Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders
That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe. By Marcus Chown. Diversion Books. $16.99.
Carl Sagan’s notable comment about whether
he preferred science or science fiction makes an early appearance in Marcus
Chown’s Infinity in the Palm of Your
Hand, and is in effect a motto for the book. Which field did Sagan said he
preferred? “Science. Because science is stranger than science fiction.” Chown
offers 50 short chapters demonstrating just how true this is – and since most
chapters refer to multiple elements of some phenomenon or other, there are
really far more than 50 wonders here.
A science popularizer in the Sagan mold,
Chown is also adept at chapter titles and opening quotations. How can a reader not want to find out why a chapter is
called “The Disposable Brain”? Or read one whose subhead states, “Every breath
you take contains an atom breathed out by Marilyn Monroe”? Or one with the
subhead, “If the sun were made of bananas it would not make any difference”?
How can anyone with even a slight interest in scientific oddities not enjoy a book that, in addition to
chapter-opening quotations from Shakespeare, Galileo, Richard Feynman, Greek
philosopher Anaxagoras, and William Blake (from whom the book’s title is
taken), offers comments from Joan Rivers, Gary Larson’s “The Far Side,” and,
from Pink Floyd, “There’s someone in my head and it’s not me”?
That Pink Floyd remark is a fair example
of how cleverly Chown weaves popularized science and popular culture together.
It comes in a chapter called “Living with the Alien,” whose subhead reads, “You
are born 100 percent human but die 50 percent alien.” What this is about is the
fact that around half the cells in the human body are bacteria – humans are,
essentially, symbiotic organisms (although Chown does not say exactly that). A
study of all foreign microorganisms in the human body found “more than 10,000
species of alien cells in your body – forty times the number of cell types that
belong to you. In fact, every square centimeter of your skin is home to about
five million bacteria. That is about five hundred in every pinhead-size patch.”
This is how Chown explains things: taking a scientific finding, emphasizing its
weirdness, and thus showing how extraordinary everyday, taken-for-granted
things are.
He also deals with non-everyday things, which means, for example, time travel, which “is
not ruled out by the laws of physics” but turns out to require the would-be
time traveler to “take the earth and a region near a black hole and connect
them with a wormhole,” using “a type of matter with repulsive gravity that we
do not know exists” but that has been calculated, plus “the energy emitted by
an appreciable fraction of the stars in our Milky Way during their lifetimes.” Simple!
Equally so is Chown’s explanation of the reason “you could fit the entire human
race in the volume of a sugar cube,” wryly adding, “albeit a very heavy sugar
cube!” The sugar-cube discussion, which focuses on how much of an atom is empty
and why that is important, is one of Chown’s best in Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand, because in it he does what he
can to make quantum theory sort of understandable, aptly referring to it at one
point as “quantum insanity.” Readers who cannot grasp the complexities of the
quantum world – that would be everybody – will be relieved when Chown explains,
“Don’t even try to imagine how this can be. It is impossible. The truth is that
the electrons and photons and so on that make up the world are neither
particles nor waves but something [with] which we have nothing to compare them
in the everyday world and for which we have no word in our vocabulary.” That is
not only accurate but also refreshing: reality is made up, we are made up, of things that we can comprehend mathematically
(well, a very, very few of us can), but are literally incapable of envisioning.
There are inherent limits to what the human brain (which performs all its
wonders using the power of a 20-watt bulb, as Chown explains in one chapter)
can calculate, just as there are limits to what any computer can possibly do
(limits that Alan Turing set out to discover, as Chown discusses in another
chapter).
The reason Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand works so well is that it does not
“dumb down” abstruse science: instead, it shows how utterly wonderful and
wonder-filled scientific discoveries are, even when (especially when) applied to mundane life and things we generally
accept without thinking much about them. There is something exhilarating in
Chown’s writing, something captivating in the way he casually tosses about a
variety of fascinating facts and discoveries while explaining how many things
remain unknown and perhaps, given the inherent limitations of the human mind,
unknowable (although don’t bet on it). If Carl Sagan’s comment on the
strangeness of science could be this book’s motto, then a remark by J.B.S. Haldane
that heads one of the chapters here could be a pithy summary of what Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand is all
about: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we
can suppose.”
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