Chris Lavers
Aeons by Martin Gorst (Fourth Estate)
Atom: An Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth … AND BEYOND by Lawrence M Krauss (Little, Brown)
Popular-science books on any particular theme tend to arrive in bunches. Perhaps prompted by the earlier success of Richard Fortey’s Life: An Unauthorised Biography, bookstores are now filling up with books exploring “deep time”. Two recent and notable additions are Martin Gorst’s Aeons and Lawrence Krauss’s Atom.
The first 11 chapters of Aeons detail attempts to determine the age of the Earth, and the last four that of the universe. Particularly refreshing is Gorst’s treatment of the much-maligned Bishop James Ussher, who, in 1650, declared that the Earth had been created at 6pm on Saturday October 22 4004BC. The story of how he arrived at this conclusion is fascinating and the standard perception of Ussher as a paragon of religious ignorance is unwarranted.
Perhaps Gorst could have given us a more detailed treatment of the Earth’s age and written another book about the age of the universe; the hiatus between the two sections is ugly, and the last four chapters rather rushed. This would also have given us the chance to wallow in even more of his elegant prose.
If your thirst for knowledge does happen to be universal, however, put Aeons down after chapter 11 and pick up Atom. Trust a physicist to take things to extremes. Krauss’s deep-time contribution starts when the universe was the size of a baseball and ends long after the Earth succumbs to the death throes of the sun. In between the universe expands, galaxies coalesce, stars burst into life.
On some planets orbiting these stellar furnaces skies beget clouds, oceans fill with water and, sometimes, life begins. On one particular lump of rock, creatures evolve and change in myriad directions until one individual unexpectedly becomes smart enough to relate the whole elaborate story so far and predict what the future has in store.
Krauss weaves his cosmic story around the life of a single oxygen atom from the time it was a twinkle in the universe’s eye to the eventual death of its constituent particles. This denouement may come to pass in some distant part of the cosmos long after we have all passed away but, if we are really lucky, it may just happen in a tank of minutely scrutinised water currently located down a mineshaft in Japan.
If and when it does, physicists the world over will jump up and down with excitement, because they will have learned something profound. Exactly what that was would take too long to explain, which is a relief, because I’m not at all sure I understand it. Read the book and try for yourself.
The standard of writing in Atom is perhaps even higher than in Krauss’s 1995 bestseller, The Physics of Star Trek. But be warned he remains the United States’s leading exponent of the exclamation mark, an annoying bit of punctuation that is certainly redundant after a sentence informing us that a teaspoonful of collapsed atoms would weigh a million billion billion tonnes. Even I can tell that’s rather a lot.