Under The Microscope

THE LEFT HAND OF CREATION, by John D Barrow & Joseph Silk; Penguin, 1995; 262 pages; $24.95

If God created the universe, then we can be sure he was left-handed. We know this because the universe today is dominated by an asymmetry showing a preponderance of left-handed objects -- in particular, elementary particles such as neutrinos with left-handed spin, and also in biology we find only left-handed helical molecules occurring in nature, such as DNA and left-handed amino acids, even though their mirror images are in principle chemically stable configurations.

The left-handedness of nature gives the title to this book but, in fact, it is a popular account of cosmology and particle physics, topics which in the last decade have merged into one, and become one of the fastest advancing fields of modern astronomy.

Readers who enjoyed and understood Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time will also enjoy this book. The text by Professors John Barrow and Joseph Silk, well-known experts in cosmology from respectively Sussex, England and Berkeley, California, is written in the same popular style as Stephen Hawking's work. In places it is equally as unintelligible to the layman as Hawking, and the topics discussed take the reader through a cosmic journey at an often breathtaking pace, covering black holes, quarks, WIMPs, quantum gravity and grand unification theories all within a few pages. But the style is deliberately breezy and light, so these complex subjects never get bogged down in too technical a language.

The result is an excellent and informative book, which has to some extent been brought up to date since its first edition in 1983, which was essential to take into account the results from the COBE satellite on the microwave background radiation as well as the latest work on inflation theory, which concerns the universe's evolution during the first fraction of a second after the big bang.

Nevertheless, there are some irritating stylistic lapses in an otherwise good book. The six chapters have a certain unevenness in style and content, probably reflecting the dual authorship. Some topics are covered twice and the different topics are not linked very well into an integrated account. Even some matters of style, such as whether to write "Universe" or "universe" were never resolved by the copy-editor (the latter is recommended by this reviewer). The fact that both occur once again suggests two authors working almost independently.

My advice is to buy this book before the end of the century, and if you understand at least half of it, it will have been worth reading. After that time, the chances are that it will already be too out-of-date, so rapid is the advance of cosmology today, thanks in part to the new discoveries being made by the Hubble Space Telescope. Curiously, the HST is not even mentioned in these pages, which says something about the highly selective choice of topics and the strong theoretical bias of the authors.

John Hearnshaw is Professor of Astronomy at the University of Canterbury.