The Harmonious Universe by Keith Laidler, Prometheus Books, $28, ISBN 1591021871 Reviewed by Marcus Chown
BY A peculiar coincidence, only yesterday I happened to walk past the shop in London where in 1805 the 13-year-old Michael Faraday began his apprenticeship as a bookbinder. Within those walls, his employer encouraged the uneducated boy to read the books he was binding. He boned up on science, and one day, Keith Laidler tells us, a grateful customer gave him a ticket to Humphry Davy鈥檚 lectures at the Royal Institution. Incredible to think that a single act of kindness and a single ticket changed the course of science.
Anyone who sets out to survey all of science, from physics to biology, from chemistry to cosmology, deserves respect. And Keith Laidler has undoubtedly done a good job in The Harmonious Universe, enlivening what could be a stodgy historical overview with a liberal leavening of biographical asides and anecdotes about science鈥檚 principal movers and shakers 鈥� among them Faraday.
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Inevitably, when reading a book of this kind, a reviewer is drawn to familiar subjects. In my case, that means physics and astrophysics and here small things did jar. The cosmological red shift is not strictly a Doppler shift induced by velocity but by the expansion of the universe.
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were not using the radio horn at Holmdel, New Jersey, 鈥渢o improve communications with satellites鈥� when they stumbled on the radio hiss of the big bang. Their predecessors at the horn, the Bell Labs engineers, had certainly been bouncing signals off Echo and Telstar satellites, but once they had finished they handed the horn to Penzias and Wilson who wanted to use for astronomy. Laidler is also a little out of date in saying that the expansion of the universe is slowing down. Since 1998, the evidence suggests it is actually speeding up.
Laidler is undoubtedly better when he gets closer to his home ground of chemistry. All in all, he succeeds in covering a remarkable amount of material in a small space and in an accessible way. This is a good place to start if you want to get up to speed on a wide range of modern stuff.