Human Universe

"Sort of. I think the book is much better than the TV series. The thing about Brian Cox (bless him) is that on TV, it all seems to boil down to the cliché of him standing on a mountain top looking aesthetically pleasing and going ‘Oh, isn’t it beautiful?’ or ‘Isn’t it just wonderful and fantastic?’ in his lovely Mancunian accent. Whereas the book itself is beautifully written. I like it because of its broad historical sweep, but also because he gives an up-to-date description of modern particle physics and cosmology so that it is “as simple as it could possibly be, but not simpler”, as the saying commonly attributed to Einstein goes. What I had to keep reading about 12 times over was his description of inflationary cosmology and what the Big Bang is, and how you could discuss the idea of what happened before the Big Bang, and the whole idea of a scalar field, which I still don’t think I fully understand. But his description is the most lucid I’ve ever read. It’s very beautiful. The whole book seems to rest on the juxtaposition of two notions. First, that the universe doesn’t seem to care one whit about the fact that we are here—in that sense, we are insignificant. Yet, at the same time, this is the only known place where beings like us exist; therefore, we are special. The book plays with that juxtaposition all the way through. It’s bang up-to-date, and almost soulful. I listen to it when I’m driving. “The universe doesn’t seem to care one whit about the fact that we are here—in that sense, we are insignificant” I only encountered it quite recently when I was at New Scientist Live . At one of the talks, I found myself voicing the frustration: Isn’t inflation a complete fudge? How are you going to get a homogenous isotropic universe? We just pretend that we have this exponential inflation in the first ten-to-the-minus-whatever seconds of the Big Bang. But why do we have such a thing? These poor people were trying to explain it to me and I was being rather difficult, perhaps because I still don’t understand it. They said that the best description was in the Human Universe , and told me to go out and get it. And they were absolutely right."