| THE MATCHBOX THAT ATE A FORTY-TON TRUCK What Everyday Things Tell Us about the Universe Marcus Chown New York: Faber and Faber, 2009 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-19-86547-922-7 | ||||
| ISBN-10: 0-19-86547-322-4 | 269pp. | HC | $25.00 | |
| Pages 8-9: | "If only Binnig and Roherer had a time machine. They could have transported Democritus to their Zürich lab, stood him in front of their remarkable image [of atoms], and said: 'Look. You got it right.'" |
| And, after a few years of education, Democritus would have understood. (I'm being churlish; it's a wonderful and charitable thought.) |
| Page 15: | "This kind of chance is not the type familiar from the roll of a dice and the spin of a roulette wheel." |
| Die, Marcus! (And now I'm being snarky, as well as picking a nit. But the singular of "dice" is "die.") |
| Page 50: | "The electron, as the lightest known subatomic particle, tends to have the biggest associated wave." |
| Are not neutrinos lighter than electrons? |
| Page 62: | "Apologies for the gory detail on how electrons arrange themselves in atoms, but there is no other way." |
| Poorly phrased: S/B "no other way to tell it". |
| Page 68: | "In this picture,the height of the wave is simply the height of the tip of the hand above the zero level — in the case of the clock defined by the line joining nine o'clock and three o'clock." |
| Missing comma: S/B "clock, defined".) |
| Page 74: | "The net effect of interchanging the two soccer balls, therefore, has been to rotate one through a complete turn with respect to the other." |
| I think this S/B "a half turn". |
| Page 75: | "The manipulation of the spin of electrons by magnetic fields has also made it possible to store and retrieve vast amounts of data on the disk drives of computers and iPods." |
| Another nit: iPods have solid-state memory. |
| Page 77: | "Well, both electrons and quarks obey the Pauli exclusion principle, and this relies on all electrons being identical and all quarks being identical." |
| This seems inconsistent, but it is not. But the phrasing could be improved: "all quarks of each type are identical" or something similar. |
| Page 121: | "Its measurement of the speed of the crucial nuclear reactions in the CNO cycle were critical..." |
| Number: S/B "measurements". |
| Page 124: | "Beryllium-8 was unstable, but not so unstable that the triple-alpha process was impossible." |
| The instability of beryllium-8 is described as a problem in several places. But if it were stable, presumably the sequential growth of atoms from hydrogen to helium to lithium to beryllium to boron to carbon, and on upwards in atomic weight, could proceed unimpeded. Perhaps I am missing some subtlety of nuclear physics. |
| Page 139: | "As pointed out before, the most stable nucleus in nature is not iron-56 but nickel-56, which shares the same number of nuclear building blocks." |
| Chown spends the remainder of the paragraph describing how nickel-56 decays into iron-56, with a half-life of six days. Inconsistent. |
| Page 145: | "If the universe goes on forever, there are an infinite number of such shells." |
| Number: S/B "is". |
| Page 163: | "Simply by taking the mundane observation that we live in a largely quantum universe and applying their no-boundary condition..." |
| This is backwards: S/B "non-quantum". |
| Page 173: | "The problem is that eventually such 'Boltzmann brains', as they are known, will outnumber ordinary observers like you and me..." |
| Chown describes the Boltzmann brain as "a brain with a single giant eye." I sure hope they don't come from planet Arous! (Refer to The IMDB entry for this 1957 film.) |
| Page 174: | "...and it would take 10 million, laid end to end, to span the full stop at the end of this sentence." |
| Back on page 18, he said it would take "more than a million" atoms to span the head of a pin. I believe the head of the pin would be larger than a "full stop" (British for the period in punctuation.) |
| Page 191: | "The inflaton field decayed, leaving the vacuum as the normal vacuum we see around us today." |
| This word is repeated three more times down the page, and once on page 192. I presume it is a technical term for the inflation field, much as "gluon" refers to the "glue" that keeps three quarks locked in the form of a proton. The Glossary confirms this. |
| Page 196: | "Those bombs were tested in the desert of New Mexico..." |
| Chown knows there was only one bomb tested at Trinity. I assume he means something like "the design for those [plutonium] bombs was tested". |
| Page 201: | "As evidence for his idea, he points to computer simulations of the formation of our solar system, which invariably show about ten Earth-mass planets forming." |
| If true, this is a remarkable finding, of which I was unaware. Apparently these other Earths get thrown out. One to a customer?1 |
| Page 204: | "Alien artefacts — in the solar system or elsewhere — may also be unrecognisable." |
| This must be the British spelling of "artifacts". I "recognize" it as such.2 |
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