I have occassionally dabbled with science books for idiots before, such as the Science of Discworld series, and Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything. Marcus Chown’s new offering is a much more compact volume, with the goal of explaining the two great scientific discoveries of the 20th century: Einstein’s theories of relativity, and quantum theory. He starts by coming up with as many fascinating facts as possible: for instance, you age faster at the top of a building at the top than at the bottom (relativity at work), and if you removed all of the empty space from the atoms of the human race, you could compress us all together in to a 1cm cube. These facts serve to highlight many strange and wonderful aspects of the science on offer.

Quantum theory comes first. Quantum theory (which even Einstein didn’t really get) describes the behaviour of the essential particles (atoms, photons, electrons, etc.) that are the building blocks of life, and that have a dangerous tendency to violate what we think of as the laws of physics more or less whenever they feel like it. I must confess that even with the plain English examples, some of this was too much for me to take in: atoms possess the properties of both particles and waves; as soon as you try to observe the behaviour of a particle, you influence the outcome (how does it know it’s being observed?), etc. Chown reassures us that even scientists who work on this stuff don’t know why most of it happens, only that it does. From my perspective as a sci-fi reader, there were one or two ideas that have been picked up by writers, notably Charles Stross’s use of paired quantum singularities for instant communication across the void of space in Singularity Sky (sadly, says Chown, although these atoms can somehow violate the speed of light to reflect each others’ state across a vast distance, you couldn’t use it to communicate due to the fact that observing the state of the particle stops it doing its magic. Pesky quantum). Star Trek-style teleportation is pretty much impossible too. Boo.

I was on safer ground with relativity: light is a wave (with you so far) which means you can never actually catch up with it (ok) which means that it is effectively the universal speed limit and can never be exceeded (makes sense). Our perception of time and motion is all relative to our position and speed, and ultimately everything (gravity, motion, time, mass, energy) is a facet of the space-time continuum so beloved of science fiction. I pretty much got all of this, even black holes, perhaps because it’s easier to cope with examples that can relate to our level of existence and that reflect some of the physical laws that we pretty much take for granted. I was interested to ponder how few science fiction writers have bothered to take account of the impossibility of faster-than-light travel. In my recent reading experience, only Alastair Reynolds and Orson Scott Card have properly incorporated the effects of travel at relativistic speeds in to their fiction, and Reynolds goes further with red shift and so on. Most writers get around this with wormholes (which to be fair Einstein says may exist) or just treat faster-than-light travel as a magic, unexplained ‘black box’.

I definitely learned something from Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, which might have benefitted from the subtitle (But It Can Make Your Brain Throb a Little). I cannot criticise the science, or the lucid writing style; my only comment would be that, like me, I suspect many readers will cope better with Einstein than with quantum theory, and they might have felt that addressing the issues in that order was a better learning curve. Putting that aside, this is a great book and a worthy attempt to bring big science to idiots like me.

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