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BOOK REVIEW / So he discovered the mystery of the universe: 'Wrinkles in Time' - George Smoot and Keay Davidson: Little, Brown, 18.99 pounds

Tom Wilkie
Wednesday 29 December 1993 00:02 GMT
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I HAVE a problem with biographies of scientists. Science is just as much a human activity as the arts and, although its practitioners seldom like to have this noised abroad, it is just as driven by human passion and frailty.

Yet science is different: whereas the end-point of the arts is to produce a painting, play or other creative work for public display and enjoyment, the creations of scientists are passionless and detached from human emotional interest. Thus, some knowledge of the colourful domestic life and bizarre death of Joe Orton enhances and expands the experience of seeing one of his plays, but the electric charge on the electron remains untouched even by the fullest biography of Robert Millikan, the American physicist who first measured that charge.

There are exceptions to these doubts about scientific biography. But, sadly, this is not the case with the quasi-autobiographical Wrinkles in Time. George Smoot was the leader of a team that has made one of the most important discoveries for decades; he has reached out to the edges of the observable universe and back towards its beginnings in time; and he has found ripples in the fabric of space-time which formed the seedlings of the galaxies that we see today.

He resolved the fundamental paradox whereby the early universe had appeared uniform in all directions, posing serious problems to those astrophysicists who wished to account for the fact that the universe today is palpably 'lumpy'.

What a pity, then, that he, together with the science writer Keay Davidson, has produced such a banal book. Anyone who wishes a reasonably clear account of our present-day understanding of the Big Bang and the subsequent development of the universe will find it here. But of interest and wonderment, of human passions, of the interplay between personal life and professional work, this book is devoid.

It is not for the want of trying. But the authors do not have a sure touch for human interest. Thus we find that the church of Santa Croce in Florence 'is one of my favourite places for pilgrimage'. We learn that it contains the tombs of Machiavelli, Dante and Michelangelo, together with some outstanding renaissance art and architecture 'but most important, it is only a couple of blocks from Vivoli's gelateria, which serves the best ice-cream in the whole world'.

This is a very long book, yet I question whether all the information in it is really necessary. For instance, Dr Smoot tells us that 'in the winter of 1984, I worked in Rome for a week. I was attending a scientific workshop on the early universe and a meeting with R Mandelosi, G Sironi, L Danese, and G Danese of the universities of Bologna, Milan, and Padua.' One presumes there is a reason for listing these people so extensively.

But the 1984 workshop was important merely because it gave Dr Smoot a chance to drive to Pisa and see the leaning tower which, in turn, is important only as a painless introduction to Galileo and his astronomical observations. The living Italian physicists, having made their entry on page 19, are never heard of again, except for poor Giorgio Sironi who reappears briefly on page 256 recovering from surgery for cancer.

The discovery that Dr Smoot and his team made, using the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, is important to our understanding of the universe and to our place in the scheme of things. But on the evidence of this book, the man who discovered the cosmic seeds of the galaxies is not the best messenger for his news.

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