Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand

March 1, 2019
A genial tour of the universe and its mysteries.According to Einsteinian and other theories of relativity, light should take about 8.5 minutes to zoom from the sun to Earth. Yet, as New Scientist cosmology consultant Chown (The Ascent of Gravity: The Quest to Understand the Force that Explains Everything, 2017, etc.) notes, it takes much longer--30,000 years, in fact. The delay has to do with the density of the sun and the circuitous route that light must take in order to leave: "Photons are like Christmas shoppers fighting their way down a crowded street," writes the author. "They cannot go in a straight line but are forced to zigzag." In the case of light from the sun, it can advance no more than a centimeter before pinging elsewhere, and before you know it--well, as Chown notes, the light now bathing us was born during the last Ice Age. The author writes with gods-for-clods, rocks-for-jocks enthusiasm: "Some slime molds have thirteen sexes. (And you think you have difficulty finding and keeping a partner!)." Though the rhetorical ploy gets old, there's plenty for more advanced students to ponder, such as Chown's passing note that all life is really cellular life. Indeed, there are lots of moments that will stir the imaginations of meditative stoners. For example, the air we breathe was also very likely breathed by Marilyn Monroe, Julius Caesar, and "the last Tyrannosaurus Rex ever to have stalked the earth." Also, the laws of probability suggest that the number of possible earths and their possible inhabitants are uncountably unknowable: "There are an infinite number of galaxies that look just like our own galaxy containing an infinite number of versions of you, whose lives, up until this moment, have been absolutely identical to yours."Heavy stuff lightly spun--just the thing for the science buff in the house.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 15, 2019
Prolific science writer Chown (The Ascent of Gravity, 2017) explains in the foreword to this book that he's always looking for fun facts to liven up book readings and entertain strangers at cocktail parties. With that end in mind, he presents 50 seemingly dubious scientific proclamations, or, as he dubs them, "things"? Human Things, Solar System Things, Extraterrestrial Things, and so on?intended to dazzle audiences. Each declaration ("Human beings are one-third mushroom"; "You age faster on the top floor of a building than on the ground floor") gets its own two or three-page entry, consisting of the claim, a supporting quote from luminaries ranging from Albert Einstein to Walt Whitman to Pink Floyd, and an accessible presentation of Chown's scientific reasoning. The tone is consistently light and breezy, even when the science, which is backed up by chapter notes, gets a little technical. The end result is an addictive, intriguing, and entertaining read, plus, as a bonus, a handy guide for anyone yearning to spice up their conversational skills.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)