Big Bang by Simon Singh

This is a disappointing book. Simon Singh has written two best-selling television tie-in volumes, but there is no sniff of a TV association here, and I'm not surprised. Big Bang cosmology is full of excitement today, with new ideas being bandied about concerning the early universe and what happened before the Big Bang. But all of that is relegated by Singh to a brief epilogue, and in the bulk of his book he offers a rather pedestrian history of humankind's expand- ing vision of the universe, from the ancient Greeks to the late 20th century - but, crucially, stopping there.

There are so many similar books in print that this one would not even be worth commenting on, if it were not for Singh's credentials as a populariser and the hype that will inevitably surround its publication. In view of that, a health warning seems necessary: if you know anything about the history of astronomy, Big Bang is likely to dull your senses long before you arrive at the meat of the story

Of course, if you know nothing at all about astronomy, you may learn a lot from the book, if you don't mind the ponderous style. But when the author himself comes up with the (accurate) comment on page 145 that "it has been a somewhat tortuous journey that has brought us to Einstein's theory of relativity", any reader who has got that far can only nod in agreement. And the torture continues. Just when you think Singh is at last getting to grips with the Big Bang, he steps back in time to give us a brief (but not brief enough) history of the telescope. This jumping forward and backward in history to cover different topics sequentially rather than in parallel breaks up the flow of the main story; but it still leaves scope for baffling omissions. For example, the concept of novae and supernovae is chucked in with minimal discussion, although it is a key to the story.

It's not so much that Singh gets things wrong as that he has a slightly skew-whiff view of the history of science. He repeats unfounded stories, such as the one about Galileo muttering, "Eppur si muove", describes Einstein's theory of gravity as if it conflicted with Newton's theory ("Newton vs Einstein") and never makes clear the difference between theories and models. He also manages to avoid any mention of James Clerk Maxwell, whose electromagnetic equations formed the basis of Einstein's insight into what became the special theory of relativity.

There are such minor errors in both the science and the history dotted throughout the book, but nothing more confusing for the kind of person who might otherwise benefit from reading it than a horrible passage on page 283 that could give the uninitiated the impression that the mixture of nitrogen and oxygen in the air is equivalent to the "mixture" of hydrogen and oxygen in water. And just a couple of pages later, the narrative flow is destroyed yet again when we learn (two-thirds of the way into a book called Big Bang) that "before embarking on this part of the Big Bang story, it is first necessary to take a short step back in time and examine..." Well, by then, who cares what we have to examine?

If my comments seem harsh, it may be because I read this book immediately after teaching at a course for would-be science writers, and it is full of the kind of things the course advised budding writers to avoid. But criticism should be constructive, and there is one feature of Singh's book that stands out, and could have formed the basis of a really good story. His discussion of the work of George Gamow, Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman, which laid the scientific basis of the modern Big Bang model in the decade following the Second World War (and therefore would have been a sensible place to start the book), is far too good a story to bury the way he does.

Dr John Gribbin is a visiting Fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex, and author of 'Science: a history' (Penguin)

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