"Big Bang" by Simon Singh

This is a delightful and fascinating history of cosmology up to and slightly after the near-universal (pun not intended) acceptance of the Big Bang theory of the creation of the Universe. Having taught Physics for 33 years I knew most of the Science and understood the arguments but there were still aspects I had not fully appreciated. These were carefully explained and I am confident that this book would be accessible to the general reader. Singh also explained the philosophical issues and weighed up the various arguments carefully so that their merits and demerits could be easily compared. But the icing on the cake was his affectionate portrayal of the very human astronomers and cosmologists who contributed to (or fought against) our present understanding.

There were so many characters. Here are just a few:

• Fritz Zwicky, for example, was famously rude. His favourite insult was to call you a 'spherical bastard' because,just like a sphere, he thought you were a bastard whichever way he looked at you. 
• Lord Rosse owned an estate in Ireland and gave up astronomy to look after his tenants during the Irish Potato Famine; he built a huge telescope on his lands but was rather foiled by the fact that there are two sorts of weather in Ireland: raining and about to rain. 
• Walter Baade, a German emigre in USA during the Second World War experienced similar frustrations when the authorities decided that, as an enemy alien, he should be confined to his house between sunset and sunrise despite working on the Mount Wilson optical telescope. 
• George Gamow, a practical joker, who had to defect from the USSR; his first attempt involved trying to canoe across the Black Sea which he had to give up after two days. 
• Fred Hoyle, the proponent of the Steady State Theory, who shot himself in the foot not once but twice: first when he developed the theory for nucleosynthesis which removed a significant problem for the Big Bang theory and secondly during a radio broadcast when he scornfully referred to what was then called the dynamic evolving model as a Big Bang, thus creating a catchy name to popularise the idea.

The book ends with a short epilogue in which the continuing issues facing cosmology are outlined. Why is the expansion of the Universe apparently accelerating? What is the mysterious dark energy that might explain this? Why are the six numbers that govern the Universe so perfectly aligned that humans can exist? Does this mean that we are just one bubble in a multiverse? And most of all, of course: What happened before the Big Bang?

A thought-porvoking book that takes you for a ride through the mysteries of the Universe and yet explains them so well that you understand some reallt difficult science.

April 2015; 493 pages

Other books by this author:

• Fermat's Last Theorem: I have not yet read this
• The Code Book: I very much enjoyed this history of cryptography
• The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets: a fun book about Maths which I have reviewed in this blog

"The Simpsons and their mathematical secrets" by Simon Singh

The script writing team of the hit US cartoon series The Simpsons includes a surprising number of mathematicians; they have degrees, post-graduate degrees and in some cases they have even published original research. Perhaps because of this, they have made it their mission to sneak mathematical jokes into the cartoons; often on the basis that there is no harm adding in extra jokes that only a very small percentage of the population will understand. This can be as simple as choosing three numbers for a display board which, rather than being random numbers, are a Mersenne prime, a perfect number and a narcissistic number.

This book not only exposes the secrets but also goes into the history and the maths behind the numbers and has pages of mathematical jokes. (There is also a section at the back about the maths (and sometimes the physics) of the spin-off animation Futurama; this felt a bit like padding because there is no hint on the front cover or the title page that Singh is going to include another show.)

My favourite mathematical joke from the book: There are 10 types of people in the world; those who understand binary and those who don't.

My favourite fact that I didn't know before: in 1979 an upper limit was calculated for the number of flips you would need in the worst case scenario to make a randomised pile of pancakes into one that was perfectly ordered such that the biggest pancake is on the bottom of the pile. This number was calculated in a paper co-authored by William Gates who went on to found Microsoft.

But then the book made me angry. Why do we live in a society that spurns the beauty of mathematics and assumes mathematicians are weirdos while soccer players are heroes. As Singh points out: Keats claimed that if you "unweave the rainbow" you will somehow destroy its beauty but Feynman replied that a mathematician or a scientist can appreciate the surface beauty of a flower whilst at the same time appreciating the underlying beauty of the biology and the ecology and the biochemistry that makes that flower. So scientists see more beauty than non-scientists.

So I would like to make a start to reclaim poetry for the geeks by proposing that Euler's equation:

has the transcendent beauty equal to (or even transcending) any haiku. The very idea of e or of i are as stunning as a rainbow!