Watching the Universe

Title: Watching the Universe
Author: John Gribbin
Publisher: Universities Press, India 1998 (First Edition 1998)
ISBN: 81-7371-143-7
Pages: 221

A slightly outdated book – is the first impression the reader gets. The volume consists of 17 essays first published in the Griffith Observer over twenty years from mid-1970s to mid-1990s. Gribbin, a famous science author confesses tat he started writing them as light relief from his day job at the science journal Nature. The author has updated many chapters with later information, but the lack of focus and outdated nature of the topics covered is disheartening. On many essays, he has cautioned that the material is now out-of-fashion and needn’t be taken too seriously, particularly the example of white holes or cosmic gushers, as they were called at that time. This note of caution prompts the reader to take all chapters with some apprehension and the authenticity of the book is totally lost in the process. Gribbin adds another apology that some of the topics may also be seen in other works by him and it is indeed so. The repetition of the same ideas is quite boring while at the same time helping to refresh our memory, depending on the way one chooses to look at the question. The lack of subject focus is apparent in the selection of essays. One’d have wondered that the author would include anything in the universe for discussion! The cover page showing a long-exposure photograph of an observatory on the background of concentric circles of star loci is not altogether apposite to the course of the book, as the author mainly discussed sub-atomic particles and the origins of the universe. The sad state of affairs is further brought forth in cold focus by the absence of any diagrams or illustrations. How the author could do away with them is beyond our comprehension, particularly when the ideas of space-time and wormholes are discussed.

The fact that the essays were written in the pre-global warming period is made amply clear by the argument that the world is in fact cooling (see chapter 3 – Waiting for the Next Ice Age). Gribbin argues that the temperature is dropping and the current inter-glacial period is moving slowly to an ice age like the one which prevailed about 12,000 years ago. This is a classic example of how an idea gets outdated in the scientific literature even after a short period of a decade. Immediately after the publication of this essay, scientists began to consider anthropomorphic climate change and global warming as serious issues. Sadly, this book conveys the negative idea regarding climate change. It is mentioned that the warming caused by greenhouse gases will be balanced by reduced solar activity (see chapter 6 – The Curious Case of the Shrinking Sun).

A brief and enlightening narration of thermodynamic principles is a plus-point for the book. As given in Chapter 14 – Time and the Universe, “Rudolf Claussius, a German physicist who was one of the pioneers of thermodyanmics, summed up the first and second laws thus in 1865: ‘The energy of the world is constant; the entropy of the world is increasing.’ Equally succinctly, some unknown modern wit has put it in everyday language: ‘You can’t get something for nothing; you can’t even break even’.”

Altogether, the book should be read by a reader who follows scientific ideas with a curious and insatiable mind. Even though the book can only be considered as a review of many ideas presented elsewhere by various authors and Gribbin himself, its worth as a compendium is not to be under-rated. The recommendation is very clear - If you find this book in a library, read it by all means, but if you look forward to purchase it, you can safely save some money.

Rating: 2 Star