The Magic of Reality

Title: The Magic of Reality – How We Know What’s Really True

Author: Richard Dawkins

Publisher: Black Swan, 2012 (First published 2011)

ISBN: 978-0-552-77890-9

Pages: 257

Richard Dawkins is a great biologist, rationalist, atheist, popularizer of science and a modern thinker, all rolled into one. Reading one of his books is delightful experience taking into account the enormity of information extracted from it and the lucid common sense approach employed by the author throughout. Many of his books, like The Selfish Gene, Climbing Mount Improbable, The Greatest Show on Earth, Unweaving the Rainbow, The Extended Phenotype, The God Delusion and The Ancestor’s Tale have been reviewed earlier in this blog. Unlike the previous titles, The Magic of Reality is brought out with a younger and more general audience in mind. The author has successfully completed his mission though the book is rather small by Dawkinsian standards. Any young person who reads this book with an open mind and is prepared to fill up the thoughts which the author has developed to its logical conclusions, will not fail to appreciate the pure magic in science and its expositions. Often we wonder at the miraculous happenings recorded in sacred books, but don’t stop to think of the amazement the ancients would have felt had they witnessed some of science’s own miracles which we take for granted today, like jet planes, live television, mobile communication or satellite navigation. As the famous science-fiction writer Arthur C Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This book also helps us from assigning supernatural origins to a phenomenon which we cannot explain with today’s science. Such an approach is a dead end – if it is indeed supernatural, there is no point trying to shine light on it which will always remain in the shade. Rather, such occurrences should be taken as an opportunity to further the scientific knowledge and to channel scientific methods to new pastures.

Finding a good and suitable title for a book is one of any author’s most difficult tasks. A lot of considerations like appeal to a particular class of readers, the socio-religious-political connotations and such niceties go into selecting a title, not counting the immense pressure sure to be exerted by the publisher who naturally wants to maximise his profit. So, this part cares for the goodness of the name. As for the ‘suitability’ part, there is no hard and fast rule. In fact, we don’t even know of this until reviewers come out with criticisms about the choice of the title. But Dawkins excels superbly in choosing the most correct name for his work, ‘The Magic of Reality’ which he has explained scintillatingly in the first chapter. Reality is something which exist and which can be sensed by us. In this, we are aided by instruments which extend our five natural sense organs dealing with sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. We are aided by telescopes, microscopes, ENT machines or MRI scanners to sense the real things existing in places where our natural senses can’t reach. Or, we may build models, sometimes physical or sometimes abstract, whose predictions can be tested by our senses which correspond to reality. Moving on to magic, there are three types – supernatural, stage tricks and poetic. The first lives in myths and fables fit only to fire up the imaginations of little children, the second is very enjoyable as a means of social interaction, but it is only a trick. The third, poetic magic is which make us wonder struck with awe at the glimpse of a star-studded night sky, a splendid rainbow, a nicely performed musical item or a deeply appealing piece of poetry. What Dawkins means by the title is that the real things, which exist around us can inspire in us a sense of poetic magic if we care to look into the science which explains them.

The rainbow and its spectrum of colours is something Dawkins cherishes most and represents as a supreme exemplar of poetic magic. In the chapter, ‘What is Rainbow?’, this phenomenon is explained in nice detail. Not only that, he has written a separate book titled Unweaving the Rainbow, which argues that though science has demonstrated the secrets behind rainbow and other mesmerizing experiences, they still appear magical. Dawkins’ attempts to narrate concepts in physics is marked by its simplicity and sharpness of comprehension. Though not a physicist himself, and who in fact harbours a not too flattering view of 19^th century physicists because of their stubborn belief that the immense age of earth suggested by biologists and geologists based on fossils and land formations was not tenable because there was no known process in physics at that time to explain the availability of a non-depleting energy source for so long a time. The deep secrets behind the origin of the universe, its expansion, birth and death of stars, how seasons are experienced and such topics find an able educator in Dawkins. Whenever he is not well versed enough to illustrate advanced concepts in exotic areas of quantum theory, the author bows gracefully, declaring that he is not qualified enough to do that, but the concept is well understood by scientists in the concerned branches.

True to his credentials as a foremost popularizer of science, the author dwells at length on the question of what is a miracle and how it should be dealt with. This chapter should make serious reading for real investigators of truth. A miracle is an event which challenges all natural explanations and would violate established scientific principles. But before we gulp it in one piece, we should consider the alternative explanations of the stated incident. Dawkins presents David Hume, a 19^th century thinker and his rules for deciding on the truth of miracles. Hume argues that a miracle should be accepted only if the falsification of it by logical means is even more miraculous than the first one. Even in reported miracles experienced by thosands of people, there is the often plausible explanation that the incident was falsely or even fraudulently reported. Rumours run thick and fast when outlandish occurrences are involved. Dawkins comments that when rumours are old enough, it becomes tradition.

The book is a pleasure to read which young readers would find very useful. As noted earlier, the title is apt and perfectly explains the function the book is called upon to perform, namely, making the readers marvel at the magic (in a poetic sense) which reality evokes (or rather, should evoke) in us. While describing how ordinary material are composed of atoms on a tiny scale, Dawkins cleverly wriggles free from explaining quarks, which are the components of protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei. He says, “Quarks are not something I am not going to talk about in this book. That’s not because I think you wouldn’t understand. It is because I know I don’t understand it” (p.93). This seems to be an intelligent ruse not to get bogged down in quantum phenomena which are counter-intuitive and happening at such small scales. This may even be construed by some people to be working in a mysterious way which we cannot grasp. In a scholarly fashion, Dawkins gets over this difficulty too, because he had already stipulated that reality is something which can be tested by the predictions of a model if it can’t be sensed directly by us, which quantum mechanics admirably does.

The ideas presented in the book are logically and conceptually structured well. Every chapter begins by telling a myth existing in various societies and related to the topic. Indian and Chinese myths are also narrated, but not numerous enough. These myths always pale in comparison with the scientific wonders which follow in the discussion. The contents are much illuminating and entertaining. ‘Who was the first person?’ is the title of an interesting chapter to answer that frequently asked question. In a narrative interspersed with fact and wit, the author conclusively establishes that there never was such a person to pinpoint. The evolution was so gradual that it is like asking when a person turned old. Getting aged is a similar slow process that we can’t designate a particular day as the one in which that person became an old man. To tide over the problem, we use arbitrary criteria to determine old age, like the day when that person turned 60, or likewise. This chapter is essentially a synopsis of Dawkins’ another illuminating work, ‘The Ancestor’s Tale’.

The only negative aspect is that the book is intended only for teenagers or other people who have only a cursory exposure to physics and hence lacks depth. A few colour plates illustrating some of the concepts detailed in the main body of the work would’ve been immensely appealing. This shortfall is all the more made stark by the fact that most of the author’s other books do possess this. Though the cover of the book loudly proclaim that it is illustrated by Dave McKean, the renowned designer and illustrator, his output fails to impress. In fact, the readers won’t even notice the caricatures as they look so commonplace and irrelevant.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star