Galileo鈥檚 Finger: The ten great ideas of science by Peter Atkins, Oxford University Press, 拢20, ISBN 0198606648 Reviewed by Robert Matthews
IN 1737, the Italian antiquary Anton Francesco Gori gained access to the 95-year-old corpse of Galileo Galilei and removed the middle finger of the venerated scientist鈥檚 right hand. This bizarre relic is kept in the Museum of the History of Science in Florence and is labelled with a lyrical inscription about how this finger pointed up to the heavens and revealed new wonders. Peter Atkins, a professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford, argues that the lifting of Galileo鈥檚 finger marks a key moment in intellectual history, when scientists shrugged off the dead hand of authority and began to discover cosmic truths for themselves.
What more appropriate title, then, than Galileo鈥檚 Finger for a guide to the 10 most important ideas that have emerged in the following 400 years? Not just any decamerous collection of ideas, note, but 鈥渢he鈥� 10 great ideas of science. And not just any guide, either: according to Richard Dawkins鈥檚 eulogy on the front cover, Atkins鈥檚 prose style should make him a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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I would not put much money on Atkins winning any time soon. Few could argue with Atkins鈥檚 choice of 10 such concepts, which begin with evolution and DNA, and end with space-time and number theory. Yet from the first page, Atkins shows a harrumphing contempt for anything that does not conform to his world view, from the 鈥渦tterly but engagingly wrong鈥� Greek philosophers and 鈥渋ncessant, petulant, pestering鈥� creationists to 鈥渉yper-pessimistic鈥� sociologists of science.
Nor is he content merely to hold his views: he seeks to ram them down our throat with a literary style that veers from tedious to florid. For example: 鈥淚n short, an electron in the second s-orbital can penetrate through the region occupied by the two electrons in the first s-orbital and experience the full attractive power of the triply charged lithium nucleus鈥�, and in the chapter on symmetry, Atkins opines that 鈥淎ny brilliant sailor should be able to tell you that a graviton鈥檚 spin is 2鈥�.
Most irksome, however, is the pervasive patronising tone: phrases such as 鈥淏e patient鈥�, and 鈥淵ou will be pleased to discover you can understand鈥� abound. Like Galileo鈥檚 finger, this dire book deserves to be in a museum, a reminder of a time when scientists thought they could convince us of their views by finger-wagging alone.