First published 2018. Sceptre, paperback, 2019, pp 182, c. 45,000 words.
What is this book about? Don’t expect to learn any physics from it. It’s a philosophical meditation on how the study of physical phenomena have revealed incredible wonders about the origins, workings and fate of the universe, and also what the current limits to our knowledge are. Radford finds happiness in all this and is keen to share that feeling with us.
Radford worked as the science correspondent for the Guardian newspaper for many years, amongst many other jobs for that newspaper, like arts editor. He claims never to have passed a physics exam. He takes his title from Boethius, the sixth century man ‘of great importance in the history of culture’ according to Russell in his History of Western Philosophy (I’d never heard of him either.) Boethius was a Roman senator who devoted himself to translating the ancient Greeks into Latin. Eventually he fell out with Theodoric, the Ostrogothic ruler of Italy, and while awaiting execution, wrote a book called The Consolations of Philosophy. Radford suggests that most great intellectual endeavours, from religion to art, are primarily devoted to answering the fundamental question of human existence: why? Physics serves that end too, but it does so by proposing theories that can be independently tested and do not require an act of faith. He finds his consolation in this process of discovery, describing science as being like a cairn, a pile of stones constantly being added to and with errors being constantly corrected by new evidence, and by this process allowing us to see further [p107].
The structure of the book is not obvious but is based around four great experiments: The Voyager spacecraft, The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the Hubble Deep Field images, and the LIGO gravity wave detectors. Each of these four were, or are, colossal undertakings with no tangible payoff, but each has served to deepen our understanding of the workings of the universe, helping us to push back the boundaries of the questions ‘where have we come from?’ and ‘where are we going?’ Today physics can give us insights into the moment of creation in the ‘big bang’ and into the ultimate fate of the universe, but it can never answer the question ‘why?’ Also, as the boundaries of our knowledge expand, all that seems to be revealed is that there is far more that we don’t understand, and perhaps never can because it is so immensely different from our human experience.
There are some poignant thoughts captured here like the Voyager spacecraft, those wonders of 1970s technology with their golden LP discs, that will most likely greatly outlive the human race and planet Earth. He also meditates on how ultimately alone each of us is because we each have a different perspective and experience different events; how we all live in our own virtual reality.
Radford writes very clearly and well. He uses no complex jargon, and occasionally turns a nice phrase: ‘Tomorrow’s world takes shape against the backcloth of all our yesterdays.’ [p29] Occasionally he makes a statement that he elsewhere argues against: ‘Newtonian physics is fundamentally wrong.’ [p43] He elsewhere argues that Newtonian physics is what allowed the Voyager spacecraft to execute their exquisite cosmic dance with the gas giants. What he might have said is that Einstein revealed a more accurate explanation for the works of the universe than Newton’s earlier approximation. We know that Einstein’s explanation is not the whole story either: no one has yet reconciled it with quantum mechanics. There was one flat out error I spotted: the Andromeda galaxy will first touch the Milky Way galaxy around five billion years from now – not four million. [p91]
While I found this book hard to pin down and the structure unclear, by the end I thought it a worthwhile read. There is much to enjoy in recalling the great revelations of physics, and sitting back in the company of someone who admires them and has thought deeply about the pleasure to be had in that.
© William John Graham, August 2022