"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

"A More Perfect Heaven" by Dava Sobel

The author of Longitude, which told of John Harrison's struggle to perfect the chronometer and claim the Board of Navigation prize, now turns her attention to 'How Copernicus Revolutionised the Cosmos'"

Sobel is a brilliantly readable writer of Science history. She makes her subject come alive. Copernicus was a  Catholic Pole in Minor Orders (never an ordained priest, only a canon or trustee of his cathedral) who did a lot of good work administering the cathedral lands (in effect a self-governing state of the Holy Roman Empire) at about the time the Lutheranism was infecting large parts of Germany. Against this backdrop he pursued his interest in Astronomy. He became well known in astronomical circles and contributed to a papal committee investigating calendar reform. He clearly realised early that he could better calculate astronomical tables if he put the sun at the centre of the universe rather than the earth; it probably took him longer to decide that this reflected physical reality. There were two objections. In the Bible Joshua commands the sun to stand still; why would he have said this unless the sun was moving? Copernicus seems to have decided quite early that this should be interpreted differently. The second problem was that the earth does not seem to move. It may have taken Copernicus a little longer to accept that the appearance belied the reality.

Nevertheless he delayed publishing his book because he was fearful of the inevitable backlash, both ridicule and angry charges of heresy. Finally a Lutheran mathematician, Rheticus, travelled to Copernicus to convince him to publish; this seems to have been the catalyst that bred De Revolutionibus.

Having written plain history, Sobel turns to play-writing to dramatise the moment when Copernicus met Rheticus. There were other pressures at the time. The Bishop was trying to persuade Copernicus to give up his housekeeper because of the scandal of a once-married woman living with a canon. Rheticus seems to have been gay (later he was accused and convicted in absentia of sodomy). It is an interesting device to insert fiction into history but Sobel seems to carry this off perfectly.

A wonderful little book. July 2012; 236 pages