Marcus Chown - Infinity in the Palm of Your Hands

Diversion Books

A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004

New York, New York 10016

www.DiversionBooks.com

Copyright 2019 by Marcus Chown

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For more information, email

Book design by Pauline Neuwirth, Neuwirth & Associates.

First Diversion Books edition April 2019.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-63576-594-6

eBook ISBN: 978-1-63576-593-9

First published in the United Kingdom by Michael OMara Books.

Printed in the U.S.A.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To Allison, Colin, Rosie, Tim, and Ornella

With love, Marcus

CONTENTS

Nothing is too wonderful to be true.

MICHAEL FARADAY

C OMEDIANS, WHEN INTRODUCED AT parties as comedians, may feel under pressure to tell a joke. Science writers, when introduced at parties as science writers, may feel under pressure to trot out a jaw-dropping scientific fact. Well, I do. Sometimes.

What kind of thing should I say? Something short and snappy. Enough to intrigue, make a person smile, but not enough to cause their eyes to glaze over so that I inadvertently appear a bore.

I try things out on my wife, who has no science background, often while she is watching TV: Did you know that an electron rotated through three hundred and sixty degrees is not the same electron?

Um, she says, not turning away from the screen.

What about: you could fit the entire human race in the volume of a sugar cube?

Yes, thatll do. Now, can I watch my program ?

My wife is an important sounding board.

There is another reason for finding these intriguing one-liners, though, and thats public talks.

Many talks I give are during tours to promote one of my books. The problem is that it is impossible to do justice to an entire book in forty-five minutes or so. Instead, therefore, I often pull out some intriguing facts and use them not only as a means to catch peoples interest but also as a way into describing some of the science I have written about.

It all started with my book What a Wonderful World: Life, the Universe and Everything in a Nutshell , which was supposed to be about everything though that is, of course, impossible. It did, however, cover everything from finance to thermodynamics, holography to human evolution, and sex to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. What, I wondered, should I include in my talk, and what should I leave out? It was then that I got the idea of talking about my Top 10 bonkers things about the world.

The great thing was that this was a movable feast. So, if the audience looked bored with one of my bonkers things, I would drop it from the next talk and include something else that would hopefully get a better reception. I imagine this is a bit like being a stand-up comedian. If a joke does not work one night, it gets discarded and substituted for something else for the next performance.

And the beauty of the format is that it works for other subjects as well. I developed an app called Solar System for iPad, which was followed by a book called Solar System . In talks to promote it, I talked about my Top 10 bonkers things about the solar system.

Which brings me, finally, to this book. Why not, I thought, put together some of the most mind-blowing scientific facts I have discovered over the yearsthings I have covered in books and articles and things Ive never written about beforeand use them as a way into explaining some thought-provoking and often deeply profound science?

For instance, the fact that, if you squeezed all the empty space out of all the people in the world, you could fit the human race in the volume of a sugar cube illustrates perfectly the mindboggling emptiness of matter. You, me, everyonewe are all pretty much ghosts. And that leads naturally on to quantum theory, the most successful but also the weirdest physical theory ever devised, which ultimately provides the explanation of why atoms are overwhelmingly made of nothingness. The fact that, if the sun were made of bananas, it would be precisely as hot as it is now leads to the remarkable fact that the temperature of the sun has nothing whatsoever to do with what is powering it. And the fact that 95 percent of the universe is invisible leads to, well, the extraordinaryin fact, embarrassingrealization that everything scientists have been studying these past 350 years amounts to no more than a minor constituent of the universe. Andeven worsewe have pretty much no idea what the major component is.

Years ago, I interviewed the American planetary scientist and science popularizer Carl Sagan at the Dorchester hotel in London (his suite, I remember, had fantastic views of Hyde Park and the Serpentine). After writing nonfiction books like The Cosmic Connection , Sagan had written his first science-fiction novel, Contact , which would later become a film starring Jodie Foster. I asked him what he preferred: science or science fiction. Without the slightest hesitation, Sagan replied: Science. Because science is stranger than science fiction. And it is. We find ourselves in a universe far stranger than anything we could possibly have invented. I hope that, in the following pages, I manage to convey some of this strangenessand wonder.

I really enjoyed writing this book. And I hope you enjoy reading it. At the bare minimum, I hope it will arm you with a few amazing facts about the universe to trot out at parties.

M ARCUS C HOWN , London, 2018

You are a third mushroom

How extremely stupid not to have thought of that.

THOMAS HUXLEY,
ON HEARING OF DARWINS THEORY OF
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION

Y OU ARE ONE THIRD mushroom. Thats right. You, me, all of us share a third of our DNA with fungi (as if my Christmas-card list was not long enough already!). This is strong evidence that humans and mushroomsin fact all creatures that share the earth todayhave a common ancestor. The person who first recognized this was the English naturalist Charles Darwin.

In 1831, aged just twenty-two, Darwin took up the post of ships naturalist on HMS Beagle . During its five-year voyage, he made a series of striking zoological observations. He noticed, for instance, that the birds and animals on the isolated Galpagos Islands, 1,000 kilometers off the west coast of South America, appeared to be variants of a small subset of birds and animals found on the continent. Not only that, but the birds and animals on each island of the Galpagos archipelago also differed from each other in subtle ways. Most famously, the finches that lived on islands where large nuts were available had stubbier beaks than finches on other islands.

After eighteen months of intense concentration, a light went on in Darwins mind. He realized why creatures were so exquisitely tailored for their environments. And it was not, as was the prevailing view, that they had been designed by a Creator. There was a perfectly natural mechanism that created the illusion of design.