The bad news for general readers is that Simon Singh's Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe (Fourth Estate, $27.95) has charts and graphs. The good news is that Singh's nimble mind and lightness of touch give you the confidence that, in this case at least, your mind won't reel at the sight of them. He traces the development of the Big Bang model -- according to which "time and space emerged from a hot, dense, compact region between 10 and 20 billion years ago" -- all the way back to Anaximander and Xenophanes, pre-Socratic Greeks who may have believed strange things but broke with their forebears by basing their theories on observations rather than "supernatural devices or deities." And Singh carries the story forward to remind us that, although most scientists favor it today, the model has had a few detractors, among them the late astronomer and novelist Fred Hoyle.
Above all, Singh keeps track of the human stories behind the evolution of an idea. In discussing the contributions of nuclear physicist George Gamow, Singh not only sums him up as "a gregarious Ukrainian-born maverick with a penchant for hard drinking and card tricks"; he also inserts a photo of Gamow and his wife paddling a canoe in a failed effort to escape the Soviet Union via the Black Sea. Undaunted, the couple finagled a joint trip to an international conference -- and defected. Once ensconced at George Washington University, Gamow was able to pursue his unique (for the time) specialty: the physics of the Big Bang. Like Singh himself, Gamow could both do the science and make it comprehensible to lay readers, becoming famous for his fantasy Mr. Tompkins in Hollywood, "in which the speed of light was just a few kilometres per hour, so that a bicycle ride would reveal the weird effects of relativity. . . ."
-- Dennis Drabelle
