Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos

"It is popular science and journalism and history all rolled into one, and very nicely done. Dennis Overbye trailed real working astronomers for a couple of years. He went to the conferences and went up and down the corridors and buttonholed people. He also dug into the history. So it starts early in the 20th century and stops at around 1990. Yes, if you want to know how astronomy really works then this is a book you should read. It is warts and all. It has got competing personalities. For example, a lot of the book is about the so-called Hubble Wars. Hubble was the guy who found the universe was expanding. The number that tells us the rate of expansion is called Hubble’s Constant. But measuring that rate exactly is very, very hard. It took a number of decades to get it really right. Now we pretty much have it nailed so no one argues about it any more, but they certainly did then. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter From 1950 to 1990 there were two warring camps. One bunch of people was led by Allan Sandage, who said the Hubble Constant is 50km per second per megaparsec , plus or minus five. Another camp, led mostly by Gérard de Vaucouleurs, said it is 90, plus or minus five. So they didn’t even overlap. You were either in one camp or another or stood in the middle, going, “What the hell is going on, can’t we sort this out?” It took a long time to figure out what the problems were. The number we now believe is pretty much in between the two – about 73. But the leaders of both camps were both very determined personalities and they had young followers who learnt at their feet. But for me, science is not just obstinacy and fashion. It is driven by the passion to know the truth. The facts are out there and eventually it gets sorted out. This is the most extreme example in astronomy in the history of the 20th century of clashing personalities in the so-called Hubble Wars. There are always miniature versions of that going on."

"One of my favourite people in that book is actually Edwin Hubble. He is one of the most famous of the early cosmologists. He developed the Hubble Constant, which is a rather brilliant way of measuring the distance to faraway stars and galaxies. One of the things that struck me when I read this book was that, although it wasn’t just the first time that I had thought of Edwin Hubble as a human being, it showed what a really complicated human being he was. He saw himself as a man on a mission, a famous scientist who yet needed to uphold an image of being a really good guy. Dennis Overbye does a wonderful job of showing just how incredibly driven a lot of these scientists were to achieve scientific goals. And at the same time the book explores the impact of those goals on people around them. There is a great image in that book of how people would come to visit Hubble as he sat behind his desk and the guests would see Hubble working away really hard. And he would say to them, “I am so glad you are here, and I am giving you my uninterrupted attention”. And then he would sweep the papers off his desk on to the floor as a demonstration of that. When they had left he would be rushing around picking papers back up again! That image really stuck with me and is something Overbye explores throughout the book – the duality of the public presentation and the actual working scientist. He allows you to see that in a way that a lot of books don’t. Yes I do. I have spent my whole career trying to communicate science to others and I often say to people that science journalism really evolved in a vacuum. And that was the vacuum left by scientists themselves when the majority of them decided that they were above the common fray and that they didn’t need to share what they did with the general public. Instead they were going to share everything on this exalted plane. I think that science journalists became one of the main connections between scientists and the public – although in the evolving Internet age more scientists can communicate directly with the public. But the lack of engagement by scientists means that science writers like myself have gained an enormous amount of power because we were the ones telling the rest of the world what was important, how people should think about science and who matters in science. The smart ones are. I actually wrote a piece on my blog called, “The trouble with scientists”, which is all about this tension. I used the example of my father, a very mainstream scientist, who was absolutely horrified by my career choice. But he has come to accept the role of science journalists. And now I think you see a new generation of scientists who recognise that it is an artificial boundary. Science is not research conducted on another planet by aliens. It is done by human beings and everything about it is an attempt to understand the world around us. It defines so much of who we are, and that is why it is so important for it to be communicated properly to society."

"This book is utterly fascinating. It is a massively ambitious book. It is a description of the way cosmology progressed through the 20th century through the eyes and through the stories of the people who made the advances and worked in this subject. It almost reads like a soap opera and I mean that in a good way. I used to be an astronomer and I felt like I was completely back in that environment. Overbye caught what happened in astronomy, the way that advances are made, the way that feuds develop and how problems are solved. When you read the history of science you sometimes get the impression that it is a series of logical progressions and that astronomers are a directed force. But no, they are more like drunks lurching around. They are quarrelling about our understanding of the universe in general. One of the running themes of the book is about the scale of the universe. In the late 1920s it was discovered that the whole universe is expanding. I am not talking about the stars that we see in the night sky but the isolated collections of stars. These are the galaxies that are hugely, widely separated in space. The space between them is just expanding. It is just something that the universe does. Exactly, and it is almost like a matter of life and death to them. Is the universe the long scale universe or the short scale universe? That is the irony of the whole thing. By the time you have done as precise measurements as you can then it actually turns out to be virtually the average of the two together. Interestingly, now we have our own problems with trying to go further and trying to understand more. It looks more complicated than perhaps we thought it was 15 years ago."