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| THE HANDSTAND | MARCH/APRIL 2002 |
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BOOK REVIEW THE UNIVERSE IN A NUTSHELL BY STEPHEN HAWKING By Ondine Braddell This book takes its title from an intriguing quotation from Shakespeare “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space”. It is from the perspective of man the imaginative observer that this book delineates our understanding of the universe in the terms of the current scientific research in this field, in which the author is an active protagonist. The author states his position from the start when he claims to be a “positivist” in the Karl Popper sense where a theory fails if its predictions no longer agree with experiment. For someone who has a scientific background, this book is nicely structured with the basic building blocks of special and general relativity and quantum theory introduced in the first two chapters. Other intellectual concepts such as determinism versus “the random throw of a dice,” the encompassing theme of encodification of information, and the question of our ability of predict and hence control the future are expressed in a flowing concise manner in subsequent chapters. All the content of the text is represented in illustrations and captions and this offers an alternative approach which may be more accessible to the lay man. Nevertheless this writer feels that it would require great persistence on the part of a general reader to struggle with the abstract intellectualism of the material. Underlying the science are simple questions such as: Does the universe have a beginning and how will it end? Is it limitless in size? Is its nature static or dynamic? Are events governed by cause and effect? These types of questions have been a major preoccupation of religion and philosophy through the ages and shaped our civilisation and are the natural expression of an inquisitive mind attempting to understand direct experience. The most alarming chapter in this
book questions whether biological and electronic life
will continue to develop in complexity, where complexity
is equated to growth of information. The author’s
answer is an emphatic yes if we don’t destroy
ourselves in a nuclear war. Suggestions include
growing embryos outside the human body to increase brain
size and intelligence, the use of neural implants to
transfer large amounts of information, and intelligent
computers. In the meantime, the scientists are
still searching for a grand unified theory of the
universe which scales from the very small to the
infinite, as we know it, and they need the large particle
accelerators to test the validity of their theories. |
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