Andrew Crumey
Fine Figures
The Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Maths Reveals Nature’s Deepest Secrets
By Graham Farmelo
Faber & Faber 319pp £20 order from our bookshop
Nima Arkani-Hamed, a theoretical physicist born in Houston to Iranian parents and now based at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, was trying to name a new concept when he met the novelist Ian McEwan in London’s Science Museum. McEwan suggested ‘the aleph’; Arkani-Hamed instead went for ‘amplituhedron’. That ungainly mouthful serves as the climax to Graham Farmelo’s rich survey of the growing connections between pure mathematics and fundamental physics. Farmelo is himself a physicist, with a particular interest in the subject’s aesthetic dimension. He weighs up the claim, often made, that good physics has to be beautiful and that if it’s beautiful it has to be true. What does that have to do with the ampli-whatsit? We’ll come to that.
The book begins with a brisk gallop through early attempts to quantify the universe, quickly reaching the 19th-century Scottish genius James Clerk Maxwell. Underrated in his lifetime, Maxwell posthumously showed Einstein the way to relativity through his theory of electromagnetism. Among Maxwell’s other endeavours was a little paper about contour
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Delighted to make my debut in @Lit_Review with a review of Philip Short's heavyweight new bio, Putin: His Life and Times
(Yes, it's behind a paywall, but newspapers and magazines need to earn money too...)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/vlad-the-invader
'As we examined more and more data from the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters ... we were amazed to find that there is almost never a case for permanently moving people out of the contaminated area after a big nuclear accident.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying
'This problem has dogged Labour’s efforts to become the "natural party of government", a sobriquet which the Conservatives have acquired over decades, despite their far less compelling record of achievement.'
Charles Clarke on Labour's civil wars.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/comrade-versus-comrade