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The Extravagant Universe
The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Cosmos by Robert P. Kirshner Princeton Univ. Press, 2004 312 pp. $19.95, paper 
Faster Than the Speed of Light
Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation by Joao Magueijo Perseus, 2003 288 pp. $26 |
How do scientists take abstract research findings that require well over a decade of training to understand and turn them into appealing books for a wider audience? A gift for vivid explanation is required, but to keep the average nonspecialist turning the pages, authors must also tell engaging stories. In principle, these stories might take shape within any number of genres, but in practice by far the most common is mystery: the quest for a solution to a puzzle, a quest that draws out and develops the character of the investigators, witnesses, and suspects. The author's task is to make the puzzle and its solution exciting, while also making the surrounding human drama compelling.
Two recent books, both dealing with questions of cosmic significance, start with first-rate scientific material and spin it into stories that reveal much about the human drama behind the scientific process. In The Extravagant Universe, Robert P. Kirshner tells the story of the discovery that the universe consists not only of the matter and energy that we can perceive through our senses and scientific instruments, but also of a mysterious "dark energy" and "dark matter" that we cannot currently observe. As Kirshner writes, "The universe we see is controlled by the universe we do not see: dark matter that is not like the neutrons and protons that make up our bodies, and an enigmatic dark energy that shows itself in the runaway expansion of the universe."
In Faster than the Speed of Light, Joao Magueijo describes his efforts to answer some of the unresolved questions posed by Big Bang cosmology, the idea that the universe began in a primordial explosion from a single point. Although Big Bang cosmology is now well established, it does not explain exactly how that explosion played out in the opening seconds, before the earliest time that can be directly observed by astronomers. The core of Magueijo's idea is that the speed of light may have been faster in the early universe than it is now, thereby solving some of the "Big Bang riddles" (including one related to dark energy).
The advantage of direct observation, of course, is that it has an empirical solidity that theory lacks. The "dark energy" discoveries of Kirshner and his colleagues are based on astronomical measurements of the rate of expansion of the universe. Their measurements have been widely accepted and agree with the findings of another team of astronomers. The journal Science named the work of both teams the "Breakthrough of the Year" in 1998. Consequently, the scientific plot of Extravagant Universe has the satisfying quality of a well-crafted whodunit: the mystery presented at the beginning of the book is solved (admittedly opening up more questions in the process). Magueijo is a theoretical physicist, so his work is in the realm of ideas and mathematics, and his theory, as indicated by the title of his book, is still a "speculation," not yet validated by experiments or observations. As the constancy of the speed of light is a pillar of Einstein's theory of general relativity, Magueijo's proposal is considered unlikely by many of his peers. Thus the second half of his book describes not only how his ideas unfold but also his struggle to have those ideas taken seriously by the rest of the scientific community, a goal which he accomplishes only in part.
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