Big Bang

Just finished reading Big Bang : The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh over the Christmas break. While I immensely enjoyed The Code Book and Fermet's Last Theorem, I found this volume of 600 or so pages lacking. Not that Singh doesn't tell a good tale, but his explanation of the Big Bang theory left me more dissatisfied than when I started.

He does well in establishing the history of cosmology, but very much fails to convince this reader of the water-tightness of the theory. All of the "good physics stuff" is crammed into the last section of the book and feels rushed - there's more on the competing personalities than on the physics.

With grand statements suggesting that the theory of the big bang is the greatest scientific achievement of this past century I'd expect him to make his case with scientific exactness. Instead we're reminded that several holes exist in the theory, but that it's the best "scientific" theory we've got today. Sorry, you've got to do better than that. One thing that was very annoying was that he insisted that the notion of a Creator has now been debunked, while in the same breath saying there were several big unanswered questions that the theory fails to address.

Singh invokes Occam's Razor as he tells his tale, suggesting that a wind storm is the more likely culprit of a fallen tree that a pair of self-vapourising meteorites. True enough. But he then fails to recognise that alternate theories may exist which more accurately tell of the long-ago unwitnessed past. He considers the Big Bang to be a done deal - can I hear the echo of Thomas Watson and the world-wide need for only 5 computers?

Singh fails to make the distinction between experimental physics, and observational physics - you can't be absolutely sure unless you can witness an experiment. And you can't experiment on a universe scale, meaning there's automatically a lower confidence level in any theory that is in this class. This is a point that should have been made.

It's still a good read, just like his other books, but there are holes and it's a big rushed in the later chapters. I reakon it's about a 3 out of 5.

| 03 Jan 2006 | #