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The Rise and Fall of the Universe

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The Rise and Fall of the Universe books and arts when racking billiard balls — and place globe”. However, the correct answer is not different, these books have much in com- another layer on top, and repeat. There are 400,000,000,but 5. mon. Both are insiders’ views of the subject, two ways to place subsequent layers. Viewed One can only admire Szpiro’s valiant both are highly original because the subject from above, there are three different posi- attempts to explain the different approaches matter is seen from the perspective of the tions for the centres of the spheres in any used by Richard Buckminster Fuller, Wu-Yi authors’ own research, and both include a one layer, say A, B and C. If the layers follow Hsiang and Hales in their attacks on the lot of autobiographical material. the order A, B, C, A, B, C, …, then the f.c.c. problem (although the serious reader would Few scientists are capable of putting their packing is obtained. If they follow the order do better to read Hales’ own descriptions). understanding and experiences into words A,B,A,B,A,B,…,then an equally dense pack- Szpiro’s discussion of the arguments as effectively as these two, so publishers have ing known as the hexagonal close packing between the protagonists is certainly enter- instead enlisted professional writers to look (h.c.p.) is obtained. taining. He illustrates them with a quotation at the subject from the outside. A science Kepler’s conjecture is that there are no from Henry Kissinger, who “was once journalist may not have as deep an under- packings that are denser than the f.c.c. or the asked why departmental fights are so violent, standing of the technicalities as a research h.c.p. packings (or any one of the infinite why back-stabbing is so common among scientist, but may be more experienced at number of different packings obtained by academic colleagues. His answer was short writing for the general public and conse- varying the order of the layers).The f.c.c.and and to the point: ‘Because the stakes are so quently better at getting the basic ideas h.c.p. packings have the same density, but small’.” Typically, not quite relevant, but a across.Particularly successful examples of this they are different: one is a lattice, the other is good story. genre are The Whole Shebang by Timothy not. Spiro claims that the f.c.c. and the h.c.p. As long as readers skip over the tech- Ferris (Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Simon & are “the exact same packing, viewed from nical sections,the book can be recommend- Schuster, 1997) and, more recently, Bill different angles’’.They are not. ed as a readable and informative account Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything Another distraction in the mathematical of a fascinating chapter in the history of (reviewed in Nature 424, 725; 2003), which discussions (which fortunately are set in a geometry. both demonstrate that winners need not different typeface, so they can — and should Neil Sloane is at the AT&T Shannon Laboratory, necessarily be on the inside track. Sadly, — be skipped by the casual reader) is the 180 Park Avenue, Florham Park, New Jersey Alpha and Omega by Charles Seife is not author’s misuse of the word ‘surface’.Several 07932-0971, USA. among the medal positions. times he writes of the surface of an object, The book starts promisingly enough, if when he means its area,or even its volume. you can forgive the pseudo-religious over- One of the oldest theorems about sphere tones of the title (a reference to the Book packing was proved by Gauss in 1831, when of Revelations). The suggested emphasis on he showed that the f.c.c. is the densest lattice The rise and fall both the beginning and the end seems a good packing of spheres.Szpiro attempts to repro- idea,as there are many books about the birth duce Gauss’s proof, but makes a mess of it. of the Universe of the Universe but relatively few about its For example, on page 255 the determinant Alpha and Omega: The Search for death. Unfortunately, despite the claims needs to be negated, and denoted by a new the Beginning and the End of the made on the jacket, this theme isn’t really ǵ symbol, , say. Then six occurrences of the Universe taken up by the book itself, except for a few letter D on that page need to be changed to ǵ. by Charles Seife comments in the final chapter. Similar repairs are needed on the next page. Viking Press: 2003.304 pp. $24.99 The book hardly mentions one of the Doubleday: 2003. £18.99 LABORATORY NATIONAL BROOKHAVEN main reasons for studying the packing of Peter Coles spheres: its application to digital communi- cations. From the communication theorist’s The potentially lucrative market viewpoint,Hales’result on three-dimensional for popular cosmology is pretty sphere packing is just the beginning of the crowded these days, so if a story. One of the fundamental questions book is to be successful it has in communication theory is to determine to stand out from its com- the densest packing of equal balls in multi- petitors. One strategy for dimensional space. A geometrical way of a publisher is to sign up representing signals, which is at the heart a professional scientist of Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory with something special of communication, underlies the high-speed to say. João Magueijo’s modems that we now take for granted. Faster Than the Speed Szpiro mentions this subject only briefly, of Light (reviewed in in the final chapter, but the discussion is Nature 422, 563–564; marred by another error. He describes the 2003) and Janna Levin’s following problem as a far-fetched applica- How the Universe Got tion of packing problems (it is actually a its Spots (Weidenfeld standard type of problem in error-correcting & Nicolson/Princeton codes).The problem is to find as many strings University Press, 2002) of ten decimal digits as possible, subject to are two recent books, both the constraint that any two of the strings written in distinctive, even must differ by at least two units in each posi- quirky, styles by specialists for tion. He misuses the known bounds on the a lay audience. Although very density of sphere packing in ten-dimensional The collision of gold nuclei at almost space to conclude that “at least 400,000,000 the speed of light creates particles in signals can be represented, which is suffi- conditions like those just after the Big Bang. cient for all words in all languages of the 127 NATURE | VOL 425 | 11 SEPTEMBER 2003 | www.nature.com/nature © 2003 Nature Publishing Group books and arts Instead we have a fairly conventional Science in culture account of the historical development of cosmology from antiquity to modern times. This account is up-to-date, including such Pixels and piety developments as the preliminary release The digital collection at the Museum of the History of Science in Florence. of data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and the latest observations Martin Kemp and inscription, before passing in 1841 to the new of distant supernovae, and is accompanied Tribuna di Galileo in the Museo di Fisica e Storia by some nice illustrations. It is, for the most Many museums have spent large sums of money Naturale on the via Romana in Florence, and part,quite well written,but there is too much embracing the digital age, often to no great effect. eventually to its current resting place. repetition, some of the diagrams are incom- Online access to images and information is cer- The flavour of such piety is embodied in another prehensible, and the text is peppered with tainly valuable in extending the audience of any Galileo reliquary now housed in the same museum. unnecessary and distracting footnotes. museum, but most of the projects go no further This contains the objective lens used by the There may be a place for footnotes in a than archiving, and make little creative use of the astronomer in 1610 to discover the moons of Jupi- scholarly monograph, but in a popular book potential of digital imaging. Likewise, most of the ter, which he designated the ‘Medicean Planets’. they are usually signs of sloppy writing. If on-site digital access that museums provide for Mounted in a florid ivory frame by Vittorio Croster they say something important they should their visitors relies on low-level interactivity con- in 1677, it was for years part of the cherished col- be incorporated into the text, otherwise the ceived by middle-aged curators who hope that lections of the Medicean Grand Dukes of Tuscany casual reader may miss something vital. If touching a computer screen will transform the in the Galleria degli Uffizi, alongside the master- they are not essential, they should be left out museum experience for ‘young people’. pieces of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. for fear of muddying the water. Happily, a few museums are An example from this book relates to now moving on to a more creative Digital archive? The Arthur Eddington’s eclipse expedition of level to enhance their interaction middle finger of 1919 to the West African island of Principe, with both real and virtual visitors. Galileo’s right hand. where he made the first measurement of the No museum has a more ambi- deflection of light by the Sun, predicted by tious programme in this respect Einstein’s general theory of relativity. After- than the Museum of the History of wards, Eddington wrote a poem containing Science in Florence, Italy, whose the phrase “light has weight”.In a footnote, director, Paolo Galluzzi, is devel- Seife claims that this is misleading because oping an imaginative range of light “does not actually have mass”.In every- digital access (as the site map day language, mass and weight are more- at galileo.imss.firenze.it testifies).
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