I write this on Christmas Eve 2021, while listening to the traditional BBC broadcast of Nine Lessons and Carols. One theme that strikes me from the readings and lyrics is the sense of wonder, often in contemplation of a star, or the choirs of angels lighting up the sky. Whatever one’s feeling about the Christmas story, the attitude of awe and wonder is something we can all share, if the night sky is clear. Whatever star you are following, I wish you peace, and as much joy and fellowship with loved ones, as you wish for.
The following is a book review originally written for Vectis Astronomical Society’s newsletter New Zenith in March 2019.
Book Review – The Consolations of Physics: Why the Wonders of the Universe Can Make You Happy
Tim Radford (2018) published by Sceptre
If you are a member of an astronomy society then you probably already understand the subtitle of this book. And the key word is “Wonders”. The more we see of the night sky, and the more we learn as instruments and space technology advance, the more we are confronted with the vast – unimaginably vast – distances, times, energies and sheer variety and beauty in the Universe. We not only learn about the planets, stars, galaxies etc., but we encounter them with our most natural response – a sense of wonder.
When the worlds of politics or society or relationships may seem stuck in endless cycles of chaos or irrationality or conflict, then a few minutes contemplating the night sky can re-set our perspective. We should never lose touch with those feelings that we might remember from childhood or teenage years, when we lay on the ground on a summer night and looked up at the stars, and felt the awe of a billion-year-old light show, and sense of feeling very small, and of trying to think about infinities of space or time. That’s the same perspective of Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot”, as Voyager 1 looked back at Earth in 1990.
Tim Radford writes about his encounters with some of the iconic scientific endeavours of our lifetime which allow us to study both the unimaginably large and the unimaginably small: the Voyager spacecraft, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) and the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravity-Wave Observatory). He brings out the immensity of the human achievements of these extraordinary machines, triumphs of technical excellence and international scientific collaboration, to confirm the existence of the Higgs Boson, gravity waves etc. And with Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 he considers the visionary audacity to send these objects and their famous golden LP records, tokens of life on earth in the 1970s, to become the first man-made objects to leave the solar system. They are most likely to continue their journey long beyond the time the Earth along with other planets are engulfed by the red giant stage of our dying star, Sol. Six billions years from now, they could be the last (or even only) remnants of our little lives.
This is a short book – you could read it in an evening – and doesn’t need any hard science to understand. There are no equations or even pictures, but he explains some tremendous concepts in astrophysics, cosmology, plate tectonics and particle physics with infectious enthusiasm. There are mind-blowing facts, for example in the chapter “Adventures with the Time Machine” about the materials and engineering precision needed to build the LHC at CERN: did you know that when a small puff of hydrogen nuclei are accelerated to the speed of 0.999999991 of the speed of light for the collider, the relativistic energy of the tiny batch of protons is equivalent to that of an intercity train travelling at 200 km per hour! The precision and control has to be unprecedented, because “if any one thing went wrong in this machine, everything could go very wrong indeed”.
And Radford writes well, as you’d expect from a former science editor of The Guardian. One reviewer says that his writing is “so beautiful, it reads like poetry”, and I admire someone who can, without pretention, move from Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and H. G Wells’ “War of the Worlds” to the super-conductive magnets of the LHC and the collision of neutron stars. The book title is a variation on “The Consolations of Philosophy” by Boethius, a sixth century Roman official who wrote his contemplation on the big issues of life and death while in prison. In case we ever feel imprisoned in our everyday lives, gravity-bound to our little world, our imaginations and appreciation for the incredible things that contemporary physics and astronomy can reveal, should always be able to give us consolation and even joy.
Links
- The Vectis Astronomical Society webpage
- The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (translated by Longfellow) is available for free from Project Gutenberg – but I would recommend the wonderful translation by Dorothy L Sayers (published by Penguin Books, 1953-1962)
- The Consolations of Philosophy by Boethius is at Project Gutenberg
- Tim Radford on wikipedia
- For more astronomical thoughts, see New Horizons, Old Harmonies
There was only room for one rock song on the Voyager records, that being ‘Johnnie B Goode’ by Chuck Berry, who performed the song at the scientists’ wrap-up party. Steve Martin said the first message back from outer space would be, ‘Send more Chuck Berry’.
Is that Steve Martin the well known banjo player? I mean I like a good eclectic mixtape, but I don’t think I would have had the audacity to follow Blind Willie Johnson’s bottleneck blues guitar by a Beethoven string quartet!
Yup, the comedian, actor and musician. The bandwidth, as we would now say, was a fraction of today’s, and there was a feeling that adolescent nonsense like rock music had no place on Voyager. Carl Sagan remarked that there were a lot of adolescents in the world.