Cosmology Confronted with Physical Home Truths
Reviewed by Pauline Gallagher
How The Universe Got Its Spots; Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space
By Janna Levin Weidenfeld & Nicolson, distributed in Australia by Allen and Unwin.
We are used to thinking that
science is free from the personal, the emotional, and our journey through
life. I knew that I was in for a very different experience as soon as I opened
this book. Not quite a diary, not quite a series of letters home to her
mother, Janna starts out by confronting the reader about her own fascination
with the madness of quite a few great mathematicians. With this perspective
firmly in mind, she moves into presenting infinity, a mathematical concept, as
difficult
to reconcile with physical realities. If we accept that time had a beginning,
that space can be curved, that infinity can be bounded, then it is not far
fetched at all to suppose that the universe can be finite.
Without being tied down by mathematical formulae, we are taken into a celebration of breakthroughs, from Newton through Einstein to Hawking and beyond. What is knowable depends on the observer and their perspective. The cosmology is peopled with real characters, human nature and the author’s personal thoughts and speculations about them. Janna’s hero worship of Einstein is confessed openly. “Einstein was gifted. Even his mistakes were gifted.” And the concepts - gravity, Hubble expansion, cosmic background radiation and the very difficult topology are all presented in very accessible terms to make her thesis make infinite sense.
More than the science, what makes this book stand out from the rest is its frank portrayal of the author’s living and working as a young scientist. The travel, the shifting from job to job (“Home is where the hat is.”), the chaotic nature of friendships, the struggle to keep a relationship together in the face of all-consuming science. Janna weaves her life in with the development of her thought on the cosmos. She draws parallels with mathematicians and her obsessive-compulsive musician partner, links music and mathematics into the harmonics of string theory and the universe. She relates uncertainty in quantum theory to the uncertainty in her life, and we are caught.
So, what about those spots? Well, you will have to combine a little biological understanding with cosmic background radiation to get that one.
Decidedly daring,
definitely different.
Worth a read.