February 5, 2002

When the world’s most famous living cosmologist issues another State of the universe report, what should we expect? A great deal if we take the promises made in his bestseller. A brief history of time, seriously. In that book Stephen Hawking caught popular imagination by predicting that a physicist’s theory of everything was just round the corner, and that in time it would be understandable “in broad principle” by everyone.

The fact that his new offering fails to deliver on either count tells us something about publishing, something else about physics and perhaps something more about the limits of what theoretical physicists can convey to others about what they are thinking.

The unfinished business of Hawking’s first book was a way of uniting the two great theoretical edifices of twentieth-century physics. If only some device could be found to link Einstein’s framework for describing space, time and gravity with the picture of the other forces of physics painted by quantum mechanics, the way would be clear to a grand unified theory. This would explain all the features of the physical universe, from the Big Bang to as many billion years beyond our time as there turn out to be.

The universe in a nutshell is more episodic than A brief history, but is mainly a commentary on the same ideas. The first problem with this is that not much has actually happened in physics since 1988. String theory — usually glossed as representing the fundamental physical entity as a vibrating loop of some ineffable stuff, with different modes of vibration manifesting as the particles and forces of more familiar physics — remains the best for the ultimate theory.

This means that your money buys you a lot of repetition of things you first read in A brief history. If you had trouble understanding them then, you probably will not do any better this time round; many of the explanations are exactly the same. There are now a great many elaborate illustrations. If you are confident of shifting shedloads of books because Hawking’s name is on the cover then it is fair to spare no expense on the artwork. But look carefully — most of the diagrams that actually explain something are the same as before, too. The images make this book a more handsome object, but also cloak the brevity of the text, a scant 100 pages of print. That means that quite a lot of things that should be explained are skimped. When he writes, for example, that “we have come to recognize that this standing still of real and imaginary time means that spacetime has a temperature”, you expect an account of how “we” came to this realization. But none appears.

There is a deeper problem, though. The developments in theory that have taken place since the earlier book have made things less comprehensible. When a caption beside an abstract depiction of some wavy-looking sheets in shades of brown simply says that “Black holes can be thought of as the intersections of p-branes in the extra dimensions of spacetime”, neither words nor images yield any real purchase on the theory.

The fact is that p-branes make a lay reader feel like a pea-brain because they can only properly be thought of in mathematical terms. Words do not make it. These objects (if objects they are) have no correlates in our familiar world that we can sensibly say they are like, and diagrams tend to be bad at representing 10 dimensions.

Hawking offers a reason not to care. He is, he says several times, a positivist, so is concerned only with whether mathematical models with extra dimensions provide a good description of the universe, not with whether they have any real meaning. This is little comfort if the reader does not share this curiously old-fashioned philosophy of science.

There are other, less important reasons why there is little need for this book to appear apart from Bantam’s urge to keep the franchise going. Aside from odd flashes of wit, the writing is pretty routine. The opening chapter on Einstein, for example, contains nothing that is not familiar from other popular accounts of relativity theory. An interlude on the future of life says little apart from the fact that it will probably depend on computers and genetic engineering, and the result will not look much like Star Trek. There is still poignancy in reading that “although we human beings are very limited physically, our minds are free to explore the whole universe” when you know the words were written by Hawking, but this is not enough to carry a whole book.

But perhaps as poignant is the persistence of the gap between the lay appetite for understanding theories about the universe and the attempts to feed it. Hawking helped usher in the current resurgence of popular-science writing. The millions who bought A brief history showed how many really care what science can reveal, and we should all be grateful for the now widespread assumption that anything can be made clear if the experts really try. For many sciences the results are often remarkable, but the field that really helped popular science achieve lift-off remains elusive. If Hawking’s books revolve around the question of whether cosmologists are about to unveil a theory of everything, they leave the reader with another, equally taxing question. If they did, how would we know? —Dawn/Guardian news service

The universe in a nutshell
By Stephen Hawking
Bantam
Available in Pakistan with Paramount Books, 152/O, Block 2, PECH Society, Karachi-75400
Tel: 021-4310030. 
Email: paramount@cyber.net.pk
ISBN 0593048156
216pp. Ł20. Rs1495

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