| 25 BIG IDEAS: The Science that's Changing our World Robert Matthews Oneworld Publishing 2005 Price: £9.99 Available from Amazon: click on book cover "Robert Matthews is one of the best science writers around. Whatever your background, you will learn something new from this book" - Professor Duncan Watts, Columbia University. "I've always admired Robert Matthews's clear thinking and no-frills attitude to science... He takes things that seem hopelessly complicated and explains how simple they really are" - Professor Ian Stewart FRS, University of Warwick "Robert Matthews has a gift for finding the simple, fascinating stories at the heart of concepts transforming the modern world" - John Rennie, Editor, Scientific American Introduction As I was finishing this book, some scientists had begun a campaign to warn people about a low-budget American film about life, the universe and everything. The film was called What the Bleep Do We Know?, and used a mix of documentary and drama to convey the message that there’s a lot about our universe we don’t understand. How could any scientist argue with that ? They can be a bit arrogant sometimes, but not even the most gung-ho physicist would claim to possess all the keys to the cosmos. Even so, some of them felt moved to issue public warnings about the film, describing it in terms ranging from the peremptory (“atrocious”) through to the darkly disturbing (“It is a very dangerous piece of work”). Clearly, this was a must-see movie. Yet for the first twenty minutes or so, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Various scientists made pretty innocuous statements about how new discoveries were revealing the universe to be far stranger than anyone had expected. It was when the film moved on to describe some of these discoveries that I began to see what the fuss was really about – discoveries like the ability of water molecules to be affected by thought. I had heard rumours of this before: of how a Japanese researcher had shown that the very shape of a water molecule could be radically altered just by the thoughts of those around it. Yet when the movie described this astonishing discovery, all it gave by way of evidence was some pictures of ice crystals looking nice after being blessed by a Zen monk, and looking nasty after being exposed to someone in a bad mood. Now, lots of people do find this kind of evidence pretty compelling. It’s immediate, clear, and apt to prompt wide smiles and sentiments like “Hey, man, far out”. Among scientists, though, the typical response has been: “Give me a break”. I know what they mean. Sure, the idea that water is affected by thoughts is an amazing claim with huge implications. With no obvious explanation, it also raises the possibility of radical new forces at work in the cosmos. But before we get too carried away, it might be an idea to have some decent evidence that the effect is real. And pretty photos of crystals, nice as they undoubtedly are, just don’t cut it. Many other similarly bizarre claims popped up in the film, along with similarly feeble evidence backing them up. But while I can understand why so many scientists became indignant over the film, I think they really missed the point. The real problem is that its claims weren’t bizarre enough. Water molecules affected by weird forces? Forget Zen monks; try this: water molecules owe their properties to a form of energy that appears literally out of nowhere, which appears to be linked to a force now propelling the expansion of the whole universe. And the evidence is more than just a few pretty pictures: it comes from decades of research in laboratories and observatories around the world. The truth is that discoveries are now being made that prove beyond doubt that – just as the film claims - the universe is far stranger than anyone could have believed. Astronomers have found that the universe is made from an unknown form of matter, and is being propelled by a mysterious force known only as Dark Energy. Meanwhile, physicists have discovered a bizarre phenomenon called “entanglement”, in which atoms remain in intimate and instantaneous contact with each other, even if separated by billions of light- years. Many theoretical physicists now believe that our vast universe is just a tiny part of an infinite Multiverse. Some even think the presence of parallel universes has already been detected in the laboratory. The discoveries being made on a more human scale are no less astounding. Neuroscientists have found evidence that our conscious perception of events lags behind reality by around half a second – a delay we fail to notice because it is deliberately edited out by our brains. Anthropologists now believe they have identified the origins of modern humans, and how – and why – they left their birthplace to populate the world. And completing the cosmic circle, some theorists claim to have found links between the existence of humans - and indeed all life on Earth – and the fundamental design of the universe. This book describes all these discoveries, and many more. Each of the 25 chapters is self-contained and they can be read in pretty much any order. As well as explaining the current state of play, each chapter also includes a glossary of technical terms, explanatory boxes and suggestions for further reading to allow readers to deepen, broaden and update their knowledge of fields that particularly interest them. But my aim has been to do more than simply take readers up to the very frontiers of scientific knowledge. I have also sought to give some insight into the way science works, by describing the often tortuous route by which key discoveries have been made. All too often, the scientific process is portrayed as some kind of machine into which objective observations are poured, and out of which infallible truths emerge. As the chapters that follow make clear, the reality is very different. Despite what some of its most distinguished practitioners might have us believe, science is a human endeavour, shot through with uncertainty and subjectivity - and is all the more fascinating for that. Again, contrary to what some might have us believe, science shows no signs of reaching completion. On the contrary, we appear to be further away from omniscience than ever. It is now clear that many if not most natural phenomena can never be understood to the level once thought possible. The emergence of the concepts of chaos and quantum uncertainty have put ineluctable bounds on what we can know. Many of the chapters that follow outline techniques such as Bayesian inference and Extreme Value Theory which allow us to make the most of what we can know about the world. Such techniques have application far beyond the quest for ultimate knowledge, however: Bayesian inference allows apparently impressive evidence of, say, some new cancer scare to be put in its proper context, while Extreme Value Theory underpins the design of the sea defences now protecting the 16 million people who live in The Netherlands. One of the chapters in this book describes the efforts of some of the world’s leading theoretical physicists to create the so-called Theory of Everything, which will sum up all the forces and particles of the universe in a single equation. My aim in this book is to confirm the suspicions of all who believe the universe is best summed up in a single word: magical. |
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Contents 1. Ourselves - and others Consciousness Nature versus Nurture Small world theory Game theory 2. Doing the impossible Artificial Intelligence Information Theory GM technology 3. Life Out of Africa Evolution The Selfish Gene 4. The Earth Catastrophism Plate Tectonics 5. Mathematics Bayes’s Theorem Chaos Theory Cellular Automata Extreme Value Theory 6. In sickness and in health Evidence-based medicine Epidemiology 7. The physics of reality Special relativity Entanglement The Standard Model The Theory of Everything 8. The universe - and our place in it The Big Bang Dark Energy Parallel Universes The Anthropic Principle |