Friday I picked up How the Universe Got Its Spots : Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space by the astrophysicist Janna Levin. I met Janna once. Fresh off the factory floor at Caltech, I arrived at Berkeley having convinced the graduate school admissions people there that I was going to do particle physics. I really had no such intentions. I had decided I wanted to do astrophysics. Luckily I didn’t have to take the first year grad courses (so I’ve only been through Jackson, once, thank you very much!) so I was able to immediately start taking astrophysics classes. Having taken only one astro course at Caltech, I really had a lot of learning to do! But already in my first year I was trying to find some research to do: research was the reason I went to grad school, not to take classes. One of the people I visited was Janna Levin, who at the time was a postdoc. She gave me these really cool papers on chaos in black hole solutions as well as on the main subject of this popular book, what if the large scale topology of the universe is nontrivial. So I’m sure she doesn’t remember me, but I remember those papers on topology and also a paper she wrote with J.D. Barrow on the twin paradox in compact universes. I would be neglegent if I didn’t quote the Simpsons episode where Stephen Hawking makes an appearance:
Hawking: Your theory of a donut-shaped universe is intriguing, Homer. I may have to steal it.
Homer: Wow, I can’t believe someone I never heard of is hanging out with a guy like me.
Moe: All right, it’s closing time. Who’s paying the tab?
Homer: [imitating Hawking’s voice box] I am.
Hawking: I didn’t say that.
Homer: [still imitating] Yes I did.
[a glove comes out of Hawking’s wheelechair, bopping Homer in the face]
Homer: [still imitating] D’oh.
Shortly after talking to Dr. Levin about her work, I met with Dr. Daniel Lidar in the Chemistry department who was working on quantum computing. I had done some “research” as an undergrad on quantum computing, and the newness of quantum theory really appealed to me. Astrophysics is grand and beautiful and there was so much new data coming in, but many of the great theory problems seemed so large and so well gone over that I was sucked away from astrophysics. I am still jealous of the astrophysicist when they get to contemplate the entire frickin universe. Whereas I get to contemplate things I shall never really see. Well both are pretty cool.
“How the Universe Got It’s Spots” is an interesting little book. It is written as a series of letters to the author’s mother and explains all sorts of science, from topology, to black holes, to quantum theory. I’ve become, over the years, a hell of picky person when it comes to popular science books. I will admit that there were a few times when I had to close my brain during “Spots”, but most of these have to do with describing quantum theory, and happily it wasn’t the uncertainty principle which got mangled. And I’m just too stubborn to listen to what anyone else has to say about quantum theory. So me saying there were only a few rough spots in “Spots” is like saying that it’s really really well done.
Interestingly, the book takes a very personal view of the science discussed in the book. Not personal like most popular science articles where the author descripes his or her story and relationship to all these bigwigs in the grand quest we call science, but personal instead in detailing the authors emotional relationship to her work (and in some broader context, her relationship to the world around her as well.) In this way it reminds me a bit of Good Benito by Alan Lightman. Those astrophysicists really how to hit a guys emotion nerves. Here is a nice passage from “Spots” describing mathematicians and their penchant for being insane:
When I tell the stories of their suicide and mental illness, people always wonder if their fragility came from the nature of the knowledge-the knowledge of nature. I think rather that they went mad from rejection. Their mathematical obsessions were all-encompassing and yet ethereal. They needed their colleagues beyond needing their approval. To be spurned by their peers meant death of their ideas. They needed to encrypt the meaning in others’ thoughts and be assured their ideas would be perpetuated.
Another reason that I’m hard on popular science books has to do with the amount of learned. Growing up, the best popular science books all had one common trait. You would be reading the book and thinking about the topic and you would think, “well, it seems to me that what they’ve talked about here implies X.” And then a few pages latter you would read that indeed scientists discovered that such and such does imply X! Great popular science to me has a lot to do with great foreshadowing. The problem I have now is that I know most of the story. I’ve caught up to modern times. So the foreshadowing doesn’t work for me.
On the other hand, popular science articles do have a very interesting effect when I read them today. They remind me of the big picture, and often they let my mind wander. While I was reading “Spots,” for instance, the following occurred to me. One of the reasons we love relativity, both special and general is that it arises from such simple postulates into a beautiful and complex theory. One sometimes hears that this is missing in quantum theory: where do all these postulates about Hilbert space and Born’s rule and such come from? Are there some nice basic posulates from which we can reason, much like Einstein did for special relativity, as to why quantum theory should be the way it is? But while I was reading “Spots” it occurred to me that may this was an illusion. Suppose that instead of discovering special and general relativity before quantum theory (O.K. there is some overlap, but the truely disturbing parts of quantum theory emerged after both relativity theories.) If you are a quantum person living in a quantum world, does all this talk about mirrors and clocks seems rather troubling. Mirrors are big classical thingees. What do quantum mirrors look like, and is it natural to talk the thought experiments that Einstein used? But in a larger sense, I also began to wonder if the principles of relativity are really so natural. Are they natural to someone who experiences the amplitudes of quantum theory in their everyday experience? Why is it that we spend time trying to think about how quantum theory might emerge (this is, after all, what interpretations are really after, isn’t it?), but don’t spend time thinking about a deeper theory from which, say, special relativity might emerge. This, I guess is one reason I’m interested in loop quantum gravity: there, one of the challenges is to really see how our four dimensional world emerges from the, for a better word for it, quantum foam. So why does special relativity look the way it does, quantum boy? And it’s silly questions like these which keep me reading popular science, and will continue to keep me reading popular science, long after I’ve grown accustomed to the history.
have you read ‘The Road to Reality’ ? i am in the middle of reading it and quite like it..
I have a hard time finding popular science books I like. It’s easier if the book is not in my field, but then I wouldn’t be able to tell if a topic is being covered incorrectly and I’m just being duped.
One biology book I reviewed was written by a layperson lauded for her ability to describe complex biological concepts poetically. She got the poetry right, but not the biology. One of her most egregious mistakes was the oft-committed mistake of referring to a gene as if it is uniquely responsible for a particular behavior, rather than as encoding a molecule involved in a cellular process.
Suresh: Yeah I read “The Road to Reality” a while ago…it came out earlier in the UK and I got a version from there. I really liked it too. But I like Roger Penrose. It’s a strange book, though, in terms of what audience it is designed for.