Looks like the blog was down all weekend, and I lost 100 subscribers. Not a lot when you’ve got thousands, but I only had 150 or so. Not sure why the site was down, but I apologize.
Short book review of Simon Singh’s “Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe”
I recently finished reading Simon Singh’s excellent book, “Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe.” I learned quite a bit from the book, and, as I’ve told some friends, I think I learned more about chemistry and physics than I did in the years that I took courses in them. Learned in a deeper level of understanding sort of way, conceptually. That’s something major missing from high school and college education — the way everything fits together, introduced in a historical scale. Before anyone even takes an advanced math or science class, everyone should have to take a course in the origin of the universe, taught in Simon Singh’s narrative style.
The book got me excited about astronomy, physics, chemistry, and, surprising to me, the history and people behind the development of what I recall as a child being this new and amazing “discovery” that everything started with a “big bang.” I was surprised to learn that when I was a kid, this wasn’t new stuff, but had been a theory steadily gaining support for many decades, constantly urged on by advancements in technology and discoveries across a swath of scientific disciplines.
That last bit is what I think most fascinated me — we needed astronomers, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians to help explain our universe; defining the stars wasn’t relegated to the astronomers. Singh’s book helped me come to the realization that our common understanding of the universe and all within it derives from separate disciplines related by the fact that they’re all merely different ways of trying to perceive and translate those perceptions of the universe into something we can understand. Each person in the chain of history had an important role, but knowledge was built on the backs of their combined (and often independent) efforts.
Singh also spent some time describing how religion and unscientific thought kept holding back discoveries and realizations of what the real world was like, despite the fact that a good number of discoveries were made by clergymen. Almost surprisingly, Singh didn’t place the likes of Einstein on a superhuman pedestal of perfection. Einstein wasn’t always right, and Singh focused on the mistake that each scientific generation was wont to make — settling in with a comfortable idea about how things work and turning a dogmatic eye to new discoveries that challenge the status quo. Einstein was guilty of it (read the book to see how), and it took decades for him to recant. He was by far not the only one.
Consider the Ptolemaic point of view, carrying on the ancient assumption that there was something divinely perfect about the circle, so much so that it must, by that very nature, lie as the foundation of just about everything. Ptolemy tried to mathematically explain both how the Earth was at the center of the universe (another stubborn claim perpetuated by religion) and simultaneously how all the orbits of all the satellites of the Earth and other heavenly bodies must necessarily follow circular orbits.1
What he came up with was quite a mess. Instead of going for simplicity (as in, perhaps the Earth isn’t in the center, and perhaps circles aren’t all that), he added in complexity.
(image from cset.mnsu.edu/pa)
What that image shows is how each major entity in the solar system had two orbits — one around the Earth, and another around its own orbit around the Earth. This invention satisfied those who, despite new discoveries and scientific doubts, wanted to keep the universe squeezed into a God-shaped box. The universe is a lot more complex than we originally imagined; for example, it’s not reduced to four elements. However, it’s also a lot more straightforward; when we discover something new that doesn’t conform to our prior notions, it quite often leads to a shift in thinking (what Singh explains is a “Paradigm Shift”) that explains the universe in a different, more accurate way.
As described in the book, even the most brilliant minds resist change, but the beauty of the scientific method is that it doesn’t care what the most brilliant minds think. If we feed it new information, and the results show that it does not conform to previously held ideas, then either the data is wrong or the old ideas were wrong. Singh’s book, while laying out the amazing development and modification of the theories of the origin of the universe, is a thorough explanation of how science works, despite all the efforts of stubborn humans to have it their way.
If you have even the remotest interest in why we accept the “big bang” as the theory of the origin of our universe (in the same way that we accept evolution), I strongly urge you to read “Big Bang.” If you’re afraid that the math and science will be beyond your comprehension, worry not; Singh’s style flows gently like a book of historical fiction, with a comfortable depth for the layperson. I didn’t once have to pull out a calculator. Of course, if you’re a scientist, you might find the math and science in the book to be beneath you, but the rich history, introduction to (or reminder of) the cast of characters involved, and the lesson in humility should appeal to anyone.
- This was in an effort to explain why Mars appeared to move backwards (retrograde motion) during part of its orbit “around Earth.” See Geocentric Perspective by Robert A. Hatch. Although the Ptolemaic model was imperfect in some ways (one being its non-reality), it did explain the behaviors of the solar system bodies better than any previous model, and more accurately. What science does in our favor is to take new data and destroy old ideas, no matter how nicely they appeared and no matter how staunchly they were protected by the men who clung to them. [<]
