Allen Lane £25 pp512
String theory, higher dimensions of space and “membranes” are among the hottest topics in theoretical physics today. Lisa Randall is a leading researcher in the field. But the combination of the two doesn’t strike the sparks that the publisher must have hoped for when it commissioned this book.
The principal problem is that Randall is at best a workmanlike writer, and it would be kindest not to draw attention to her worst passages. Like most physicists today, she also has a patchy understanding of the history of her subject, so it is unfortunate that the first half of the book is devoted to a rather laboured introduction to relativity, quantum theory and the attempts to unify the two — all of which have been covered much more entertainingly, and accurately, in many recent popularisations. She also, like all too many scientists desperate to appeal to a wider audience, starts each chapter with a truly dreadful “SciFi” vignette, which serves only to highlight her inadequacies as a writer.
In the main body of her account, where Randall relies on sources they are usually secondary ones, and where she does not rely on sources at all she makes some truly astonishing mistakes. Among these, she misrepresents Albert Einstein’s motivation for developing relativity theory and, in an extended passage (so it is no mere slip), elaborates on how Niels Bohr came up with the idea of electron waves. It was, in fact, someone else, in another country, a decade later. The error is akin to giving credit for The Rite of Spring to Claude Debussy. A lesser mistake (but one which always annoys me) is her repeated reference to “the theory of general relativity” instead of “the general theory of relativity” — it is the theory that is general, not the relativity.
Things look up considerably after page 303. This is not because the writing gets any better, but because Randall is at last writing about something she understands, and because this is the new stuff about membranes and higher dimensions (which she calls “passages”, hence the title of her book). This is where we come to grips with such ideas as the possibility that our entire four-dimensional universe (three of space and one of time) may simply be one membrane (or “brane”) in a much larger reality, called the “bulk”. The simplest analogy would be if our entire universe were like a single page in a great book, with the other pages of the book representing other universes.
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When these ideas were first mooted, long ago in the late 20th century, it was thought that there would be no way to communicate with the other universes, which made the whole exercise somewhat esoteric. But more recently it has been suggested that gravity can travel between the universes (through the bulk) and that therefore our universe may feel the presence of its neighbours. This is a particularly exciting idea for physicists, because gravity is by far the weakest of the forces of nature, and there is no obvious reason why this should be so, in a four-dimensional world. The new models suggest that it is because gravity leaks away into the bulk, so that the force we feel is just a faint residue of the real force.
As speculation, many of these ideas are familiar to Trekkies and other science-fiction aficionados. What is new and exciting is that this is now respectable science, with models based on equations and predictions to back them up. Frustratingly, though, just as the first half of Warped Passages is far too long, the second half is far too short. By concentrating on her own work and that of her immediate colleagues, Randall has largely ignored many of the wider implications, not least the application of these ideas to an understanding of the origin of the universe.
The readers who will get most out of this book are science-fiction fans and science buffs who have already encountered the idea of string theory and want to know more. They are also the readers who might well know more about the history of quantum mechanics and relativity theory than Randall does. The way to make the book a success for those readers would be to cut the first half of the volume by 75% and increase the size of the second half by at least 50%. It might also be a good idea to find a competent indexer — this one has come up with a classic. The entry “Large Hadron Collider (LHC)” says “see under CERN”. The entry for “CERN” includes (you guessed) “See also LHC”.
Don’t give up the day job, Professor Randall.
John Gribbin is a visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex and author of Science: A History. Warped Passages is available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £20 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585