The Quest to Understand the Force that Explains Everything
September 11, 2017
Science writer and former Caltech astronomer Chown (What a Wonderful World) details nature’s most familiar force in this sleek, well-paced account of gravity. Meticulously organized and researched, the book is split into three epochs: Newtonian, Einsteinian, and quantum. Chown opines on moments in the lives of Newton, Einstein, and others through the use of historical records and assorted quotations. He describes how “Newton alone created a system of the world, which united the Earth and the heavens in one theoretical framework.” In Newton’s system, gravity is an “invisible string that holds onto the planets and stops them flying off to the stars.” Centuries later, Einstein redefined gravity as warped space-time—Newtonian physics was wrong, but remained, in Chown’s words, “a fantastically good description of the everyday world.” Quantum mechanics, beautifully clarified in Chown’s dexterous prose, shows that nature on the smallest scale is noncontinuous: “Grainy, like a newspaper photograph inspected close up.” Newtonian and quantum theories describe the universe in all but extreme scenarios, yet are a “severe straitjacket” on any unified-theory candidate, such as superstring theory. Chown explains how energy demands have stymied further experimentation on the standard model, but readers will be curious and excited about future theories that may prove to be “as stupendous as they are unguessable.”