Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe.(Review)

Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe, by Martin Rees, Phoenix, 2000, $22.95.

REVOLUTIONARY ADVANCES are now being made in science, particularly in fundamental physics and cosmology (two disciplines that are increasingly growing together), and in genetics and evolutionary theory (where there is also an increasing interpenetration). No educated person, one might think, should be indifferent to these advances. With the first pair, we seem for the first time to be getting some grip on what the world as a whole, or at least the space-time world as a whole, is really like. With the second pair, we seem to be getting some grip on what we ourselves, human beings, who are a tiny part of this world, are really like. Our view of the macrocosm and the microcosm seems to be coming into focus, and the results are in both cases rather astonishing. That ought to engage the attention of thinking persons.

But there is a great difficulty, of course, for those of us who are not part of these great enterprises of discovery. To understand fully what is going on requires a great deal of learning and training extending over years. One has to assimilate difficult material and difficult techniques, both involving, quite centrally, a great deal of sophisticated mathematics. Lacking all this, how can we survey these enterprises from the outside?

There is a partial remedy for this situation. In recent years a whole cohort of writers have set up as middle-persons. To those who are interested, but are untrained, they bring the news from the front. They try to explain very difficult matters in the clearest and most illuminating language that they can find. We can be profoundly grateful for this attempt to bridge the gap between what C.P. Snow called, rightly or wrongly, "the two cultures".

Sometimes these intermediaries are the very same persons as those who are participating in the amazing advances. The names of Sir Arthur Eddington, relatively speaking a pioneer, and the great physicist Richard Feynman, come to mind. The author of the present book, Sir Martin Rees, is of this distinguished company. He is Astronomer Royal. He has written a superb book, quite brief and very clear, but a book which conveys admirably, along with much information, the intense intellectual excitement of the present situation in cosmology.

He presents us with an intriguing situation. We now have a rather clear picture of the evolution of our universe from the point-like event of the "big bang" (Fred Hoyle's disparagingly intended term for the postulated event for which the evidence is now rather overwhelming); to a steady expansion of the universe--the whole thing, not just its matter--leading in time to the formation of the galaxies and their stars, together with the planets that revolve around many of these stars; to the evolution of life on planet Earth; and finally, after a considerable amount of time, to the emergence of ourselves. All sorts of fine-tuning of the account may still be necessary, but the main outlines seem clear.

But there are still two gaps. First there is an incredibly short time interval--many orders of magnitude shorter than a second--at the very beginning of the big bang. There our current physics fails us. Second is the very beginning of life on Earth. (One might expect--though some religious persons might hope otherwise--that this second gap will be closed by the discovery of some mechanism or mechanisms that do not clash with our current physics and organic chemistry.) It may be added, finally, that where the universe is now going in the long run is rather less clear.