Customer Reviews

The Constants of Nature: From Alpha to Omega--the Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

"Constants of Nature" is an excellent overview of a fascinating topic--the origins and significance of the constants of the universe. It prompted me to spend a great deal of my free time digging around for more information on many of the topics it addresses, which is always a ringing endorsement for a work of non-fiction.

However, it's not perfect. The book's subtitle ("From Alpha to Omega") is somewhat deceptive--the "meat" of the book (after the first few chapters) deals almost entirely with the fine structure constant (alpha). Barrow talks a great deal about constants in general, but never devotes much time to any of the others specifically. Furthermore, at times, Barrow seems to become sidetracked--an inexplicable discussion of the value of contemplating "alternative histories" (i.e., speculating what would have happened if Germany had won World War II, and similar endeavors) awkwardly interrupts the flow of one chapter, for instance. Also, the book has several errors that were immediately obvious to me (for instance, it says light from the Sun takes 3 seconds to reach the Earth; the correct value is more than 8 minutes), which makes me suspect that there are probably many more errors that I missed, but which would be obvious to someone with a marginally greater degree of physics sophistication.

However, perhaps the biggest disappointment was in the introduction of the values of the Planck length, Planck time, etc., all of which are central to the book. Barrow justifies the signifiance of these values simply by stating that they are the only values of the appropriate dimensions that can be derived by combining certain other physical constants in straightforward ways. However, from there he makes the logical leap that the Planck distance, for instance, is the "natural" measure of length in the universe. This is certainly a fair statement, but it's hardly justifiable to make that statement based simply on the fact that it can be derived from a number of other constants--one could have selected another collection of fundamental constants and come up with a completely different "natural" unit of length. In short, the line of reasoning does not justify the conclusion.

In all, this is a thought-provoking work, but it's often short on detail and had a tendency to leave me with more questions than answers. The more technical reader will probably wish for more thorough arguments throughout; however, it's still an enjoyable read and a fine attempt at popularizing a difficult area of physics.

We couldn't expect, inhabitants of any other world to know what a meter is. But we could expect them to know pi, or the ratio of the weight of a proton compared to an electron; that's a number, about 1836, without any meters or grams behind it, and it is considered one of the "constants of nature." There are other such constants, and they form the subject of _The Constants of Nature: From Alpha to Omega - The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe_ (Pantheon Books) by John D. Barrow. The book, which is the sort to be enjoyed by anyone who liked puzzling through such works as _A Brief History of Time_, paradoxically has a main topic about the constants: What if they are not constant?

If, for instance, the proton / electron ratio were all of a sudden a little different, atoms might fly apart instead of maintaining their tiny orbital systems on which matter as we know it depends. There are other important numbers that we think are constant, like Planck's constant, the charge on the electron, and the speed of light. These three are linked within another constant, the fine structure constant. All these constants seem to have turned out just right for humans to have evolved to be investigating their physics. They all seem to be surprisingly bio-friendly. As surely as some insist that a conscious designer made the wonderfully baroque varieties of living things on our planet, others (who may admit that evolution rather than a conscious designer was at work) will say some godly entity picked the constants. But Barrow explains many alternatives, universes with the constants possibly turning out in some other way, and also explains ways that these universes might have come into being. If there are lots of universes out there, with lots of different constant combinations, it is no longer surprising that we are in one of them with the constants tuned just right to produce life, and intelligent life at that.

But in our own universe, are the constants constant? There have been some very interesting and comforting confirmations of constancy which are reported here. Barrow himself, however, has been a member of a team using a different technique to spot a shift, over a longer period of time, and, well, a shift seems to be there. There is not much you can count on in this strange universe; whether our strange universe is more strange or less for having produced us is not a question that science can answer. There are plenty of others pending; this engrossing and clearly-written book brings lots of them up. Are our constants linked to an expansive universe? Do they evolve or cycle? Are there plenty of other universes out there already, in a multiverse of possible worlds? The current view of cosmology is clearly presented here, although it is very peculiar; and the answers to these questions will be more peculiar still.

There is a good book in this book somewhere, but it is trapped inside of a fair book that promises a lot more than it actually delivers. There is an initial problem that the book fails to make the case as to why particular constants are important. When discussing the fine structure constant (which is really the only constant that is given any significant coverage), the author tells us that it is made up of a combination of the electron charge, the speed of light, and Plank's constant. One might ask why these three particular values and that would be a fair question. The author tells us that if these three values changed but the fine structure constant remained the same, the resulting universe would be indistinguishable from our own. And then he leaves it there. What does that mean? Why is this the case? The author skips over this and moves on to other topics. He also makes a claim for "natural units" without being clear about what he means and why they are particularly natural.

In chapter six the author discusses some curious coincidences surrounding Eddington's number. But after having debunked some other coincidental numbers he seems to leave himself open to claims that he is simply invoking meaningless coincidences. For example, he lays claim to an odd coincidence between the number of protons in the Universe and the ratio of the strengths of the electromagnetic and gravitational forces between two protons. Why these particular numbers? There are some interesting twists and turns in the book but there are also enough things that seem rather shaky that I began to doubt how much of the book was truly reliable. As one reviewer has already pointed out, what does one say when a book is so careless as to claim that solar eclipses are caused by the Earth's shadow falling on the Sun? I am sure the author doesn't believe that to be the case but it shows a certain amount of carelessness that worries me about the remainder of the book.

There are some good parts to the book that I should mention. The discussion of the Anthropic Principle was clear and concise. His explanation of why intelligent life could not evolve unless there were exactly three spatial dimensions and one time dimension was convincing although I would have liked him to expand on this in more depth. Chapter eleven's discussion of natural nuclear reactors was also quite interesting. Overall there are some good parts in here but I didn't find the book as a whole delivered on its promise.

As I say in the header, this book was a big disappointment to me. I don't think there is a single original idea in it. I would describe it as a collection of paragraphs from other books. Perhaps this is why the tabulation of footnotes and references at the end is 50 pages long. That is not to imply that the book is dry and scolarly. It's not. In fact, as another reviewer pointed out, what is lacking is detail. Just when you think he is going to make a point about something, he changes the subject by quoting something from another source. It is as if he took all of the books he could find on the subject and put the paragraphs he liked on a series of index cards and then shuffled them. What came out is this book.

His writing style is convoluted at best. If there was an editor for this book he was either lazy or may have assumed that because he didn't undestand it, it must be over his head. A more likely explanation was that there was nothing being said in the first place.

I wish Mr. Barrow would write fewer books and spend more time on each one. I suspect that he is talented, but perhaps is under pressure from his institution to publish or perish so out this comes.

Save your money.

In his previous book "The Book of Nothing", John Barrow presents a vacuum and uses it to show us its new meaning. Now he finds another interesting topic - constants of Nature in science (mostly "fine structure" constant but not exclusively), and uses them to teach us about unknown history and measurements in modern cosmology. I find his cube of theories and colorful description of many forms of multiverses (including the one having different times dimension) very educative.
Extra flavor is added in chapter 9 (about "virtual history"). It brings some humor and relaxes in the middle of not so easy subjects. Especially chapter 11 requires extra effort and figure 11.6 is missing from the hardcover edition. Generally: book represents another great effort in popularizing sophisticated top end of a science. Hopefully I will remember formula: 2(pi)e^2/hc for a long time to come.

  Barrow picks what is certainly an intriguing topic, and does a decent job of glossing over pretty much all aspects of the fine structure constant. He mentions a couple others, too, like beta, and alpha-s. This shallow look at these few constants probably make up around 40 pages, or so.
  That having been said, I found the rest of the book very interesting, too: stories about various contributors of various theories; what it would mean to nudge the constants one way or another; the whole history of the topic. But I bought the book to learn about the constants themselves, and was severely disappointed in that respect.
  There are also the glaring errors that the other reviewers have mentioned. I found 4 or 5 that I knew immediately were wrong (others have mentioned the 3 second light trip from the sun), as well as some annoying typographical errors (e.g. "<" instead of ">" for "greater than") and some serious fundamental errors in the notes. Were it not for these, I probably would have given the book 4 stars. They got rather annoying though, and left me with a sneaking suspicion about other things he's written that I *can't* immediately "correct" mentally.

    All-in-all, it's worth the read, but only to spark your curiosity on the subject.

In order to explain physical reality, physicists measure and determine physical quantities/parameters/information related to the object/subject in question using well defined laws such as; the laws of classical physics (theory relativity), quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics. Physicists do not know the details of all the laws, and their interpretations/explanations often vary, but the physical laws themselves are the same across the universe. Einstein's principle of covariance states that laws of nature should appear the same for all observers in the universe no matter where they are located or how they are moving. The equations and the fundamental constants that write these laws are universal, but as physicists try to explain how the universe works, it is increasingly becoming apparent to a few physicists that some fundamental constants such as the speed of light (c), fine-structure constant, proton-electron mass ratio, and gravity (G) have changed over the last 13.7 billion light years.

The author chronicles the historical development in the physics research of universal constant and touches upon the most fundamental part of creation. How do these constants that are a part of an equation could have impacted a functional universe that supports life? Mathematician Ramanujan once said that "An equation has no meaning unless it expresses the thought of God." The dimensionless constant is certainly the thought of God. Time variation of fundamental constants is subjected to theoretical and experimental research by a number of physicists such as; Arthur Eddington, Paul Dirac, George Gamow, Robert Dicke, Brendan Carter and others. The fine-structure constant was originally introduced in 1916 by Arnold Sommerfeld, as a measure of the relativistic deviations in atomic spectral lines of the Bohr's atomic model. This constsnt is interpreted as a measure of electromagnetic force that holds the atoms together or the strength of the interaction between electrons and photons; the ratio of two energies, the energy needed to bring two electrons from infinity to a distance against their electrostatic repulsion, and the energy of a single photon. It is also defined as the ratio of the strengths of the electromagnetic and gravitational interactions. This constant is a dimensionless quantity (1/137.035999679); hence its numerical value is independent of the system of units used. Many physicists have wondered why God would have created such an odd number for this constant (value of Pi is another example.) One explanation is the cosmological evolution of a quintessence-like scalar field coupled to gauge fields and matter would have effectively modified the coupling constants and particle masses over time. However, the anthropic principle states that the value of the fine-structure is what it is because stable matter could not have existed in the universe if that was any other number. In other words, galaxies, stars, planetary systems and life forms would not have evolved. For instance, if this constsnt was changed by 4%, carbon and oxygen would not have been produced in stars.

Since fine-structure constant is present wherever electromagnetism is, it is determined by various methods from atomic spectra. One is by analyzing the atomic spectra of distant galaxies and stars. The second one is the natural reactor of Oklo has been used to check if the atomic fine-structure constant might have changed over the past 2 billion years. That is because it influences the rate of nuclear reactions. For example, Samarium(149) captures a neutron to become Samarium(150), and since the rate of neutron capture depends on the value of this constant, the ratio of the two samarium isotopes in samples from Oklo can be used to calculate the value of this constant that existed 2 billion years ago. The results are conflicting and it is not clear if these constant are changing. Despite the fact that this book has many irrelevant quotations from unorthodox figures such as; Joan Rivers, Woody Allen, Brooke Shields, W.C. Fields, and George Bush, it is highly recommended.

1. The Cosmology of Extra Dimensions and Varying Fundamental Constants
2. The Role of Neutrinos, Strings, Gravity and Variable Cosmological Constant in Elementary Particle Physics
3. Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life
4. The Constants of Nature: From Alpha to Omega--the Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe
5. FINE STRUCTURE CONSTANT AND FRAGMENTATION OF THE ELECTRON AND THE INTERCOSMIC RELATIONS.

This book is another superb addition by John Barrow. His style keeps the reader glued to the book from beginning to end. Every reader interested in Cosmology or in general in Physics and natural laws and how they shape the Universe should read this book. Its really very interesting to see how the varying constants affect life as we know it on this planet at this time. Of course a serious physicist may feel uncomfortable about the inevitable Anthropic arguments that come with this scenario. But if constants vary with time, as trends show they do, then this might be a fact of life that you cannot just ignore. Future generations of scientists may unravel how and why the universe as we see now has been engineered in this way and that will have profound implications. However the book is burdened with a huge number of notes which makes the reader to go to the end of the book pretty often. It distracts from the main focus. I will request the author to reduce the number of notes in his future books. And I did not find the Fig.11.6 in my paperback edition.

The Author, though capable to give a systematic review of the present knowledge of the fundamental interactions (in terms of the respective constants), such as the strong, electromagnetic, weak, and gravitational ones, as well as the problem of their unification, merely concentrates in giving a purely superficial exposition. The book is full of historical anecdotes and chats around the science, sometimes written with a strange and irresponsible negligence to the real nature of the phenomena under consideration. For example, in p. 78 the solar eclipse is described as "...the Sun's disc was covered by the Earth's shadow..." (?!).

Nature's Constants. Holy cow, what are those? Are they the inch, the foot, the yard, the mile? The answer to that question is...a definite maybe.

John D. Barrow, in his fascinating book, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers that Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe, tells us that our system of measurements, such as the inch, the foot, the yard and the mile are rather useless in defining nature, because they center around human beings--what he calls, anthropometrics. For instance, consider the concept of length. Originally, lengths were derived from the length of the king's arm or the span of his hand. The yard was the length of a tape drawn from the tip of a man's nose to the farthest fingertip of his arm when stretched horizontally to one side. Distances were reckoned as a day's journey. Likewise, time followed from rising and setting of the sun and the moon. Weights were quantities that could be carried in our hands or slung over our backs. Like the man said, all those things are anthropometric, or, man-centric; and they worked just fine as long as everybody used the same system. That's all fine and dandy, but what happens when one tries to understand the entire universe including all the worlds, all the stars, and all the galaxies and all the empty space? At that level, anthro...pro...whatever, just doesn't cut it anymore. We need something else, and that's where the Constants of Nature come into the picture.

At that point, the author takes us right into the discussion of these so-called constants of nature? In a nutshell, they're the fine structure numbers that give our universe its distinctive character--an attempt to create order out of chaos. Several constants have been defined, but to name four: Pi is a constant (' = 3.14159). Newton's law of gravity is a constant (GN = 6.67259 x 10-11m3s-2kg-1). The speed of light is a constant (c = 299,792,458 m/s), and the charge of an itsy-bitsy, teeny-tiny electron is another constant (e = 1.602x10-19C). Get the idea? Nobody knows why those things are what they are--don't even ask. But who cares? What's important is that wherever you go in our universe, they're the same. And that ladies and germs, is why the constants of nature are the true measuring rods of our universe.

Now notice that in the previous paragraph that I refer to our universe. I said ours because as scientists learned to define the constants of nature they began to realize that there could be more than just one universe (Twilight Zone). There could be a whole bunch of universes, and they could all be defined by their very own constants of nature. That's right. The force of gravity could be slightly stronger in another universe. Of course, that could have extreme ramifications. The stars may have collapsed sooner, and the universe itself may have completely died out without so much as a trace of its former self. So how would we know it ever existed? I don't know.

So that's a small piece of this 292-page book. First you try to understand the idea of nature's constants, and how they shaped our universe, and then you try to figure out what it would be like if they were different. Gulp. A lot of heavy thinkers worry about this stuff. By the way, the book's author, John D. Barrow, is no lightweight, anthropometrically speaking, of course. He's a Cambridge professor, so I think he knows what he's talking about.

Obviously, I couldn't write about everything in the thirteen chapters of this book. For one thing, my I.Q. is way too low. For another, there's just too much information. In my opinion, the author did a good job of spoon-feeding the information in small, easy to swallow bites, and he threw in a few tidbits of info here and there to keep the reader sharp. For instance, the author spends a lot of time telling us that the constants of nature are always the same. But then towards the end of the book he tells us that the constants may have changed. What? Does he mean that Pi hasn't always been 3.14159...? I guess so, but I can't even begin to imagine a circle where the diameter is exactly one inch and the circumference is exactly three inches. Can you? It's just too weird. So the bottom line, it seems, is that we're right back at the opening question: Are inches, yards and miles constants? Read the book. Maybe you can figure this stuff out.