Under The Microscope

THEORIES OF EVERYTHING, The Quest For Ultimate Explanation, by John D Barrow; Oxford University Press, 1991; $69.95

Gone are the days when people sat down with the latest philosophical treatise with the intention of enjoying themselves. Nowadays, a work of popular philosophy is virtually a contradiction in terms.

It's difficult enough to get a work of popular science right. There's a narrow line between the incomprehensibly erudite, such as A Brief History Of Time, and the painfully fashionable -- The Dancing Wu Li Masters for example.

It hence comes as a nice surprise, to find in Theories Of Everything a work of popular philosophy masquerading as rather a good work of popular science. The major topic is cosmology, the natural philosophy of space and time, and the execution is almost impeccable.

Is there any reason why the universe should be amenable to mathematical description? If so, how complete a picture could we draw of it? What forms would a grand unified theory have to take? How are these forms related to other sorts of explanatory pictures that we use? They're just some of the big questions, all discussed against a background of the history of scientific and theological attempts to explain the cosmos.

We get to see the standard players of popular physics: wormholes in space, Godel's theorem, gauge theories and strings. But there are a lot of fresh faces as well, like the universal force law of the 18th century Jesuit Roger Boscovich. It's all punctuated by some of the best subheads and quotations I've seen in any book recently.

Sometimes the science seems a bit anecdotal. You wish Barrow had spent some more time giving explications of the theories. His treatment of "squalid-state physics", the physics of normal sized things and their chaotic interactions also leaves a bit to be desired.

But that doesn't really matter, it's the explication of the questions and what they imply and presuppose that makes this book special. Remember, education isn't just to do with facts, it's about good conceptual housekeeping as well.

Tony Smith, NZSM Wellington