The Infinite Cosmos

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Review - The Infinite Cosmos - Joseph Silk

Cosmology is a tricky topic to get right for the general reader. Unfortunately, this book by Joseph Silk gets things wrong almost from the beginning. It's a classic example of an academic (Dr Silk is from the Department of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford) failing to get the idea of popular science.

To begin with, he is a little free with unexplained terms. He quite happily throws around "statistically isotropic" as if this is a part of everyday conversion (it probably is in the Department of Astrophysics), and refers to "the fine structure constant" without bothering to explain it. In other places there are what someone like P. G. Wodehouse would probably describe as "plonking" statements - simply stating something without giving any justification. For example we hear "Only about a fifth of the matter in the universe is baryonic." How do we know? Or "It is most likely that gamma rays are highly beamed, so that the true frequency [of gamma ray bursts] in hundreds of times larger." What's "highly beamed"? Why does that make the frequency hundreds of times larger? Who knows? Certainly not one of Silk's readers.

The book reads anything but smoothly. It has an energetic style, written in short jerky sentences, but the energy seems to lack focus - there's no clear thread running through it. There is also the occasional moment when the reader simply goes "huh?" For instance, Silk claims to demolish the anthropic principle, the idea that the universe is the way it is because if it wasn't we would be here to see it. His argument goes something like this. There's something called the fine structure constant that is measured as 1/137. If it was, say, 1/150, then life could never have formed. But actually the fine structure constant is 1/137.03599911 - this is too accurate for "anthropic reasoning" or logic. The answer must lie elsewhere. What? This is incomprehensible.

This book isn't a total disaster by any means, and with anything as fast changing as cosmology, it's useful to have an up-to-date view. Silk covers dark matter and dark energy, galactic clusters and the cosmic background radiation, why the universe is probably infinite and, yes, a brief exploration of time. But I would strongly recommend reading Martin Rees' Just Six Numbers and Simon Singh's Big Bang before making an attempt on Silk's book. It simply doesn't work well enough for anyone who isn't already familiar with the field.

Only in hardback

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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