Under The Microscope

ABOUT TIME -- EINSTEIN'S UNFINISHED REVOLUTION, by Paul Davies; Penguin Books, 1996; 316 pages; $24.95

In one of the David Lodge novels mocking the foibles of academia, a dinner-party of English literature dons plays a game called Humiliation. Victory goes to he (or she) who admits to the most glaring gap of professional background. The winner is a don who has never read Hamlet.

Your reviewer is humiliated to admit that About Time is the first book that he has read by the theoretical physicist and renowned populariser of science, Professor Paul Davies. Subtitled Einstein's unfinished revolution, Davies first begins with some cultural contrasts: the ancient belief in "temporal cyclicity" giving way to Western linear time. Newton's time, flowing "equably without relation to anything external" is soon superceded by the relativity of the space-time continuum and Einstein's "biggest blunder", the cosmological constant.

This is now conventional enough, but is an essential precursor to the introduction of quantum mechanics in the remainder of the book. This material is newer, headier -- and more speculative. Quantum cosmologists are busy abolishing time, incidentally providing a loophole through which the universe can be created. A final and unrelated section of the book treats physiological aspects of time. Our sense of the present, it seems, is an after-the-event synthesis of a jumble of nerve signals desynchronised by differing propagation delays.

Davies' strength as a science writer is to review each point from several perspectives. This talking around and turning over doubles the length of About Time, but makes for much more intelligible reading. Following Galileo, Davies introduces a fictional interlocutor, but unlike Galileo's Simplicio, the questions are intelligent and pertinent. About Time will date. Results from observational cosmology in the next decade are likely to consign many of its speculations to the dust heap. (For example, your reviewer's hunch is that Einstein's blunder will not turn to triumph. No resurrection of the cosmological constant will be needed because new data will remove the current mismatch between estimates of the age of the universe and the oldest objects within it.) But About Time is a fascinating book that will be all the more illuminating on a second read -- which is what your reviewer plans to do, as soon as he has finished Hamlet.

Dr William Tobin is a senior lecturer in Canterbury University's Department of Physics and Astronomy, and a supervisor at the Mt John Observatory.