The Universe Next Door by Marcus Chown, Headline, 拢14.99, ISBN
0747234965
MARCUS CHOWN is a scientific evangelist. The deeper I delved into The
Universe Next Door the more I became suffused with a fervour for the
subject. Science is great. It is worth the effort. Dedicating your life to
science is worthwhile. It stretches you. It expands the mind. It transports you
to the frontiers of the unknown.
And my, what frontiers these are. There is nothing cosy about this science.
The unknown is vast and frightening. And even though we look back at all the
observations that have been made, and all the experiments that have been carried
out, we are continually reminded that many of our deductions might be wrong.
Today鈥檚 certainty can be laughed at tomorrow. A scientist 500 years ago would
have happily insisted that the Earth was flat, 6000 years old, and that the Sun
went round it. I often wonder, when I lecture, which of my forthright statements
of 鈥渇acts鈥� will be in next decade鈥檚 dustbin.
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Chown, who has for years been a consultant to 快猫短视频, has
deliberately set out to be thought-provoking and disturbing. His aim is to shake
scientists out of their complacency. And he succeeds superbly.
He starts by considering the arrow of time. As the days tick by, I feel older
and older, things around me decay, and the Universe expands. But many physical
and chemical processes are time reversible. So Chown encourages us to think
about regions in the Universe, now or in the future, where time might be moving
in the opposite direction.
Next he derides our use of the singular word 鈥淯niverse鈥�. How do we know that
there is only one? Perhaps there are parallel universes existing simultaneously,
and even in the same place. He reminds us that the building blocks of matter,
the electrons and atomic nuclei, are still mysterious objects. The reader is
left worrying why electrons sometimes look like particles and at other times
like waves. We are even regaled with experimental evidence indicating that
extremely cold electrons can be divided in half.
Then our lazy acceptance of three-dimensional space comes under attack.
Extra rolled-up space dimensions, all smaller than atoms, seem to come in very
handy when trying to explain the relationships between the gravitational,
electrostatic, and nuclear weak and strong forces.
After this, astronomy is only a bit strange鈥攅ven the problem that only
a small proportion of the mass that must be there is present as visible
galaxies, stars and planets. The remainder is dark. One fascinating possibility
is that the extreme conditions during the first instants of the big bang
manufactured a host of black holes, each the size of a washing machine and with
the mass of Jupiter. Scattering one of these every 30 light years (or so) solves
the problem of missing mass鈥攁nd provides enough to make the Universe
eventually crunch, instead of expanding forever.
Life. Why does our Universe seem so fine-tuned for its development? And why
did it originate on Earth just as soon as the first pool of water could exist
without boiling away? Did it break out in other places too? And why has this
life been able to develop so that sentient humans can actually comprehend the
Universe that they inhabit? Why, asks Chown, is science so simple that someone
like Isaac Newton could discover the laws of gravity over 300 years ago?
The Universe Next Door is eminently readable and delightfully
thought-provoking. It made me feel good to be a scientist, and honoured to be a
member of the scientific community. Science is not easy. The task it has set
itself may turn out to be bigger than all of us. We might never find the
answers.