By Timothy Paul Smith
Oxford University Press
Hardback: £25
Also available as an e-book, and at the CERN bookshop
This book canters through the sizes and lifetimes of things, from the outermost reaches of the universe to the confined locality of quarks, telling us what is found where and why, and is, according to the publisher’s website, suitable for “interested general readers as well as professional scientists” – a broad church.
In scanning 45 orders of magnitude, the author presents a wealth of information on “everything”, from cosmology to string theory, with passing reference to cooking, football, square dancing and more. The narrative is exuberant and many of the facts are little gems, but they are jumbled up, disordered and congested. The book reads like a series of digressions and there are enough typos and mistakes – bacteria and criteria are plural not singular, the shadow on a sundial is not cast by a gnome – to irritate anyone trying to stay the course.
Concepts seemingly pop up out of nowhere, reappearing again (and again and again) when the plot is all but lost. Much of the material is erudite, abstruse and irrelevant, such as “The delta particles Δ–– Δ– Δ0 Δ+ are like neutrons and protons but with complex spin.” Spin, complex or not, is not in the too-brief index, so the reader cannot check whether it has been defined earlier, or indeed anywhere, and the doubly charged member of this quartet is actually the Δ++, although by now – page 123 – it is debatable whether even the most interested readers care. And why should they?
Some aggressive editing would have been in order, not only to fix imperfections and remove chunks of repeated or unnecessary text, but also to avoid slowing down the observant with infelicitous phrasing, for example, “A number of species in the new world and the old world have the same common name because, at least superficially, they look the same, for example the robin and the buffalo.”
And in a cup of water drawn from an ocean today, how many molecules were in a cupful poured into the oceans long ago? After 10 pages of exhaustive and exhausting accounts of the work of Avogadro, Dalton, Gay-Lussac, Loschmidt and Maxwell, we arrive at the numbers. There are 3.3 × 1024 water molecules in a cup and 1.3 × 1022 cups in the oceans. So, 250 of the original molecules are in today’s cup and, although not stated, the oceans contain 4.3 × 1046 water molecules. Yes? No! On the following page, “there are about 8 × 1045 molecules of water on Earth.”
I was once told, if lost for affable words when asked for an opinion on something quite extraordinary, to say “astounding!” This book is astounding, which is a pity as it could and should have been excellent.
