufficient to explain, in principle, every phenomenon in the universe.'
But science, despite these almost theological ambit claims, is by no means written in stone. Quite the reverse. Chris Isham, a contributor to this splendid summary of the state of play, concludes that while it's very exciting to be involved in creating a theory that works, `in many respects it is even more exciting to be present at the collapse of one of the great edifices...' We confront just such a collapse, as relativity and quantum theory face each other off across intergalactic gulfs and the windhover blurs of electrons.
Paul Davies meant to keep this elegant guide user-friendly, at the level of a New Scientist or Scientific American article. Actually there are rather more equations than a popular science journal would use, but it's readable, good-looking, and (in the amusing words of its publicist) `still 98% up to date'.
A year before The New Physics first came out in 1989, Davies and radio producer Julian Brown interviewed many of the leading players in the spectacular new research program known as `superstring theory'. Invented in the late '60s to explain the strong nuclear force, it was abandoned when quarks did the job better. A decade on, superstrings had a come-back, shrunken in size to one hundred billion billionths of the scale of a nucleus. Still, these vibrating primordial objects do have some length, which means certain noxious infinite quantities cancel usefully out of the equations. You don't need to be a mathematician to follow this vivid tale in the words of its founders, in interviews with John Schwarz (who kept the faith), Ed Witten (who invented the 21st century maths), Nobel laureates Abdus Salam, Sheldon Glashow, Richard Feynman and Steven Weinberg. Some of them hail superstrings as the key to the new physics. Others deplore it as a fad.
After such extravagant claims, can science continue to find fresh ways to astonish us? Of course. The next physics presses forward into realms traditionally regarded as science fiction. John Gribbin, always a lucid explainer, returns to an old theme: time travel and parallel universes. He made a first pass at these topics in the 1970s, in slightly suspect books like `Time Warps'. Since then, prestigious theorists have provided good grounds for taking these topics seriously.
As usual, such speculations spring from the awful realm of the black hole, where near-infinite gravity smashes time, space and regular physical laws. Here time can be reversed, and with cunning navigation perhaps one might live to tell the tale. All this is familiar enough, and Gribbin covers it deftly. What's eye-opening is the work of Kip Thorne and his associates, who've shown that `quantum wormholes' can serve as gates through time and space.
Careful logical studies show that self-consistency is the key to plausible time-travel (or messages to the past). In effect, the blurriness and uncertainties of the atomic world are amplified up to our own scale of existence, saving the time traveller from paradox--but perhaps only at the cost of swapping one history for another!
Don't expect to see a time gate opening at a store near you soon (they require fabulous engineering and `exotic matter'). Still, one might wonder if information slipping through wormholes explains seemingly impossible results from parapsychology labs--not least, accurate precognitions of the future.