Harry Cliff (Picador)
A BALLOON the size of a football stadium hovering over an Antarctic ice sheet. A Zoom screen of researchers awaiting a big reveal. A lone researcher caught up in covid-19 restrictions, holding a slip of folded paper up to a webcam…
The vivid opening sequences of Space Oddities: The mysterious anomalies challenging our understanding of the universe give glimpses into what proves to be a cracking tale of particle physics and cosmology. The author is , a particle physicist, writer and former science comic.
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His book is structured like a film script, where each subplot is prompted by an anomaly in physics – the kind of thing that has experts muttering what Cliff calls science’s most auspicious phrase: “Hmm, that’s funny…” A growing number of these anomalies are cropping up. These, he says, can herald “breakthroughs” or “lead science astray… ruining careers”.
In cosmology, the big worry is the divergence of the two ways of measuring the Hubble constant. Measuring this more precisely is one of the field’s great missions because it tells us the rate at which the universe is expanding and helps unravel the history of the universe and predict its fate. If the methods don’t agree, writes Cliff, it implies “our basic model… is wrong”.
A similar fear haunts particle physics. We know our grasp of reality’s fundamental particles and forces in the standard model of particle physics is incomplete. It was hoped the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a huge accelerator at CERN, the particle physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, would fill in the gaps. But not much has happened since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.
The book explains this through a diverse, international cast, spanning Japan to Trinidad, with several women in lead roles. None of this seems forced. They just happen to be the best researchers for that part of the story.
Another key ingredient is Cliff’s colourful language: the weak nuclear force is described as so “pifflingly feeble” that neutrinos pass through rock “without exchanging so much as a flirtatious wink with an atom”. His metaphors can be violent, the big bang “a lacerating, annihilating growth, one that destroys, tears, and rends”. The general use of such metaphors was questioned earlier this year in an op-ed in , and while these days you might ask if it is really apt for Cliff to describe black holes as “terrifying”, for example, here the language mostly works effectively to amp up the drama.
Cliff also deftly handles the language of previous eras, now a little hard to swallow. For example, he acknowledges that Victorian phrases such as the “subjugation of new regions” haven’t aged well. This was used by James Clerk Maxwell in an 1871 lecture to set out his vision for the future Cavendish Laboratory, in Cambridge, UK.
Maxwell, who helped lay the foundations in theoretical physics, argued in favour of redefining the boundaries of what we understand rather than endorsing the limited view of the times, that the greatest discoveries had been made. As a particle physicist analysing data from the LHC, Cliff would also have every reason to fight against a dead end. His access takes the reader to the centre of the action. The description of his own project is nail-biting, and the intimacy it affords not only makes this a compelling book, but opens a window into science and what makes the problems it tackles both so hard and irresistible. Projects like the LHC are hugely expensive and funded by taxpayers, but provide stories to attract a new generation of researchers.
It also means we are in expert hands for the technical side of the story. Alongside much else, we learn about “sigma values” (used in statistics to measure uncertainty, or, here, anomalies). Why not stop tutting about how late the bus is and assess the evidence that it is likely to be late again tomorrow (in excess of 5 sigma, since you ask: time to walk).
Overall, Space Oddities is a rare joy – enlightening, thrilling and inspiring.
Anna Demming is a writer based in Bristol, UK
