Remarkable Creatures

  

Title: Remarkable Creatures

Author: Sean Carroll

Publisher: Quercus 2009 (First)

ISBN: 978-1-84724-798-8

Pages: 284

Another instant hit from the reputed author on evolution. Carroll’s Making of the Fittest (reviewed earlier in this blog), was a great effort to bring evolution palatable to ordinary readers, many of whom would have undoubtedly sought to read further books on the topic – such being the authenticity and attraction of the book. In the present title, Carroll brings out the toil and perseverance behind the discovery and elucidation of original ideas when the protagonists went on long travels to little known places infested with hostile climate, people or fauna. Some of the dramatic adventures and important discoveries which turned the world on its head are catalogued in these pages. The quest for knowledge began in the early 19^th century and has continued ever since. Beginning from the origin of life and appearance of early life forms, the search extended to the origin of humans and his place in the evolutionary tree. Alexander von Humboldt, whose epic journey to South America began it all, was not harbouring any revolutionary concepts at all, he was content with accepting the dogmatic proposition that every creature or object has a creator and the world is a harmonious entity, changing little by little in carefully orchestrated steps. The thread was taken over by his successors, Darwin being the most prominent among them, and extended to such dizzying heights as to propose the theory of evolution, common origin of humans in Africa and ruling out the Neanderthal ancestry of modern people by microbiological means.

Humboldt explored South America over a 5-year period from 1799 to 1804. His memoirs raised the urge for exploration in other naturalists to follow in his wake. Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace and Walter Henry Bates were the most noted among them. Humboldt only observed the features of the virgin landscape and fauna without theorizing. Darwin completed his famous journey around the over five years (1831-36), the germ of evolution growing in him. Being a member of the elite, he was nervous to voice his theories in public who would no doubt treat it as heresy, Darwin was hesitant for 23 years before giving vent to his true feelings. Though the world was agreeable to the hypothesis of special creation (each species of creatures created separately to fill a niche), the extinctions of species like dinosaurs made difficulties. How can one of the God’s creations go extinct? Darwin’s final decision to publish his work was in no small measure prompted by the work of Wallace, who was researching the Malay peninsula along similar lines. It was Wallace who coined the term natural selection, and sent his work to Darwin for onward transmission and publication. Lyell, the eminent geologist knew what Darwin was doing and published both of the works simultaneously in 1859. Walter Bates observed Darwin’s ideas in action in nature, particularly on the mimetic patterns in different species of butterflies, termed Batesian mimicry. Another Dutch man, Eugene Dubois explored the forests of Java to bring to light the partial remains of a hominid, called Java man.

The second part of the book deals with the discoveries related to evolution of lesser life forms. Charles Doolittle Walcott, who later rose to become director of the United States Geological Survey from very humble beginnings without any college education scoured the Canadian Rockies in the beginning of 20^th century and yielded abundant fossils of creatures from rock strata of the Cambrian era. A huge number of life forms suddenly appeared during this era in fossil record around 540 million years ago, and is also called Cambrian explosion. This event is also termed the big bang of biology. Such swelling in the number of life forms, raised claims of creation in that period and caused much unrest for Darwin. However, earlier life forms were eventually found beneath the layers. Scientists speculate the dramatic rise in the level of atmospheric oxygen around this time which caused the boom. Explorers were also interested in unearthing dinosaur fossils in the 20^th century. Roy Chapman Andrews who once swept the floors of the Natural History Museum in New York organised massive field work in the Gobi desert in Inner Mongolia and obtained dinosaur eggs and mammal fossils coterminous with dinosaurs. This ended the speculation whether mammals had lived alongside the giant reptiles.

In the 1970s, Walter and Luis Alvarez, the father-son duo’s discovery of K-T boundary (the distinctive clay line marking the end of cretaceous and beginning of tertiary periods) proposed plausible suggestions for the extermination of dinosaurs. Alvarez was forced to postulate extraterrestrial origin for the catastrophe, from the excess iridium levels in the clay boundary all over the world. Impact of an asteroid was concluded as the likely reason, when a 180-km dia crater was found near Chicxulub in Mexico. This single event was considered to mark the end of the mesozoic era. Following on the line of dinosaurs, John Ostrom found evidence from fossils in Montana, to argue that birds were a form of dinosaurs. His discoveries were later dramatized in Michael Crichton’s epic science fiction novel, Jurassic Park. Deinonychus was turned out to be one of the transitional forms implied in the theory of evolution. Lack of fossil evidence for transitional forms was used to ridicule evolutionary theory by creationists. Neil Shubin and his team investigated the sedementary layer in Ellesmere Island of the Canadian Arctic and discovered the fossils of Tiktaalik, which is a transitional form between fish and terapods.

The third part of the book covers human evolution and intermediate forms. Louis and Mary Leakey explored East Africa and numerous fossils of hominids and their tools were found. Evolutionary Biology, when it turned its attention to the origin of humans, found great admirers and followers even from other branches of science. Linus Pauling, who is the only person to be awarded two unshared Nobels (for chemistry and peace) was attracted to human evolution and established a method of estimating the time period at which two seemingly different species split up from a common ancestor. Along with Emile Zuckerkandl, Pauling devised a way for calculating the time by counting the differences in protein chains, particularly hemoglobin. This was later fully developed by Allan Wilson and Vincent Sarich. According to their classification, humans and apes shared the common ancestor till as late as five million years ago. Search for hominid forms brought to light the independent species of humans, called Neanderthal men. Svante Paabo analysed mitochondrial DNA from Neanderthal bones and conclusively proved that they are not related to modern humans. Much work still needs to be done in this field.

The book is excellent to read and lucid beyond comparison. The author righly summarizes the work in the afterword and surmises what follows next in mankind’s onward journey. If the last 150 years was dedicated to the search for the origins of life on earth, the next century may well be dedicated to finding life elsewhere in the universe. Astronomical explorations, in the form of space-based telescopes have already been trained on these exoplanets which may harbour conditions feasible for life. Discoverers of the calibre of Humboldt and Darwin may still be found in today’s human societies who would be more than willing to dedicate their productive careers in the search for attainment of knowledge, of seeing something not seen before, of describing something which are only dreamt of, so far. The book presents a seemingly unbroken thread through the chapters and parts through which it is divided. Carroll commands and obtains the unbroken attention of the reader.

One of the two points which can be levelled against is that the chapters become progressively less absorbing as it moves from the likes of Darwin to modern explorers. This might not be the author’s fault in fact, as the glamour of following the footsteps of stalwarts like Charles Darwin is not replicated for scientists who are still living among us. Another drawback is the feeling that the title has not done justice to the theme of the book, which is about the pioneering explorers and their work, rather than the remarkable creatures they have put before the world.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Telescopes In India

Title: Telescopes in India

Author: Mohan Sundara Rajan

Publisher: National Book Trust, India 2009 (First)

ISBN: 978-81-237-5637-0

Pages: 308

Books on the popular science genre are very rare to originate in India, though the country is a hot selling place for good books from England and the U.S. Boasting of the world’s largest English-speaking technical population after the U.S., this is no wonder. Mohan Sundara Rajan is an eminent science writer, with over three decades of experience in media. He is the author of sixteen popular science books including Space Today, Wireless: The Telecom Story. He is the recipient of several awards including the National Award for Outstanding Effort in popular science communication. The current title seeks to bring out the features of various telescopes installed in India as well as carrying out a survey of the field among international institutions and academia. The book is the first of its kind and definitely caters to a crying need for raising awareness of the country’s scientific potential among the future scientists and to instil in them the scientific temper, as enshrined in the Constitution. Coming right from a reputed writer, the book seems to address all the above issues satisfactorily, at first sight.

400^th anniversary of the discovery of telescope was celebrated in 2008. Hans Lipperhey of Netherlands patented the device, named spy glass in early 17^th century. Galileo Galilei, in Italy, heard of the instrument and devised one, without actually seeing a model in 1608. To commemorate the event, 2009 was declared to be the International Year of Astronomy. Perfect timing for a book on astronomy to come out! Developments in telescopes continued apace in Galileo’s century, as Robert Hooke built a reflecting telescope in 1664 and the Paris Observatory was founded in 1667. The author gives a detailed list of the various developments including principles, types and inventions, which occurred in the field of telescopes which is a good read. Today, computers and fiber optics has taken over the field and it is no longer necessary for a person to be at the eyepiece of a telescope. Remote control methods have helped him to be halfway around the globe and still obtain a glimpse of the heavens through its objective lens. No longer do they need to keep awake in the dead cold of the night. The capability of the instrument is the single factor which puts a limit on the astronomer’s efforts. Atmospheric dust and turbulence cause immense trouble for sky watching, which is compensated by a technique called adaptive optics. It adjusts for distortions in the wavefront by obtaining a reference image from a natural, bright star nearby or by artificially producing a speck of light among the sodium atoms, situated 90 km above earth, by shining a powerful laser beam on it. The data from these measurements are used to mechanically adjust the tiny mirrors on the telescope to compensate for atmospheric blur.

Modern astronomy in India is said to begin when Sir Thomas Roe, Queen Victoria’s representative to the court of Jahangir presented a set of ‘prospective glasses’ (as telescopes were then called) to the emperor in 1616. India was not much behind the world at that time, since the telescope was first used by Galileo only eight years previously. An Englishman, Shakerley observed the transit of mercury in 1651 at Surat. The Indian kings were suitably impressed by the new development that the Rajahs of Jaipur, Awadh and Travancore built observatories. However, the first astronomical observatory with good telescopes was a foreign contribution, which was built in Chennai in 1790. It set the reference meridian in India for timekeeping and that’s why Indian Standard Time is set for 82 deg 30 min east longitude, which is the coordinate of the observatory. Larger telescopes were later installed at Madras (as Chennai was called) and the fixed meridian formed the basis of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India in 1802. Indians also worked in the observatory, with Chintamani Ragoonathachary discovering the variable star R. Reticuli in 1867, which is the first recorded astronomical discovery by an Indian. The observatory was shifted to cool Kodaikanal in 1899. Other observatories established after independence were at Nainital (1955), Kavalur, Tamil Nadu (1967), Radio telescope at Ooty (1970), Gauribidanur (1979) and Hanle, Ladakh (2000), which is also the highest optical telescope in the world. Kodaikanal Observatory is dedicated for solar observations, documenting the sunspot cycles and analysing possible links to monsoon and among them Kurinji blooms which occur once in 12 years!

Solar observations at Udaipur, Rajastan began in 1975 and later taken over by the government. The institution is ideally located in the middle of a lake, helping to reduce atmospheric turbulence. This is also a part of the Global Oscillations Network Group (GONG), which is an interconnected network of six worldwide telescopes observing the sun and sharing data among each other. Dr. Sampurnanand, the then chief minister of U.P. was instrumental in setting up the observatory at Nainital, with one telescope now named after him. A larger telescope is now being planned at Devastal, near Nainital. Dr. Vainu Bappu, the noted astronomer and space scientist was deeply involved in setting up a 2.3 m optical telescope at Kavalur, in a densely forested area. The need for dark, clear nights prompted the scientific community to seek a suitable place in the Himalayas which they did in setting up the Himalayan Chandra Telescope at Hanle, Ladakh. This telescope can also be controlled remotely from Hoskote, near Bangalore. Another 2 m optical telescope, called National Large Solar Telescope is being planned at the same location.

The 20^th century saw more windows opening to observe the sky in the radio, ultraviolet and infrared bands. These waves are not as affected by terrestrial turbulences. Radio telescope was commissioned at Ooty in 1970. Giant Metre Wave Radio Telescope at Khodad, Pune went functional with thirty dishes of 45m diameter, for observing quasars, pulsars and galaxies. Gauribidanur also houses a radio array for observing the sun at short wavelengths. This Radio Heliograph was commissioned in the 1970s. India has potential to observe gamma rays which are high-energy rays coming from deep space, from ground as well as space based telescopes in satellites. AstroSAT, a satellite built by ISRO will carry five telescopes to cover broad X-ray regions as well as UV and optical bands.

The book is endowed with neatly and succinctly laid out illustrations for making the point sink. Also, being the first book of its kind in India carries its own sheen. The glossary given at the end is comprehensive and does its work of explaining the concepts in two or three sentences exceedingly well.

Well, those are the good points which can be shown in favour of the book. On the other side, drawbacks abound. The info boxes which are interspersed throughout the text is slightly distracting the reader from the main topic, even though they are informative. The illustrations are technical and unappealing to the lay reader. The drawings are also intended for science papers rather than a book on popular science. At times, we get the impression that the book is based on outdated data, as in the section on liquid mirron telescopes, where it says, “Liquid mirror telescopes became a reality in recent times (1980s), when CCDs came into use” (p.64). Remember that the book was first published in 2009. Probably, the author copied this sentence as a whole from a reference and didn’t bother to update it. Most of the material on Indian telescopes is rooted on a tone of propaganda, with all good and nothing bad! Extravagant praise for administrators and officialdom don’t give credence to a science book. The language is highly technical, which are not enunciated in detail. It assumes an undignifying pose sometimes, when the author refers to scientists as the American, or like the Germans are building a telescope or the theory was verified by an Australian, with the name of the scientist not even mentioned. A gross error is also suspected in page 174, where the author claims that the most distant stars are the youngest! This is clearly not true. The most distant stars are that much away because the expansion continuing since the big bang has taken them far. Hence, they are the oldest stars in the universe.

Mohan Sundara Rajan also supports unproved hypotheses and unsubstantiated theories as if accepting them at face value and putting doubt on the veracity of long established theories in astronomy. It is true that the long entrenched theories may turn out to be wrong, in light of new evidence to the contrary, but as such, those principles are unassailable with the current state of knowledge. The author says the solar observations have assumed significance on the basis of new theories that the sun has a solid core and nuclear fusion is not the energy source of it. This is outrageously far fetched. Solar observations are significant because of the thorough influence the sun exerts on our planet and not due to some outlandish, unverified theory. He also praises the opinion of an amateur astronomer and telescope maker from Chennai, Prof. P Devadas that lunar craters have igneous and volcanic origins, rather than meteor impacts. Here again, the author relies on authority and not on reason and verification. This is highly unbecoming of an author claiming to be an eminent science writer! He can only pollute young minds at the worst, with this style of science reporting. The book is generally free of printing mistakes, but when they appear, the effect is comic, as in page 283, “In fact, some of the images produced by ground-based telephones were better than the Hubble Space Telescope, the most expensive eye in the sky”. The narration is artificial and uninteresting making the reader suspicious that he has reproduced some paragraphs literally from glossy leaflets supplied along with new products because the author has not made any effort to make them lighter. School students would obviously find the book quite useful for collecting data and pictures on Indian astronomical programs as it abounds in them. Apart from that, a serious reader is made miserable by reading it in full from cover to cover.

The book is recommended for school students on the look out for collecting data for their projects.

Rating: 2 Star

Bad Science

Title: Bad Science

Author: Ben Goldacre

Publisher: Harper Perennial 2009 (First published 2008)

ISBN: 978-0-00-732676-1

Pages: 339

A very interesting and appealing book from a doctor-turned-journalist who routinely contribute to newspaper columns. Goldacre dissects the quacks, hacks and pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo in surgical detail and presents the innards before the readers with a characteristically sharp style. Science reporting in the media is presently in bad shape, with reporters having no clue to the workings of science churns out stories based on their sensational appeal and provoking mass sympathy or hysteria. Often without adequate base for their material, the media feeds on the frenzy of the public. This situation is partly caused by the change in science reporting methods since the second world war. In 1950s, majority of the articles were on engineering and technology, and it was somewhat easier for even the general public to understand. One doesn’t need to be a nerd to understand how a car works or how an AM radio receiver decodes the signals. However, by 1990s, the lot fell on medicine, health and nutrition to attract ever greater number of articles in mass media. Also, the technology got more complicated, resulting in probably a very few being able to explain the working of a mobile phone or a web server. The academic past of journalists remained focussed on humanities, making them unfit for efficient science reporting. Instead of relying on evidence based medicine, the public goes after self-styled nutritionists, ‘expert’ authorities on any object under the sun and scientists portrayed as scapegoats of the big pharma or conventional medical establishment.

Detox methods were widely popularised and kits were sold in large quantities to unsuspecting public. They promise to remove unspecified toxins from the body, sometimes by so ridiculous a way as attaching a piece of medicine-filled sticker to the foot. This is mere eyewash, as is Brain Gym, an exercise program for school students without any scientific basis for the ritualised procedures followed in the program. While it is true that exercise breaks are good for the students, such copyrighted programs don’t do them any good. Homeopathy is another such nonsense, based on the false notion that ‘like cures like’. Homeopaths are not interested, if not hostile, to the idea of conducting randomized, double-blind, clinical trials to establish the effectiveness of their sugar pills in curing people of diseases. A few research papers claiming efficacy are methodologically flawed and the results are not statistically significant. Actual trials showed that the homeo sugar pills work no better than placebo, the author then moves on to describe the placebo effect in another illuminating chapter. Even the colour of the pill is said to infuse a psychological effect, stimulant medication come invariably in red, orange or yellow, while tranquilizers are generally blue, green or purple. In fact, placebo medication has also been shown to be more effective than regular medicines, in some cases. He could have included a reference to Jacques Benveniste, whose paper was the greatest hoax in support of homeopathy. The homeopaths have shown themselves to be not having the maturity nor the professionalism to practice within their limited means. Though homeo pills don’t have effect both ways, their advocacy against vaccination are critical medication are exposing ordinary patients to unnecessary danger.

The nutrition industry, spawning food supplements, is another quackery doing the rounds for the last 20 years. Data from little known, unsubstantiated research papers are blown out of proportions and trumpeted as fact. Beta carotene, promoted aggressively by the industry as an antioxidant to ward off  ageing may in fact cause harmful effects. Eating a lot of vegetables and fruits, avoiding smoking and obesity, doing exercise are some of the most effective ways to leading a healthy life, but people go for medicalizing their lives and follow copyrighted procedures and shamelessly swallow pills for ensuring the same thing. Fish pills was one of the quacks practiced by the industry worldwide. They were thought to increase children’s IQ, and was based on a false study. Goldacre attempts to find out what caused such a barrage of spurious medicine during the last decades of last century. The golden age of medicine was the four decades or so, beginning in 1935, when penicillin, dialysis, organ transplants, intensive care, vaccination and almost all of the now commonly used medicines were invented and put to good use. During the 1980s, the output suddenly slumped and the industry turned its focus to nutrition products and alternative medicine. A company, once established, has to generate income to stay alive whether or not new medicines are invented. Children are inculcated with the notion of consuming a fish pill, three times a day, thereby priming him to be a regular eater of medicine during the rest of his life. Instead of addressing issues like social inequality, disintegration of local communities and breakdown of family and others, they are forced to turn to medicines for behavioural problems.

Not only individuals, but prominent administrators and politicians are falling victim to the trickeries of nutrition industry. In early 2000, South African President, Thabo Mbeki and his health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang refused to administer anti-retroviral drugs to AIDS patients claiming that those would endanger the patients. Their alternative was multi-vitamin pills and nutrition as encouraged and supported by food supplement industry leaders like Matthias Rath. Tshabalala-Msimang even refused to accept that AIDS is caused by HIV and maintained that afflicted people are killed by poverty and not AIDS. She advocated the consumption of beetroot, garlic, lemons and African potatoes by the AIDS victims. Massive campaigns by grassroots organizations in 2005 forced the government to backpedal. Incidentally, it was also shown by trials that African potatoes are harmful to AIDS sufferers.

Goldacre spends considerable effort to address the question of whether modern medicine is indeed evil as claimed by alternative medicine gurus. Evidence-based medicine is the only way forward in a dense jungle covered by such hocus pocus as ritualistic and alternative healthcare. Even trials conducted by big pharma are often not trustworthy due to the bias in them. Pharma-sponsored trials invariably lead to positive results, endorsing the medicine being tested out. As if to cover the cost of R&D, big companies charge premium rates on pills, often denying their use in underdeveloped countries. Statistics however, shows that the industry spends only 14% of their revenue in R&D while lavishing a whopping 31% on advertising and promotionals. Even with all these counterpoints, it can’t be argued that modern medicine is evil.

Another pitfall usually lurking behind the headlines of media is unfamiliarity with the nuances of statistical parameters. Failure to understand the concepts of statistical significance and the probability of occurrence of a rare event confuse people. Sometimes, the logical inference runs counter to intuition. The ignorance sometimes leads to unjustifiable deals like sentencing an innocent person to prison, based on flawed probabilistic assessment that a death or murder is such a rare event to happen naturally, other than by wilful commitment by the accused. Demeonstrations of some cases in England and Denmark proves Goldacre’s point. The book ends with the story of how the media went berserk against the MMR (Mumps, measles and rubella) vaccine claiming that it produces autism in children. No respectable study was behind the assertion, save some authoritative figures bent on offering alternate products. Rates of vaccination fell from 90% in 1999 to 73% in 2005 when the claim was debunked. Measles had started coming back to England during that period, probably caused by the large number of people not getting vaccine during that period. Ignorance, emotion and hysteria were trumpeted against the medical community.

The book is a pleasure to read, though it would have served it well to have some photographs too. The author spells out flaws in our intuition in a very informative way. The flaws are,

1) We see patterns where there is only random noise

2) We see causal relationships where there are none

3) We overvalue confirmatory information for any given hypothesis

4) We seek out confirmatory information for any given hypothesis

5) Our assessment of the quality of new evidence is biased by our previous beliefs. (p.247-250)

Our predisposition to affirmative outcomes are sealed with a good quote from Francis Bacon, “It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than negatives” (p.247). This book must find a respectable place in the library of a rational-minded person seeking to separate the wheat from the chaff in today’s world full of promotional material of dubious usefulness.

On the negative side, the author’s tirades against leaders of alternative medicine often degenerates to personal attacks targeted to demoralize him rather than demolishing the argument. Accusing a person of not having a medical degree is no answer to his argument that a particular piece of gobbledegook works in a specific case of a disease. The people suffered most from the hands of the author are Matthias Rath, Patrick Holford, Gillian McKeith and Chris Malyzzewicz. They may be charlatans, but the vengeful attack has not helped the truth establish. The author sometimes does not complete the argument or logic as evidenced by his statement that “Evolutionary theory is one of the top three important ideas of our time” (p.229), but he fails to mention the other two! In one chapter, Goldacre continues his all-guns attack on the tests on MRSA swabs hoax, at the same time not even explaining what is MRSA. The hapless readers like me have to search Google for that term, while still not getting an idea of which incident the author was referring to.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

The Grand Design

Title: The Grand Design – New Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life

Author: Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow

Publisher: Bantam 2010 (First)

ISBN: 978-0-593-05830-5

Pages: 186

Stephen Hawking doesn’t need an introduction in the world of popular science. No other book has seen such tremendous success as his A Brief History of Time, which spawned a genre of publications in its own right. Nobody thought that writing a science book would turn out to be a lucrative profession until that work turned everyone’s heads in a single stroke. Hawking shot to global fame and is popularly considered as the greatest living scientist, no doubt sympathetically influenced by the chronic disease afflicting the author. The Grand Design is a good work on the lines of the much successful earlier works of Hawking, but definitely not matching the purpose and clarity of the others. It pours over the quest for a unified theory, the unending journey of mankind to find reason behind the way things are. It follows the beaten path, with a survey of ancient Greek thinkers, going straight to renaissance Europe, enumerating the progress in unification of forces of nature, quantum theories and ends with speculations on the perceived design in the origin of the universe.

Ancient Greeks, starting probably from Thales speculated that the universe acts the way it does based on some natural laws. Existence of God was not a criterion in that philosophy. Aristarchus proposed that humans don’t occupy a unique place in the universe as claimed by the religiously minded and Anaximander formulated the beginnings of evolution. With the fading away of the classical age and advent of middle ages, religion overshadowed science. Scientific enquiries were sometimes brutally put down, as with the case of Bishop Tempier of Paris, acting upon the advise of Pope John XXI, published a list of 219 errors or heresies that must be condemned with death, one of them being the notion that nature follows laws. Interestingly, the Pope himself fell victim to those laws – the law of gravity – a few months later, when the roof of his palace fell in on him. Descartes used the term ‘Laws of Nature’ for the first time. Three questions arose for the philosophers of that time, 1) what is the origin of the laws, 2) are there any exceptions to the law, i.e, miracles, 3) is there any one set of possible laws? If we include God as the answer to the first, the question becomes more mysterious, without being answered. For the second question, the answer is no, based on scientific determinism put forward by Simon de Laplace in 18^th century. All the thinkers have maintained that the answer is in the affirmative for the third question.

Hawking argues that there is no reality independent of the observer. We adopt a model-dependent realism, the idea that a theory or world picture is a model and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. The properties of a good model are, 1) it should be elegant, 2) it contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements, 3) agrees with and explains all existing observations and 4) makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out (p.51). A particular model can’t explain all aspects of the universe. In some cases, conflicting theories may have to be combined to explain the characteristics of nature, like wave-particle duality of light. For reflection, refraction and photoelectric effect, the corpuscular theory of light provides the answer, while for interference, the wave theory is the only refuge. Thus, each theory is good at predicting a subset of all possible occurrences. This is an inherent nature of model-dependent realism.

Everything went well until scientific determinism itself was put in doubt while accepting quantum mechanics as the theory of the future in 20^th century. Quantum physics seems to undermine the idea that nature is governed by laws. Instead, it is a new rule, stating that given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the possibilities of various futures. Every particle, going from one position to the next, takes on all possible routes, signifying infinite trajectories and futures. This aspect differentiates it from the classical theory, according to which the universe began at a single point in spacetime and had only a unique past. The author then purports to spell briefly on the unification of forces, which are four in number. The first integration came in the 19^th century when electricity and magnetism was combined in a single theory by James Clark Maxwell, then came the electroweak theory of Abdus Salam and Weinberg combining electromagnetism with the weak nuclear interactions. Every classical theory was complemented with a quantum mechanical description, as in the Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) by Richard Feynman. Similarly, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) was put forward to describe the strong force in a quantum way. Grand Unified Theory (GUT) was unsuccessful in effectively combining electroweak and strong forces. String theory was formulated in its wake to supply this deficit, but was found to have some logical flaws, around 1994. M-theory was forwarded as the alternative, the letter ‘M’ standing for master, mystery or membrane! Hawking seems to lend his weight behind this theory, which require 11 spatial dimensions and postulated 10⁵⁰⁰ universes with different laws and histories.

The Big Bang is assumed to be the origin of the universe. In fact, all classical theories, including Einstein’s general relativity, breaks down at this point. Since the universe was very tiny at around this time, it may be treated as a quantum event. But, quantum events have all possible futures, and in reaching the present state, it might have travelled through all possible time paths, called Feynman some-over histories. We happen to live in a universe where every parameter is just right for intelligent life to evolve. A change of 0.5% in the strong nuclear force or 4% in electromagnetism would destroy all carbon and oxygen atoms, along with all life, as we know it. But this fine tuning of parameters does not imply that there was a creator or designer who fiddled with the knobs. In an infinite variety of universes (multiverse) ours is unique in the sense that the settings were just right for life to emerge. But how did the process was set in motion in the first place? Hawking’s answer seems to be a little stretched. Particles cannot be created in the local spacetime because energy is conserved and creating matter spends energy. But, the universe, taken as a whole displays a balanced state of energy. So, whole universes can be generated in a quantum ripple, as the total energy of the universe is still conserved, the net energy again being zero. But the argument, sadly, is unconvincing.

As is usual with works of Hawking, the book is fine in the quality of pages, printing and illustrations. The layout is commendable, with a lot of colour illustrations making the arguments come alive in front of our eyes. A glossary is included, but seems to be an afterthought as it lacks depth. There are no new concepts explained in the book, lacks direction in most places and is quite unattractive when taken as a whole. The forced humour introduced deliberately in several places is unappealing. The authors don’t do justice to the grand title by fumbling about in the crucial explanatory stages of the grand design. In the end, one wonders what prompted Hawking to bring out such a book as this. However, if you are new to books on popular physics, then this book is a real starter.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Not Exactly

Title: Not Exactly – In Praise of Vagueness

Author: Kees van Deemter

Publisher: Oxford 2010 (First)

ISBN: 978-0-19-954590-2

Pages: 313

Kees van Deemter is a Reader in Computer Science at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. His work involves computer speech and writing and the logical, linguistic and philosophical issues these raise. This book is an attempt to introduce the concept of vagueness which we encounter everywhere from language, science to computers. We usually use the terms moderately cool, reasonably tall and the like without thinking twice about the lack of clarity these terms bring in their wake. However, without exception, those words pass off as perfectly acceptable in everyday transactions. In science too – in which precise language is a creed – such terms are quite often used. The parameter of BMI (Body Mass Index) and IQ ratings are all plagued by the uncertainty in meaning, even though the technical community has conferred an arbitrary threshold to separate the individual entries into groups like obese, highly intelligent etc. Part 1 of the book introduces the concepts of vagueness which are useful in everyday life and in science. Part 2 is devoted to linguistic and logical theories that are proposed to make sense of vagueness while the third part is mainly an overview to summarize the points conveyed.

Natural languages abound with vague words. Noam Chomsky’s attempts to make a computer determine whether a sentence is grammatical and Richard Montague’s efforts to obtain its meaning are seminal work on reducing arbitrariness. English boasts of a number of very popular adjectives which are all vague. The top ten in the list are (number of occurrences in the corpus are given in brackets), last (140,063), other (135,185), new (115,523), good (100,652), old (66,999), great (64,369), high (52,703), small (51,626), different (48,373) and large (47,185). Hedges such as ‘probably’, ‘apparently’ and ‘may be’ are indicators of uncertainty. Removing them all may change the intention and meaning of the sentence. This actually happened when the British secret service removed the vague words from the dossier on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and ended up ‘sexing up’ the document which led everntually to a war in the Middle East.

Normal apparatus of classical logic, with its clear cut definitions and Boolean logic is unsuitable for reasoning with ambiguity and the gradable notions on which empirical science is based. The author goes on to demonstrate in length how classical logic can mathematically represent vagueness. The theoretical forays go to such depth and are so involved and uninteresting that he instructs the readers to skip those portions if they want. While classical logic is helpless to define vagueness, prompting degree theories like fuzzy logic come to the centre stage to handle the monster. The notion almost true is perfectly valid in fuzzy logic, while quite useless in the classical one. An application of fuzzy logic is in Artificial Intelligence (AI), which has reached maturity through fifty years, after the extravagant claims in its youthful era going unachieved. Chess programs are now powerful enough to defeat human grand masters. The latest weapon in the mathematical arsenal to deal with uncertainty is game theory, of which a brief introduction is given in the book.

The book is utterly boring, uninspiring, uninteresting and a pure waste of time. I hope there is no vagueness in the above sentence! The author takes precaution early on in warning the readers that a philosophical mind is essential for appreciating the contents, but the content is so out of touch with real use and is packed with haughty proclamations of jargon. There are too many spelling errors, quite unbecoming of a publisher so honoured in the field. The author is so  convinced of his stature in the field that he quotes from eleven of his research publications in the foot notes section. He might probably be the most quoted author in the reference section too!

Altogether this book may be avoided as it is completely unintelligible (at least for me). Attempts to read the book are highly discouraged.

Rating: 1 Star