Tag Archives: Michael Brooks

Can We Travel Through Time – Michael Brooks ***

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It can be something of a struggle to make a book stand out, to make it different from the crowd. In this case, Quercus Books has achieved the different feel by giving The Big Questions: Physics the appearance of a notebook. It’s a hardback with an elastic closure (the black stripe in the picture), just like many notebooks. I’ve a suspicion it’s one of those novelties that seemed a good idea at the time – all it does for the reader is get in the way a bit, though you can use it as a bookmark, but it does at least make the book, or rather the series, distinctive.

My suspicion is that the whole approach didn’t work, as the paperback is a conventional design and has been retitled to pull out just one of the questions – Can We Travel Through Time (a question that isn’t really answered in the book – for that you need my How to Build a Time Machine).

Although the book is an individual one by Michael Brooks, the series is a significant one in getting a feel for this title. Edited by professor of philosophy Simon Blackburn, it ‘confronts the fundamental problems of science and philosophy.’ Because of this context, it has quite a different feel to many popular science books.

One impact is an undesirable one. There is considerably less historical and human context than there is in a normal popular science book. Although it contains most of the key aspects of physics, it does so always from the point of view of the science, rather than the people involved and how the scientific ideas were developed. This is a shame, because it’s a big part of the appeal of popular science. That’s what is taken away. What is added is (not surprisingly) more of a philisophical slant. So, for instance, we have considerably more on the possible interpretations of quantum theory than you would normally find in such a book. This was an interesting addition.

Overall it’s always a difficult challenge, trying to take on all of a subject as wide as physics. I recently did this with Egghead Physics, and I respect anyone who can get good coverage. Brooks is strong on twentieth century physics – relativity, quantum theory, particle theory, modern cosmology and the understanding of existence that has emerged from these fields. There is significantly less on areas that were developed sooner but are still important, from mechanics to electricity and magnetism.

The level of the writing was generally quite breezy, readily comprehensible by a non-technical reader, though occasionally the focus on the science with non of the context made it a trifle dull.

On the whole, Brooks gets his contents right, though the chapters feel rather arbitrary and unstructured. Perhaps the only point things go a little astray is when talking about the implications of having an infinite universe. ‘Though it would contain infinite numbers of worlds, and thus infinite numbers of worlds with Earth-like life,’ it begins. Whoa there. You can have an infinite universe with just one world in it. Or with infinite worlds of which only one is capable of supporting Earth-like life. Similarly, even if you had an infinite set of worlds all capable of supporting Earth-like life, there wouldn’t have to be many worlds with a replica of you on them, as Brooks suggests. You could have infinite worlds all of which only developed bacterial life, or that never developed mammals. It’s a misunderstanding of infinity to think that as soon as you have an infinite set, you have a set which contains all possible entities.

That apart, it’s a sound book, I’m just not quite sure who it’s aimed at. It’s too lightweight to be a book for physics students, but lacks context for popular science. It’s probably best as a guide to physics for philosophy students, which may have been the intention in the first place.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Free Radicals – Michael Brooks ***

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This is one of those books that is very well done – but it’s difficult to like the outcome. Michael Brooks sets out to show that real scientists are not at all like the hyper-rational, logical, conformist Mr Spock caricatures we know and love. This is fine, as long as he doesn’t also demolish scientific heroes along the way – we all need heroes.

Whether it’s using drugs to stimulate ideas, or being selective results, it seems many a scientist has been prepared to stray from the straight and narrow in order to get to their desired ends. We see how dog eat dog the battle to publish can be, but also how a kind of ‘acceptable fraud’ is all too common – not the outright making up of results, but rather going all out to pursue an idea, possibly a spark of genius, even if it means temporarily ignoring an experimental result or interpreting the data in a slightly selective fashion.

Parts of the book feel a bit forced. The suggestion that many (or even any) great scientific ideas were the result of being on LSD or other drugs seems a little unlikely. Apart from anything else there is reasonable evidence that effective creative thinking is suppressed by drug use – users may well think they are being creative while high, but in reality aren’t. The capability to come up with new directions and see things in different ways seem to be better served by going for a walk or sleeping on a problem, rather than tripping – it’s difficult not to get the sense that Brooks is just out to shock the reader here.

There is also rather too much emphasis put on the tedious postmodernist views of Paul Feyerabend and his ilk. I thought that Alan Sokal’s brilliant hoax had put paid to all that rubbish, but Brooks was prepared to drag it into the argument. However there is no doubt that scientists’ tendency to take risks (whether with themselves and other people or with their theories), to support a theory far outside what is suggested by experiment and to be harsh to opposing theories are real and often hidden behind the ‘rational people of science’ facade. Brooks makes clear that sometimes a scientist will be so convinced with a theory that they keep on ignoring the evidence for years… and they are eventually proved right. How often this happens compared with occasions when they don’t get it right he doesn’t say.

Perhaps the most important message is the need for mavericks in science, not just conformists. All too often modern academic science is far too rigidly bound to make big progress. If we are to make real breakthroughs again, perhaps there needs to be more opportunity to go out on a limb. At the same time, and this is something Brooks doesn’t really pick up on, we need a lot more education of the public (and of journalists and politicians) in the realities of science – an understanding that it is very rarely about certainty, and is all about probabilities – and that it is much easier to disprove something than to prove it. The public expects science to be black and white, where it is really shades of grey. We just need education to understand that this doesn’t discredit it. They are by far the best shades of grey available. But we shouldn’t expect certainty.

In the end the advice I would have given to Michael Brooks if asked before he wrote the book would be ‘Tread lightly for you tread on my dreams.’ There is no doubt that this is an interesting subject, and it’s important that we understand that scientists are human. But you don’t improve matters by simply pushing them off a pedestal. They still have the best view around.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Michael Brooks – Four Way Interview

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Michael Brooks, who holds a PhD in quantum physics, is an author, journalist and broadcaster. He is a consultant at New Scientist, and the author of 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense and The Big Questions: Physics.

Why science?

Science is simply the best way we have of understanding the world. It’s not perfect – far from it – but it has made an enormous difference: the world is a better place for its existence. You only have to look at what vaccine science has achieved to see why science is such a force for good.

Why this book?

It was a great chance to sit down and think about what really matters: why do physicists do what they do, what questions they are trying to answer and what we have learned so far. It turns out that we’ve learned an awful lot over the centuries. I also loved harnessing the idea that such huge issues – Big Questions – can actually be boiled down to questions that children could ask (and they do, in my experience!)

What’s next?

I’m working on a book provisionally titled Standing on the shoulders of anarchists. It’s about how science really works. People think that scientists are cool, rational and logical – always making progress, and objectively assessing each others’ work in a tidy, well-disciplined way. The reality is very different. This book explores the intrigues, the moments of dubious behaviour, the wacky inspirations behind some of our greatest breakthroughs – dreams, drug-taking, hallucinations – the triumph of personality over evidence… All of this lies behind work that has won Nobel Prizes. In a way the book is highlighting science’s rock ‘n’ roll side: science is anything but boring.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

Lots of things! It’s great to see the Large Hadron Collider up and running now, and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of that in particular. But I’m pretty much always excited. Almost every week science seems to spit out a surprising result or discovery that makes you stop and question everything you were thinking the week before!

13 Things that Don’t Make Sense – Michael Brooks *****

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There are two ways to cope with things science can’t get a handle on. One is Shakespeare’s. (There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.) The slightly snide dig at science. The other is to accept this is what makes science interesting, and to come at these anomalies (as Michael Brooks refers to them) with a scientific mind. Thankfully, this excellent book, subtitled The Most Intriguing Scientific Mysteries of our Time, takes the second approach.

Brooks is breezy and fun – always readable and never dull. In thirteen chapters we discover some remarkable oddities of science. Some are reasonably well-known like dark matter and dark energy. Others less so (at least to me), like the Pioneer anomaly, where the two old Pioneer spacecraft are taking a course out of the solar system that isn’t properly explained by our current understanding of gravity – and particularly in the case of the Mimivirus, a giant virus that has many of the mechanisms of a living organism, and which Brooks uses beautifully to uncover the relatively unknown area of the remarkable nature of viruses. We also get life, death, sex, extraterrestrials and cold fusion – all explored in ways that might surprise.

In the case of cold fusion, for example, Brooks usefully shows how the science community’s concern not to appear flaky has resulted in some positive results being suppressed. This is no conspiracy, just the science herd instinct coming to the fore. He makes it clear that there are significant doubts about the original results – but equally there is evidence that there is something happening in some of the cold fusion experiments.

An obvious comparison is Michael Hanlon’s earlier 10 Questions Science Can’t Answer (you don’t have to be called Michael to write these books, but it helps). Although there is a small overlap on dark matter/energy they take quite a different approach and would be better seen as companions than rivals.

If I have any problems with the book, the tone can be just a bit too breezy sometimes, and he seems slightly less effective on medical topics. On the placebo effect Brooks seems a little confused over whether it works or not – and with his chapter on homeopathy seems a little out of date after Singh and Ernst’s Trick or Treatment. In fact, it was a shame he ended with the homeopathy chapter, as it’s the weakest. It was fine, for instance to point out structures in water – but there was nothing about how long these last (or how well they stand up to percussion). There was also a spot of skimpy fact checking. We’re told astronomer Edwin Hubble was English. (Anglophile, yes, English? No, no, no.) And that water is the only liquid that expands on freezing. Sorry, silicon and acetic acid do, and I suspect there are others.

These are small problems, though. Apart from the last one, each chapter is a little vessel of delights. I can see the appeal of the ‘how to carbonize your ferret’ style of little factoid books, but one like this that can develop each topic is so much better. Deserves to be up there as one of the best popular science books of 2008/9. Recommended.

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Review by Brian Clegg