Jordi Montaner | 3 may 2010
Title: The Quantum Zoo: A Tourist’s Guide to the Neverending Universe (published in Spanish as El zoo caúntico)
Author: Marcus Chown
Editorial: US edition: Joseph Henry Press; Spanish edition: La liebre de marzo
Year: 2005 (US); 2008 (Spain)
Pages: 170
”Real science is far stranger than science fiction, and the universe is far more incredible than any invented contrivance,” says Marcus Chown, a British physicist at the University of London who writes for New Scientist magazine and has previously published several popular science books such as “The Universe Next Door”.
In “The Quantum Zoo”, Chown takes us on an entertaining journey through a number of mind-boggling mathematical problems and amazing conundrums of physics that would be difficult to explain otherwise. Someday, all high school textbooks will be written like this.
The author expounds an unending series of oddities in this marvellous book: with every breath we take, we inhale an atom exhaled by Marilyn Monroe, Einstein, Gandhi, Napoleon, or Sitting Bull; an atom can be in many different places at once, the equivalent of being in New York and London at the same time; time travel does not conflict with the laws of physics; the faster we travel, the thinner we become; we age faster at the top of a building than at the base; a cup of coffee weighs more when hot than when cold; one percent of the static that appears when you tune a TV is a relic of the Big Bang…
Einstein claimed (although Chown would surely correct my use of verb tense and say “claims” instead) that “the most fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple and should be explained in language everyone can understand".
After getting his PhD in physics in 1980, Chown started his own peculiar crusade to become the most daring communicator of scientific knowledge anyone had imagined as a broadcaster-astronomer at the radio station of the University of California in Pasadena. In the dark of night, Chown assured listeners that our bodies are made of the same material as the stars and that the natural laws that govern our immediate surroundings, our homes, yards and neighborhood were not different from those of the entire cosmic universe. "Very few of the extraordinary discoveries of the last century seem to have permeated people’s consciousness," explains the author. He adds, however, that when he tries to read the explanations that science makes about what happens, though rigorous, they are often confusing, leaving the average reader bewildered and bored. "We live in a world as beautiful as it is strange, and it is not so difficult to explain why."
That was how Chown began writing furiously about science. He did so, moreover, with provocative titles such as “We Need to Talk About Kelvin,” “Felicity Frobisher and the Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil,” and, above all, “The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead: Dispatches from the Front Line of Science.” As insightful as he is funny, the author uses a scalpel on the skin of mysticism to separate the natural from the supernatural with pedagogical lucidity. The questions and curiosities Chown raises go on and on: the origin of biological complexity; the limitations of only living in the present; the survival of life forms without the solution of continuity; why Elvis is still alive; why all the laws of the universe can be summarized in a computer program only four lines long; and how our flesh contains stardust. We date the Big Bang at 12 to 14 billion years ago, but the oldest fossil record we have "only" goes back to 300,000 years ago, can you imagine that nothing at all happened in all that time? And what does whatever was going on during all that time have to do with what is happening now?
Alchemist of popular science, Chown does not speculate like Carl Sagan or dive into philosophical currents a la Sartre. No, for Chown, the incredible world of physics speaks for itself. This books tells us that neutrinos are subatomic particles, waste-specters of nuclear reactions that originate in the heart of the sun. While it takes light 30,000 years to travel from the center of the sun to its surface, neutrinos take only two seconds and eight minutes to reach the surface of the Earth. Is it not enough to hear that wonderful fact in order to be blow away? But there is more. The author invites us to imagine three impossible things every day, before going to sleep. This books gives the readers goose bumps by subverting the religious theory of the resurrection through a concept called decoherence that states that the quantum identity of our bodies is not destroyed but changes state. Here Chown refers to Schrödinger's famous experiment with a cat in a basket, which could appear dead or asleep according to the situation of the observer.
Difficult to understand? Not at all. But we are used to putting on a tough skin when an idea scares us. We turn with pleasure to the consolations of philosophy, the musings on being and nothingness. Good luck.
