David Bodanis, Passionate Minds. Scotland on Sunday, June 2004. Review by Andrew Crumey.

The story of Voltaire’s love affair with Émilie du Châtelet has everything: money, passion, adultery, tragedy ¬– even physics, because what bonded them was a shared interest in Newton. Perfect material, then, for an author well known for historically based works of popular science.

Émilie made a surprise appearance in Bodanis’s earlier book, E=mc2, where she was likened to “Geena Davis, Mensa member and onetime action-film star, trapped in the early eighteenth century”. Happily, in this new and fully fleshed-out account, there is nothing so cringe-inducing. Instead, Bodanis paints a lively and well researched picture of the famous couple that is touching and compelling, if at times questionable.

Take, for example, their first meeting. “They rode to an inn outside the city walls; they had chicken cooked in wine, there were candles everywhere…” Readers acquainted with standard Voltaire biographies (or even E=mc2) will scratch their heads here, because the usual story is that they met at the Opera. The endnotes supply the answer: “other accounts” opt for the Opera, but “the dating is inconclusive”. It’s good to learn that the standard version may be unreliable, but where did that chicken come from? Bodanis does not say, and although the notes he does provide suggest careful and considered reading of many sources, we are left wondering if the phantom bird may have hatched from his own imagination.

Similarly there is the story of how Voltaire, prior to meeting Émilie, became a millionaire. Following exile to England (where he became a fan of all things English, including Newton), the thirty-four year-old writer returned to Paris, well known as a poet and dramatist but hard up. A new lottery provided the answer. The government had rashly decided to subsidise the monthly prize money, so that anyone buying all the tickets would automatically make a huge profit. Voltaire joined a syndicate to do just that, and by the time the scam was exposed he had amassed enough wealth to live comfortably for the rest of his life.

The mathematician La Condamine usually gets credit for the plan, but Bodanis gives Voltaire equal if not greater billing. The same centre-staging extends to Louis XV’s affair with Madame de Pompadour, which Voltaire is here said to have instigated. Bodanis may well be correct in this, but some acknowledgment of his dissent from conventional wisdom would not go amiss.

Still, most readers will be happy enough to be whirled along by Bodanis’s engaging prose, which never suffers a dull moment. We certainly get a far better picture of Émilie here than previously, though by emphasising her virtues and playing down her less attractive aspects, Bodanis renders her a little less three-dimensional than the wily, egotistical Voltaire.

The two lived together in a country chateau with the acquiescence of Émilie’s absent husband, and Voltaire used his riches to create a sophisticated scientific laboratory in which to investigate the nature of fire. Émilie researched the problem too, but in secret, reaching conclusions different from Voltaire’s, and both published their results in the journal of the Academy of Sciences – the first time that either a woman or a poet had made it into print there. Emboldened by her success, Émilie went on to do the work for which she is most famous – the translation of Newton’s Principia into French.

Biographically-minded readers will probably feel that Émilie’s scientific achievements are sufficiently well covered in this book, but I was left wanting far more. Her ideas on energy which Bodanis discusses appear to be a repetition of what Leibniz had already discovered, and Bodanis takes a rather too simplistic view of the factional war between the followers of Leibniz and Newton, suggesting Émilie waged a one-woman campaign to unite the two approaches. In fact she had an ally in someone else who figures in this book, her other lover, the mathematician Maupertuis, mocked by Voltaire in Micromegas and Candide, who proved Newton’s predictions about the shape of the Earth but also revived Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds in his principle of least action – the basis of modern quantum theory.

It is no harsh criticism of a book, though, to say it leaves you wishing for more. Émilie’s story ended far too soon when, as her relationship with Voltaire crumbled, she looked elsewhere, became pregnant, and died soon after giving birth at the age of forty three. What we have here is a truly great story, told with the sincerity, exuberance and affection it deserves.

Piers Bizony, How To Build Your Own Spaceship. Scotland on Sunday, April 2008. Review by Andrew Crumey.

Anyone hoping to put together a space shuttle in their back garden might be a little disappointed with this book, which doesn’t quite deliver on its title. Yet its aims can be gathered from its unusual dual classification: “popular science/ travel writing”. This is a book about the technology of space flight, at a time when going into orbit is becoming a genuine tourist possibility – as long as you have a few million to spare.

At least two private companies are seriously looking at the potential for using Russian Soyuz rocketry to send fee-paying passengers on a trip around the moon; but for the time being, super-rich travellers must content themselves with trips nearer Earth. Five people so far have coughed up around $20 million each for a stay on the International Space Station. They didn’t pay for distance: the space station orbits only around 250 miles above ground. What they got was a unique view, the experience of weightlessness – and the necessary training to cope with it.

As Bizony points out, commercial space travel – of the kind promised in the very near future by Virgin Galactic – has to deal with issues of safety and comfort in ways that no airline need worry about. What do you do about toilets? Or your neighbour throwing up all over the zero-gravity cabin? America’s Federal Aviation Authority has officially relaxed its safety rules where space flight is concerned, and Virgin’s passengers will only get three days’ preparation for their ultimate white-knuckle ride. The two and a half-hour flight will be “sub-orbital”, reaching the official boundary of space – 60 miles above Earth – for just six precious minutes of weightlessness before descending. Celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Sigourney Weaver are allegedly queuing up for the $200,000 seats – but people like that expect not to get a fingernail broken, never mind being blown to atoms.

Apart from Richard Branson, the key players in the new industry are mostly dot.com billionaires: they include the founder of Google and the inventor of Microsoft Word. Bizony pitches his book at people hoping to muscle in on the business for themselves: a cute conceit to begin with, but one that soon feels forced. He is also apt to wander off-topic: the latter part of the book feels more like a general survey of space exploration, having little to do with tourism.

Still, there is plenty of curious information here: I had never realised, for example, that all Soyuz missions had a loaded gun on board, officially there in case the capsule came down in wolf-infested wilderness. We can safely assume such items will not be carried by the glitterati taking off from Branson’s New Mexico spaceport. I just hope that Norman Foster’s “eco-friendly” design for it works better than Heathrow Terminal Five.

Samantha Hunt, The Invention Of Everything Else. Scotland on Sunday, June 2008. Review by Andrew Crumey.

Nikola Tesla helped bring electricity to America and radio to the world. In the early twentieth-century, the Serbian-born inventor was as famous as Edison and Marconi. But while his rivals reaped the glory, Tesla became a recluse, finally shutting himself in a New York hotel room where he allegedly worked on death-rays, mind-reading devices and time travel until his death in 1943 aged 86. Now this eccentric genius is the unlikely hero of Samantha Hunt’s novel – and like Tesla himself, the book is both colourfully inventive and fundamentally flawed.

The story begins in Tesla’s first-person voice as the ageing scientist goes to feed pigeons in the park, these being his only remaining companions. Hunt strikes a distinctly poetic tone, and her engagement with language is one of the book’s most attractive features. It is also, however, its biggest problem. Addressing a pigeon as though it were his lover, Tesla sees, “an eye that remembers me before all this gray hair set in, back when I was a beauty too.” Certainly men can think themselves beautiful, but there is something distinctly feminine about the language as a whole. More worryingly, Tesla’s voice shows little evidence of his supposed scientific background. “Something in knowing is not quite as wonderful as not knowing,” he says – an observation that from a poet would be commonplace, but which from a scientist sounds like heresy. Even worse is when he tries to explain what it is that he actually invented, an “engine for the generating of alternating-current power” containing “a magnet, an iron rod where the charge has been separated, negative at one end, positive at the other.” Anyone whose knowledge of physics goes beyond changing a plug will know this is hokum. The first-person narrator of this book does not sound like an octogenarian male scientist whose first language was not English, but like a thirty-something female American author who teaches creative writing.

Does it matter? For many readers, it probably will not. But for those who read with the mind’s ear as much as the mind’s eye, the false voice is bound to be irritating. For a while I tried hearing it in third-person rather than first, and this worked well enough. But why not write it that way to begin with? And while most readers won’t want a detailed account of electrical engineering, surely they can at least expect some basic accuracy. The impression given here is that Tesla invented AC electricity, the kind we all have in our homes. But Tesla did not invent it, he devised new ways of producing and delivering it. Nobody would accept a novel where Shakespeare writes the Canterbury Tales - why should novels about scientists be any different?

Tesla, however, is only one half of this book, and what saves it is its other half, a young hotel chambermaid called Louisa, who tidies Tesla’s room and befriends him. If only the entire novel had been written from her viewpoint, it could have been a winner. In fact, as her story develops, Tesla appears increasingly irrelevant, since another mad inventor appears on the scene, claiming to have made a time machine. Louisa also bumps into a forgotten schoolmate who becomes the book’s love interest, and just might be a visitor from the future.

Curiously, it is Louisa who has the more scientific view of her surroundings. A snowflake hits her eye and “she can see its crystal structure… a blue refraction”, while for Tesla, snow feels like “a shattering of wet glass on my cheeks”. Both are effective observations, but Hunt’s characters seem to have had their brains accidentally swapped in the writing laboratory.

Matters become still more confusing when Tesla’s first-person account turns out to be his journal, read by Louisa – but then Tesla disturbs her, still narrating in first person. For much of this book, I wondered if Hunt was playing some enormously clever postmodernist game, but in the end decided she was not. Her attempt at literary ventriloquism simply does not work; what does succeed is Louisa’s story, a charming period romance with an appropriate air of innocence and wonder, well stocked with carefully researched details that create an authentic sense of time and place.

Even so, don’t expect any kind of resolution at the end: Louisa’s beau ultimately seems as peripheral as Tesla himself, and the novel never solves its quest for a male figure worthy of her heart. The problem, perhaps, is that the real-life story of Nikola Tesla was so remarkable that there seems little point turning it into a novel – though other writers have tried. Sometimes knowing is better than not knowing, and fact beats fiction.

Robin Wilson, Lewis Carroll in Numberland. Scotland on Sunday, June 2008. Review by Andrew Crumey.

Everyone knows Lewis Carroll as the author of the Alice books, but in his day job he was an Oxford maths lecturer, and most of his publications were about geometry, logic and numerical puzzles. It is this side of his output that Wilson explores in a book that will interest Carroll afficionados and delight fans of recreational mathematics.

We also learn about Carroll himself, though Wilson sticks to the facts, never trying to delve too deeply into Carroll’s psyche. Speculation about his unhealthy interest in children is dismissed as “nonsense” (probably rightly), but we are still left with the impression of a man at odds with normal society, finding solace through playing the role of teacher. As well as making up stories for children, Carroll loved setting them conundrums – not always with happy outcomes. One girl, faced with the familiar puzzle of getting a fox, a goose and a bag of corn across a river, promptly burst into tears. Another child (son of the actress Ellen Terry) recalled being given the same problem, which Carroll demonstrated using matches and a matchbox, and found himself completely bored by the lengthy explanation. Carroll’s vice, it seems, was not paedophilia but pedantry. His talent was for combining it with whimsical humour.

Even in serious books about logic, Carroll could not resist crazy examples such as, “No fossil can be crossed in love; an oyster may be crossed in love; therefore oysters are not fossils”. He memorised strings of numbers by turning them into coded verse: “Two jockeys to carry made that racer tarry” stood for the logarithm of 2. Carroll considered writing a book called Logarithms by lightning to explain his technique, by means of which he extracted the 13th root of 87654327 in his head in nine minutes flat – but like so many of his projects, it never materialised.

Intriguingly, Carroll seems to have had an obsession with the number 42, long before Douglas Adams got hold of it. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has 42 illustrations, and Alice’s incorrect multiplication after she falls down the rabbit-hole makes sense in a sequence of number bases ending with 42.

For the general reader, this book may delve just a little too deeply into the mathematics of voting systems and matrix determinants, but teachers might find ideas for the classroom, perhaps after translating Carroll’s nineteenth-century prose into the language of Harry Potter. They should bear in mind, though, what Carroll himself wrote, after reducing the little girl to tears. “That was a lesson to me about trying children with puzzles.”

John Gribbin, In Search of the Multiverse. Scotland on Sunday, January 2010. Review by Andrew Crumey.

In 2001 a team of computer scientists at an IBM research centre in California performed an historic experiment. They showed that fifteen equals five times three. Hard to see why John Gribbin should compare this “landmark event” to the Wright brothers’ first flight, until you appreciate how they did it, and what their success implied. The computer was a liquid, its billions of molecules serving as countless tiny processors. Their speedy calculation demonstrated the existence of parallel universes.

The idea is a staple of science fiction and popular culture: other worlds where history took a different course, from Hitler winning the war to the twists of Gwyneth Paltrow’s love-life in the movie Sliding Doors. Lump together all the possibilities and you get the “multiverse”, a word coined as long ago as 1895, but only recently embraced by physicists. Numerous books on the subject have appeared in the last few years, but Gribbin’s stands out for succinctness and readability. Long renowned as one of Britain’s finest popular science writers – his 1985 book In Search Of Schrodinger’s Cat remains a classic of the genre – Gribbin combines expert knowledge with straightforward, no-frills exposition.

The infamous cat in a box – simultaneously alive and dead, according to the rules of quantum theory – prompted PhD student Hugh Everett to suggest in 1957 that really there were two universes; it was only by opening the box that we could discover which one we happened to live in. A “cold individual who loved computers”, Everett did little to advertise his own theory, and it was not until the 1970s that he gained widespread recognition, partly helped by an article about his work in a science-fiction magazine. Chain-smoking and alcoholism took him to an early grave in 1982, but his reputation continued to rise.

The Oxford physicist David Deutsch, inspired by Everett’s work, proposed the idea of a “quantum computer”, where instead of storing information as ones or zeroes, the components would be in both states at once, enabling calculations to be done far more quickly. Peter Shor wrote a program that could run on such a device, and what the IBM team created in 2001 was a working version. “Looking at what happened to aviation in the century following the Wright brothers’ success,” says Gribbin, “gives the merest hint of where quantum computing might be by the year 2100.”

But does it really prove multiple universes exist? This is what Deutsch has claimed, and Gribbin agrees. Deutsch, he says, “knows more about computation than anyone else I have met”; the IBM experiment “proved that quantum computing works, proved that Shor’s algorithm works, and makes it very difficult to doubt the existence of the multiverse.”

However not every specialist in the field considers the case closed; the clarity of Gribbin’s argument comes at a cost of suppressing opposing views. This should certainly not put off prospective readers who will learn a great deal from this excellent book, but it does mean they should exercise caution. “Evolution is a fact,” Gribbin says at one point, “like the fact that apples fall off trees.” Yet are they really the same sort of fact? He defines the multiverse as “everything there is”, then says, “we still don’t know what electrons (or other quantum entities) are, nor how they do the things they do”. It’s hard to add up the sum of all existence when you can’t say what exists. “Either there is a Multiverse, or there isn’t. That is clearly a scientific question.” Only if philosophical questions are brushed under the carpet.

What Gribbin very ably explains is that really there are lots of multiverse theories; the oldest, around for centuries, is the idea that in an infinite universe everything is possible, so if you could fly far enough you would meet another you, an identical arrangement of atoms. Everett’s parallel worlds, on the other hand, are physically unreachable, while superstring theory implies ones where not only history but physics itself is different. In fact there is now such a multitude of multiverses that cosmologist Max Tegmark has found it necessary to introduce a classification system for them.

Like Tegmark, Gribbin assumes any unification of these diverse ideas must itself be a scientific theory. Perhaps, though, it should belong to some other discipline. Could it be, that the reason why so many physicists have produced so many multiverse models in the last half century, is that they all grew up on the same science-fiction stories?

Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence. Scotland on Sunday, March 2010. Review by Andrew Crumey.

For fifty years astronomers have been searching without success for radio signals from civilisations on other planets. With each year that passes, the silence becomes increasingly ominous. Could it really be that we are entirely alone in the universe? Yes, says Paul Davies, it could.

Davies is part of SETI, the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence. As chair of its Post-Detection Taskgroup, he plans for the day when ET phones Earth, and his committee has drawn up protocols for informing scientists, politicians, the media and general public. He is frankly sceptical that any of it will ever be put into effect.

In the half century since SETI began, the power of radio telescopes has increased dramatically, and so has the ability of computers to unscramble the cracks, pops and whistles emanating naturally from space. Three million people have downloaded SETI@home, analysing space data on their own PC in the hope of finding an alien message. Given so much effort, why has nothing been found?

One problem, says Davies, is the assumption that aliens will be like us. Really there is no good reason to suppose they would transmit analogue radio signals from giant masts, when even our own species has moved so quickly to low-power digital broadcasts too weak and garbled for extraterrestrials to notice. If anyone out there is eavesdropping on Earth then it is not multi-channel TV they will be picking up, but the occasional burst of military radar.

They might be using a completely different communication technique that we have not yet invented. One option suggested by Davies involves particles called neutrinos, which can travel through an entire planet almost unscathed. That makes them very effective information carriers, though also extremely hard to detect. If a machine could be made that would spit out neutrinos on demand, and another that could capture them, then simple Morse code would be enough to send a message right across the galaxy with no weakening or fading at all. But are we being showered by artificially made neutrinos? It appears not. If aliens have a better system then it is one we have not even thought of.

Davies also questions a deeper assumption. Must life always evolve on planets that can support it? This was the view of the charismatic astronomer Carl Sagan, famous for the 1980 television series Cosmos and as author of Contact, a novel about a successful SETI search that was filmed with Jodie Foster. Not only is life inevitable if the conditions are right, said Sagan, but given long enough it must always give rise to the highest form, intelligent creatures much like us. Davies is more modest; he points out that while abilities such as vision or flight have evolved independently many times on Earth, intelligent reasoning has arisen only in our own species; the rest cope perfectly well without it. We are not the highest form of life, only a very unusual kind. And considering the numerous evolutionary accidents that have made us what we are, Davies reckons the chances of them all being repeated anywhere else in the universe is effectively nil.

Even if unintelligent life is out there, how would we recognise it? The Viking spacecraft that landed on Mars had an automated experiment meant to find if the soil contained organisms, and the results are still being debated decades later. The soil lacked Earth-type life, but had a strange chemistry that some experts consider a signature of biological activity. Davies raises the tantalising possibility that Earth itself might host alternative non-DNA microbes that have simply gone unnoticed, and describes the remarkable efforts of scientists to find these aliens that could already be among us.

This book is not a history of SETI but a survey of what SETI has hoped to find, and of why it might have failed. It makes for a bitty read, though an entertaining one. Davies’ doubts about alien intelligence do not prevent him from pondering civilisations that get their energy from black holes, or spread themselves in the form of viruses. As Davies freely admits, he has been a lifelong fan of science fiction, and would dearly love any of it to be true.

But he also appreciates that science fiction reflects human concerns, and the genre’s greatest era coincided with fascism, the cold war, and a belief in unlimited technological progress. In our current information age, speculation centres on the idea of extraterrestrial supercomputers whose hyper-consciousness is devoted to working out mathematical theorems, not building empires. In which case why would they bother talking to us? Moreover, says Davies, “I wonder how the information argument will play out in the 2090s, when the economy may revolve around something that hasn’t been imagined, let alone invented.” In our search for extraterrestrials what we are really looking for is ourselves.

Davies’ scepticism might seem odd given his professional involvement, and conspiracy theorists will doubtless regard this intriguing book as part of a global cover-up. In fact, says Davies, governments have shown little interest in aliens: in 1992 the US Congress began funding SETI as a way of marking the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World, but pulled the plug within a year. When an apparent space message was picked up by a British amateur astronomer in 1998, the BBC broke the story and generated worldwide media interest, while Whitehall ignored it. Finding aliens could take centuries – politicians have shorter-term concerns.

David Wootton, Galileo: Watcher of the Skies. J.L. Heilbron, Galileo. Scotland on Sunday, October 2010. Review by Andrew Crumey.

It is 400 years since Galileo Galilei pointed his little home-made telescope at the sky and saw for the first time the mountains of the Moon, phases of Venus and satellites of Jupiter, finding evidence of Copernicus’s theory that Earth was not after all the centre of the universe. The quatercentenary is marked by two excellent biographies, each a model of scholarship, though quite different in character. While both authors are historians of science, Wootton’s background is in history while Heilbron trained initially in physics. This is evident from first glance: Heilbron delves deeply into Galileo’s theoretical methods, offering diagrams and equations that might intimidate the general reader but will appeal to mathematically literate ones, while Wootton’s narrative is purely verbal, divided into bite-sized thematic chapters. But the contrast goes further: Heilbron’s style is the more flamboyant, Wootton’s the more readable. Heilbron’s book is expansive, digressive, occasionally self-indulgent; while Wootton’s is pacey, keen to emphasise original findings, and reads in parts like a conference paper. Heilbron’s is sure to be the definitive technical study for years to come; Wootton’s is aimed at a wider audience. Galileophiles will naturally wish to have both, and will not be disappointed with either.

One thing everybody knows about Pisan-born Galileo is that he stood at the top of the Leaning Tower and dropped two objects of differing weight which landed at the same time, thus disproving Aristotle and establishing a basic principle of modern physics. Wootton devotes a chapter to this supposed event, for which the only testimony comes from Galileo’s disciple Viviani, who also left us the story that by watching the swinging chandelier in the neighbouring cathedral Galileo realised that the rate of oscillation depended only on length, a fact that could be used to design a pendulum clock. Unfortunately, says Wootton, “Viviani’s story has long been dismissed as a myth”; the great chandelier was installed after Galileo left Pisa, hence the Leaning Tower story appears equally fishy. Heilbron adopts a differerent tone: “Iconoclasts have thrown doubt on this vignette although the tower’s tilt made it a perfect platform for the experiment.” Some have even doubted whether Galileo was much of an experimeter at all, instead relying, as Einstein later would, on “thought experiments”. Both biographers reject this, with Wootton making the important point that experiments in real life are never as simple as ones done in schoolrooms once the “correct” answer has been decided. As an historian, he appreciates how messy the whole thing is.

This messiness extends, of course, to life itself. Galileo never married but had a Venetian mistress, Marina Gamba, “about whom little is known”, according to Wootton. Heilbron speculates that she was a prostitute or, at best, an “honest courtesan” (the higher class who charged as much for conversation as for what Montaigne called “the entire business”). Heilbron suggests that Galileo acted as her mentor, annotating Petrarch poems for her, but admits “this is an exercise in imagination”. What is certain is that Galileo left Marina behind when he moved to Florence in 1610: his daughters were put in a convent. One of them, the saintly Maria Celeste, was to be his greatest emotional support in later years; her story has been told in Dava Sobel’s Galileo’s Daughter.

Pride, stubbornness and a degree of self-destructiveness are agreed as factors in Galileo’s progression from modestly successful academic (earning money mainly from private lessons, horoscopes, and the sale of a calculating device whose operation Heilbron describes in detail), to celebrity when he announced his telescopic discoveries in a pamphlet called The Starry Messenger, then notoriety in his run-in with the Inquisition, leading to his final years being spent under house arrest at a rented villa outside Florence.

Given that fame only came when Galileo was 45, both biographers are keen to explore the earlier part of his life. Heilbron emphasises the extent to which Galileo truly was a “Renaissance man”: his father Vincenzo Galilei was a musician, and Galileo played the lute to professional standard. He was also a poet: Heilbron quotes extended extracts from his verse and criticism, admitting that while modern commentators have found hi m excellent as a prose writer, his poetry largely stank. He painted too, and might have followed an artistic career if science had not beckoned.

Wootton highlights some curiosities of character. While his brother went far afield in search of fortune (ending up in Germany), Galileo’s wanderings never took him further than Rome. He enjoyed gardening but had as little interest in animals as in foreign lands. His best friend, Sagredo, gave him a small caged bird that had been brought all the way from India. Sagredo was to appear posthumously as a character in Galileo’s greatest work, the Dialogue On The Two World Systems, that was to get its author into so much trouble. In real life he was a sensitive soul, says Wootton, anxious that Galileo would take good care of the precious bird – but no word came back, not even of thanks, despite letters of enquiry. “Eventually he extracted news of it from Galileo: the cat had caught it.”

Heilbron’s Sagredo would have taken this in his stride: his interests included “Jesuit baiting, art collecting, and womanizing”; he ran a private brothel and invented a combination wine glass and thermometer so his favourite tipple could always be in optimal condition. Galileo did his share of carousing: Heilbron thinks it may have left him with syphilis, but Wootton insists his real interest was in the heavens.

Prior to 1610 he had probably made all his great discoveries concerning motion and mechanics, but would only expound his ideas in print towards the end of his life. It was when he heard of the recently invented telescope, and figured out how to make one of his own, that Galileo became a public figure. Quickly attacked for trying to pass it off as his own invention, he nevertheless brought it to greater refinement than anyone else had managed.

Was Galileo already a Copernican before looking through his telescope? Wootton cites a pamphlet by a writer calling himself Alimberto Mauri that came out in 1606, asserting that the Moon could be seen (with the naked eye) to have a rough surface. Wootton agrees with those who think Mauri was actually Galileo, already convinced the Moon was a world like ours. Heilbron is sceptical and considers the pamphlet unremarkable, though he quotes other early pseudonymous work by Galileo indicating radical thinking. Galileo maintained to the end that he was a devout Catholic: it wasn’t his fault if the Church had decided Copernicanism was heretical, when really it did not contradict the Bible at all (something the Vatican finally acknowledged in 1820). Wootton argues that Galileo was a materialist free-thinker from his early years, but that this did not necessarily contradict an unorthodox kind of Catholicism.

For the papal authorities the question hinged on whether one thought Copernicus’s theory to be a convenient mathematical model, equivalent to Ptolemy’s as a way of predicting planetary motion, or a statement of physical truth. If there was no way of distinguishing one theory from the other, then either could be used. But Galileo believed there was clinching evidence that showed the Earth moves: the tides. Knowing nothing about the Moon’s gravity, he thought tides to be caused by the turning of the Earth as it orbits the Sun. Heilbron carefully explains “this fateful and fallacious theory”, which Galileo may have borrowed from Paolo Sarpi, while Wootton omits the minutiae but claims there to be a grain of truth in it. In any case, to the end of his life Galileo would continue to refine the idea, even though it predicted a different tidal cycle from what is actually observed. Such stubbornness was too much for the Inquisition, whose patience ran out. In 1632 the ailing Galileo, 68 years old, was summoned to Rome, threatened with torture, and recanted.

What of that other famous story, when at the trial he supposedly muttered under his breath, “But still it [the Earth] moves”? Heilbron dismisses it in a sentence: it simply didn’t happen. Wootton tells us the story first appeared in 1757, “just at the time when the Catholic Church was beginning to acknowledge that further opposition to Copernicanism was futile”. Like the one about the Leaning Tower, it will continue to be told, no matter what scholars say.

Wootton reckons one of the best portrayals is Brecht’s Life of Galileo, “a play which, for all its fictions, deserves to be taken seriously as historical interpretation”. For Heilbron it is the science, not the life, that is ultimately of greatest importance: his book bears comparison with Pais’s classic study of Einstein, Subtle Is The Lord. Readers will have their own preference: I’m grateful to both authors for shedding new light on one of the greatest episodes in intellectual history.

Stuart Clark, The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth. Scotland on Sunday, March 2011. Review by Andrew Crumey.

The turbulent lives of astronomers Galileo and Kepler are examined in this well researched novel by an author who is himself an astrophysicist. The topic has been fictionalised many times before, for example in a play by Brecht, an opera by Hindemith, and in novels by John Banville, while non-fiction accounts have included two important new biographies of Galileo within the last six months alone.

Into this crowded field Clark brings what could be described as a period docudrama in book form. What it lacks in evocative prose or emotional depth, it makes up for with attention to detail. “Do you use an equant in your calculations?” Kepler asks a colleague. “Of course,” comes the reply, “and a deferent too.”

As well as scientific and political details, the narrative is well stocked with informative historical asides, such as when a cardinal is found eating a remarkable dish. “Is that ice cream?” the visitor asks, to which the cardinal replies, “One of the greatest inventions to have taken place in my lifetime.”

The authorial view seems often to be through a lens. “By the time Bellarmine reached the steps leading to one of the giant doors of the Roman College, the building filled his entire field of view.” The same is true of any building when you’re right in front of it: the mental perspective is that of a camera some distance behind Bellarmine’s head. Less often do we feel ourselves truly inside the minds of the numerous historical characters who fill the pages.

The central story is the clash between the new Sun-centred cosmology and the prevailing religious views. Galileo’s fall from grace is dramatised by means of a fictitious Vatican insider intent on burning the heretic and covering up what he knows to be true science. The real story is a lot more complex and has been debated by generations of scholars; Clark’s drastic simplification will mislead readers who assume every main character in the book to be authentic.

There are other lapses. Galileo’s telescope is opened and found to contain “a pair of convex lenses”. Clark corrects the error later: the eyepiece was concave, giving an upright view, immediately exciting at the time because of the military and strategic possibilities. Yet here is another oddity: in this novel no one thinks to use a telescope during the daytime. When Kepler first gets his hands on one, the only thing he wants to look at is Jupiter. That is what the plot demands, but a real person would not have waited until dark to test the miraculous device.

Power, patronage and censorship are the novel’s themes, so it is intriguing to see a logo on the cover proclaiming official endorsement: “Content approved by NMSI Enterprises/Science Museum. Licence no 0283”. The inquisitors of old have been replaced, it seems, by new, commercial guardians of truth.

Giovanni Vignale, The Beautiful Invisible. Scotland on Sunday, March 2011. Review by Andrew Crumey.

The Beautiful Invisible is subtitled “creativity, imagination and theoretical physics”, its blurb proclaiming, “the creations of theoretical physics are akin to the works of great writers and artists.” Yet this book says little of substance about aesthetics. Mildly peppered with quotations from literary authors, it is basically an undergraduate physics primer without the equations.

That is no bad thing: I would say that for anyone thinking of starting a physics degree, or wishing they had done one, this is an excellent book, with clear explanations of topics such as phase space, symmetry groups and spinors, by someone who is evidently a first-rate teacher. But as an exploration of creativity, imagination or beauty it barely scratches the surface.

In fact, Vignale says, he wanted to call it “Praise of the Abstract”. The colleague who came up with the catchier title clearly had a better sense of marketing. Abstraction, the effort of thinking for ourselves, is an economic no-no. Far better to have something that appeals to naive wonder, which is what the title and subtitle does, if not the book.

Vignale’s structure is that of a lecture course. After opening generalities we get down to business: Newtonian mechanics, thermodynamics, relativity, quantum theory, presented logically and sequentially (so no nodding off or skipping chapters, otherwise you’re sunk).

Considerations of art and beauty are brief and superficial: “Theoretical physics has all in common with poetry, except the lack of restraints. It is fiction constrained by fact.” Or, “In physics as in poetry you cannot talk about something without talking at the same time about everything else.”

Science has shown that we’re genetically almost identical to chimpanzees: the really interesting question is why we’re so different. To say that physics and poetry are imaginative, creative and fun is simply to bracket them alongside every other potentially fun activity in the world. Vignale calls Dirac’s electron equation “beautiful”, but when the same word can be applied just as easily to a Beethoven symphony, a formula one racing car or Nicole Kidman, it becomes no more than a commonplace expression of admiration.

Better, surely, for the physicist to try and show us an example of an ugly equation, an unimaginative theory, or at least try to say how physics differs from rather than resembles poetry. The aforementioned Dirac did this: he said the scientist wants to say something nobody knew before, in words that everyone can understand – and the poet does the opposite. More kindly, we might say that while science is the organisation of universal fact, art organises particular experience. According to Vignale, “the ultimate beauty of the Taj Mahal is that it may inspire new Taj Mahals.” That’s a theoretician’s view; the artist, however, is concerned not with generality but with uniqueness.

Dava Sobel, A More Perfect Heaven. Scotland on Sunday, August 2011. Review by Andrew Crumey.

Nicolaus Copernicus’ “On The Revolutions Of The Heavenly Spheres” moved the Earth from the centre of universe, sparked religious controversy, and gave us the modern meaning of the word “revolution” as political upheaval. Dava Sobel, whose previous books include Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, tells the Polish astronomer’s life story in an unusual way.

The central part of the book is a play script depicting the pivotal moment when Copernicus worked on his theory with a young assistant, Rheticus. This is flanked by a conventional biography that fills out the historical circumstances and sketches the scientific ideas.

Sobel says she originally intended the play to stand on its own, but was encouraged by her editor to embed it within a non-fiction context. “Readers who prefer a strictly historical account may of course skip over the play, though I suspect some will gravitate to the script—perhaps reading only that part.”

As a straight-through read it is an odd experience. In the first part, Sobel ably brings Copernicus to life from the scant surviving evidence. Attending a variety of universities, he studied poetry, rhetoric and medicine as well as astronomy, his failure to graduate being possibly because he couldn’t afford the examiners’ fees or compulsory celebration banquets. But he did qualify in church law at Ferrara, then returned to Poland to take up an administrative post with the Bishop of Varmia, his uncle.

Copernicus treated the sick, dealt with legal disputes, wrote a treatise on currency devaluation and proposed a system for standardising the size of bread loaves. His uncle’s death brought a new bishop who accused Copernicus of having an improper relationship with his housekeeper - and at this climactic moment we break to the play.

The demonic bishop becomes, in the play, a grumpy but not unlikeable old duffer; the housekeeper is Copernicus’ long-suffering common-law wife. Having already told us the historical facts, we are able to see what is speculation. The central story of the play, the composition of Copernicus’ book, is less dramatic than events narrated previously. The dialogue would probably work well enough on stage, but on the page the short exchanges are tiring to read. Sobel is right: readers preferring to know what actually happened will want to skip through this section pretty swiftly.

The final part returns to conventional biography and sees Copernicus’ book into print, placed in the author’s hands as he lay on his deathbed, seventy years old and paralysed by a stroke. Rheticus, we have learned in the play, was gay; he fled a death sentence and lived to old age, while the unfortunate housekeeper was banished and disappeared from history.

The sandwich construction doesn’t really come off; the different parts act against rather than with each other. But the book offers a lively account of an extraordinary life: readers can decide for themselves which telling they prefer.