Review: Cosmic tales to tell your friends

30 July 1993

by Marcus Chown, Arrow, pp 171, £5.99 pbk

In 1965, small groups of scientists were messing about with entertaining but
what seemed like utterly pointless conjecture about the origins of the
Universe. Less than three decades later, physicists now casually talk about
what happened in the first squillionth of a second of time as if the whole
topic were more or less sorted out, final confirmation awaiting a few more
measurements, and perhaps a Higgs boson or two. This is largely because in
1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson built a peculiar-looking aerial
focused on a particular band of the microwave spectrum and almost
accidentally identified the remnant of the Big Bang, and because 20 years
later, on 23 April 1992, George Smoot and some NASA satellite readings
confirmed that the afterglow of the explosion had almost indiscernible
kinks in it.

And that just about wrapped up the argument. The existence, everywhere in
the sky, of radiation around the 3 Kelvin energy band, demonstrated that the
Universe had a beginning and the ripples, inconsistencies or hot and cold
spots in that radiation confirmed that the eruption hadn’t been uniform.
Because of those ripples, the nebula, galaxies, stars, planets and people
ultimately condensed. But then, we are here, so the ripples had to have been
there. The triumph was in finding them.

It was what journalists call ‘a good story’ but, as George Smoot told The
Guardian shortly afterwards, it would have been an even better story if they
hadn’t found them. Then the standard theory of the Universe would have had
to be torn up.


Marcus Chown’s book is a very good piece of story-telling, because it
patiently pursues not only the story’s main thread, but also the wrong
turnings, the exasperations and serendipities of the search for the relics
of creation. What made it difficult was that practically everything radiates
microwaves. Many know about the ‘white dielectric material’ or in other
words, pigeon shit, that confused Penzias and Wilson. We don’t usually hear
anything about the frustrations of trying to eliminate microwave radiation
from almost everything in the Universe – the ground, the Galaxy, the plastic
lenses on the telescopes, the water vapour in the heavens – to detect the
radiation of the cosmos itself. We hear about the winners – Penzias, Wilson,
Smoot – but most of the time we don’t hear very much about the dozens of
others who arrived at the answers prematurely, imprecisely, too diffidently,
too confidently or just too late, but who still played a powerful part in
the Big Answer. Almost everybody who matters (and one or two, such as this
reviewer, who don’t) gets a mention. Chown is very good on NASA news
management and the media circus that followed the announcement, a circus
cheerfully whipped on by all sorts of scientists, perhaps because
astronomers and cosmologists recognised that 23 April was one of those rare
occasions – Chernobyl was another – on which, suddenly and miraculously, the
public were prepared to try to catch up with science, and they should not
spoil the fun by pointing out that really it was only ‘not a bad’ story.

He also goes to some lengths to understand how Smoot of the Cosmic
Background Explorer team was converted into the ‘Indiana Jones of physics’.
He quotes one colleague as saying that Smoot said things to the press ‘in a
way he would not talk to a scientific audience’. Well, all I can say is,
bully for Smoot. Chown writes as if he were addressing his fellow humans, so
bully for him too. Only when you reduce the cosmic understanding of the past
25 years to something like vernacular English can you begin to appreciate
how cosmic it really is. Just think about it for a moment. Chown, in a rare
slip of the imagination, calls it ‘a long slog’. It seems to me that to go
in one generation from confused conjecture to a confident, split second by
split second, chronicle of Creation itself is a bit of a sprint. The book
belts along at a fair old pace as well.

Tim Radford is The Guardian’s science editor.