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AUTUMN BOOKS better, especially as the latter receives just a single paragraph. Fresh material, based on advances made over the past two decades, has been included, such as the concept of ‘dark energy’ and advances in string theory. I am also pleased to see that the discussion of the anthropic principle is retained. This is a hot topic of discussion at the moment in connection with multiverse theo- ries. However, I found it a little surprising that the idea is still treated rather cautiously here. I have no doubt that A Briefer History of Timewill soon be on the shelves of every high-street bookstore around the world. This is surely to be welcomed: any book that can reach a wide audience and get across the excitement of science has to be a good thing. And with Hawking enjoying an iconic status not seen in a scientist since Einstein, his role as an ambassador for science should not be underestimated. ■ and hopefully, one imagines, more digestible the special theory of relativity are not at the Jim Al-Khalili is professor of the public ones. On the whole I like this, but it does seem cutting edge of current thinking doesn’t mean engagement of science in the Department of a bit of a cheat if readers get through the same they are any less counter-intuitive. The two-slit Physics, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey amount of material before giving up, only now experiment and the notion of the relativity GU2 7XH, UK. He is the author of Black Holes, boasting of having seen off three chapters of simultaneity could have been explained Wormholes and Time Machines. instead of one. The new book is certainly easier going. The old third chapter (“The expanding Universe”) of 11 in the original is now the seventh chapter of 12, highlighting the additional weighting Science in society given to introductory material. The three middle chapters (“Black holes”, “Black holes was transformed into a strongly felt quest to Victory and Vexation in Science: Einstein, ain’t so black” and “The origin and fate of the comprehend the physical world. This drive, Bohr, Heisenberg and Others Universe”), which together made up a total of Holton says, constituted a flight from “personal, by Gerald Holton 70 pages in the original, are now lumped into Harvard University Press: 2005. 244 pp. everyday life, with all its dreary disappoint- one chapter just 18 pages long. Elsewhere, $35, £22.95 ments, and escape into the world of objective every attempt has been made to clarify those perception and thought”. Indeed Einstein passages deemed to be hard going. Finally, out Daniel J. Kevles once remarked that the tenacious pursuit of a goes the chapter on the arrows of time, the In Victory and Vexation in Science, Gerald difficult scientific problem demanded “a state diagrams of light cones and event horizons, Holton, a physicist and historian of science at of feeling similar to that of a religious person and discussions of chaotic boundary condi- Harvard University, provides a series of illu- or a lover”. tions, and in comes a new crowd-pleasing minating historical and biographical essays on Einstein ultimately embraced a transcen- chapter on time machines. science and scientists in the twentieth century. dent spiritualism, free of anthropomorphic I find myself unconvinced by this valiant This thought-provoking book mixes reminis- and what he considered primitive elements. effort, however. Clearly, the incredible success cence with scholarly reflection, drawing on His views irritated the theologian Paul Tillich of A Brief History of Timewas due to a combi- Holton’s deep knowledge of scientists and their and angered clerics such as a Roman Catholic nation of timing, marketing and the persona of intellectual, religious and social engagements. cardinal in Boston, who found intimations of the author. It can never be repeated. But what The 14 essays range over a variety of topics atheism in Einstein’s theories of space-time. is often overlooked is that its major, paradoxi- and are organized into two sections: ‘Scientists’ Queried on the point, Einstein declared that he cal attraction was its charming incompre- and ‘Science in context’. The first part covers, believed in “Spinoza’s God, Who concerns hensibility to the non-physicist — the idea in addition to the icons in the book’s subtitle, Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, that anyone could take a peak inside one of the physicists Enrico Fermi, Percy Bridgman not in a God Who concerns Himself with the the greatest minds in science. This is lost in the and Isidor Isaac Rabi, and the psychologist fate and the doings of mankind”. new book. For millions of people around the B. F. Skinner. The subjects in the second section Unlike Einstein, Rabi was raised as an world, A Brief History of Timewould have include innovation in science and art, policy orthodox Jew, but while he separated from been the only science book they have ever read for basic science, postmodernism and science, orthodoxy, Holton notes that deep down he or attempted to read. But with the briefer ver- and women in science. The subjects are dis- remained “God-struck throughout his life”. sion, I feel the baby has been thrown out with parate, but several arresting topics appear and Like Einstein, Rabi saw science as a means of the bathwater. It is just another run-of-the- reappear in the volume. transcendence beyond the visceral concerns of mill popular science book on modern physics. Among them is the religious impulse that the human species. He once recalled that The topics that it claims to treat more carefully Holton finds behind the science of Einstein physics filled him with awe and put him in have been covered better elsewhere. In any and Rabi. As a youth, Einstein was deeply reli- touch with a sense of original causes. “When- case, many of the topics left in and flagged gious in some profound non-sectarian sense, ever one of my students came to me with a as more introductory are just as baffling, even though he was raised in an irreligious scientific project, I asked only one question, abstract and abstruse to non-scientists as those household. After the age of 12, when he began ‘Will it bring you nearer to God?’.” left out. Just because quantum mechanics and encountering science, his religious inclination The role that intuition plays in science is 161 © 2005Nature PublishingGroup AUTUMN BOOKS NATURE|Vol 438|10 November 2005 also discussed. Holton raises the issue in a capti- Holton rightly insists that the Heisenberg in Part of the problem for science has been vating essay on the origins of the Fermi group’s Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, who said attempting to distil a working definition of research with slow neutrons in Rome during he knew how to build a bomb but refrained, genius that removes its more subjective and the 1930s. The decisive experimental step was is a fictional character and ought to be viewed untestable historical and cultural associations, taken by Fermi himself, when he interposed as such. while still retaining our idea of it. This is far paraffin between the fast-neutron source Holton is dismissive of the postmodern cri- from easy. One tenet is that a genius must be and the target. Fermi turned to the paraffin tique of science, saying it holds that the aim recognized as such by the relevant experts in with neither forethought nor announcement. of achieving objective truth is unrealizable the field — but by that reckoning, if Einstein He was guided, Holton writes, by brilliant “because there is no difference between the hadn’t published his theories, he would have intuition, a speculative move “below the level laws scientists find in nature and the arbitrary been barred from the title. Despite the many of consciousness”. In the course of mathemat- rules that govern baseball games”. He finds difficulties with investigating genius (hence ical invention, Henri Poincaré knew similar part of its roots in nineteenth-century Euro- the mixed results), science has tried to break it moments of deep intuition that arrived unbid- pean romanticism, which was at times scien- down it into components such as intelligence, den, “a manifest sign”, he thought, “of long, tifically productive. But he also sees shades structure and function of the brain, madness, unconscious prior work”. of it in Hitler’s declaration that “there is no level of disinhibition, even genetic inheritance. Holton writes with relish of a conversation truth, in either the moral or the scientific Because of the somewhat elusive definition on the origins of the uncertainty principle sense”. For Holton, truth emphatically exists of creativity, Nancy Andreasen opts for a between Heisenberg and Einstein in the mid- in both senses. It is clear from these graceful case-study approach in her book The Creating 1920s that Heisenberg recounted to him in essays that he stands with Rabi, admiring his Brain. Andreasen is an MD with a PhD in 1956. But Holton finds Heisenberg’s politics insistence that science is an essential part Renaissance English literature, which formed appalling, and rebukes him for his willingness of culture, an ennobling activity, a guide to the basis for her first book, John Donne(Prince- to collaborate with the Nazi regime and for objective thinking and a “unifying force for ton University Press, 1967). From Mozart to issuing “astonishing exaggerations” about all of humanity”. ■ August Kekulé, and Henri Poincaré to Samuel Einstein’s role in the atomic-bomb project Daniel J. Kevles is in the Department of History, Taylor Coleridge, she unravels the insights, while claiming that he had declined on moral Yale University, New Haven, accounts and descriptions of their moments of grounds to build an atomic bomb for Hitler.

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