Perhaps the thickest wall between contemporary popular science
writers and their audience is the essentially unimaginable nature of modern
physics. A century ago, a physics teacher could use pool tables, wheelbarrows,
and spinning buckets to illustrate the forces underlying the universe. And for
most of what happens in life, those examples still suffice. But anybody seeking
to explain or understand the universe in contemporary terms is going to have to
toss all those comfortingly concrete objects in the trash. And what examples
could a contemporary writer use to illustrate the fact that space itself
curves, that there is a universal equation whose result is the Greek letter psi, which represents “every possible
state of the world,” or that the cosmos might consist of one-dimensional
string-like universes moving within a ten-dimensional space? The untrained mind
reaches out, vainly trying to lay its archaic map of the universe over this
alien landscape, and slumps back, befuddled and defeated, thinking only “here
be dragons.”
The 1970s saw a raft of best-selling books popularizing the “new”
physics, which had already been around for a generation. Books like The Dancing Wu-Li Masters and the Tao of Physics (both of which I read and loved) related science to
Eastern spiritualism, generating huge sales numbers that were in direct
proportion to the wince-rate of the physicists who read them (the sleeper film What the Bleep Do We Know? continues
this tradition). Physicists like Steven Weinberg and Stephen Hawking wrote
back, attempting to bridge the gap between scientists and the public without stretching the science, and Neil Turok’s The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos, a book based on Turok’s 2012 Massey Lecture series,
continues in this noble tradition. And as the Director of Waterloo’s Perimeter
Institute, a former chair of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge, and a colleague
of Stephen Hawking, Turok has the chops to accurately capture the world of
modern physics.
But here’s the thing. If you read fantasy literature, you’ll know
that the motif of the one “true” language—the language that includes the real
names for everything and allows one to know and control the relationships between all things—is
ubiquitous. In a sense this language does exist, but unlike the pidgin-Latin
of Harry Potter or the ancient language in Eragon, it requires more than just
knowing words, and it’s devilishly intimidating for the lay-person. The
language is mathematics, and without math, there’s no way to really grasp the
bizarre world of quantum physics. What Turok does, though, is open the door for
us a crack so that we understand enough to feel a sense of wonder about just
how strange the atomic and cosmic foundations of our everyday world are, and
how remarkable it is that there are minds subtle and large enough to grasp
them.
Turok, like Moses or George Mallory, climbs with you for awhile
and then pulls ahead into the misty heights above. Fortunately, like Moses (and
unlike Mallory), Turok comes down from the mountain with the tablets from on
high, etched in a language we can understand, even if we don’t get to see things
face-to-face. And along with his presentations of the perplexing constructions
of modern physics, he also gives us an often moving picture of the people who
struggled, sometimes against considerable adversity, to advance the field, from
historical figures like Maxwell and Faraday, to neglected scientists like Emmy
Noether (who worked without pay as a professor at Gottingen University because
she was a woman), to the adventurous African students who travel to attend the
African Institute for Mathematical Science that Turok co-founded in a derelict
hotel in South Africa with the goal of making “the next Einstein an African.”
We also get snippets of Turok’s own background as well, so the oddities of
relativistic and quantum physics are presented within a personal context. For
the lay reader, it’s this human element that grounds the more esoteric ideas in
the book and makes them less alienating. It certainly helps that Turok is an
infallibly cheerful and accommodating travelling companion.
The Universe Within offers a glimpse into the mysteries of the
cosmos that might just inspire you to follow up Turok’s recommended reading
list or pore through the hilarious and addictive minutephysics videos
produced by his student, Henry Reich (Got only one minute to learn what a Higgs
Boson is? No problem!). In five lectures, Neil Turok can only plant a seed, but
the more we know, the more we want to know, and so his book might just be the
beginning of a mind-expanding journey.
- Bruce
