Why Does the World Exist?
One Man’s Quest for the Big Answer
by Jim Holt
Published by Profile Books www.profilebooks.com

Why is there something rather than nothing? Such an unassuming little question from the outside but once opened, it expands, Tardis-like, into a vast maze of speculation and hypothesis at – or arguably, beyond – the cutting edge of physics and philosophy.

After a brief history of nothing (a surprisingly recent concept) Holt – philosopher and essayist for the New York Times – gives us a concise and highly readable tour from Aristotle through Sartre, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Wittgenstein et al. Fortunately Holt doesn’t just stick to people most of us know best as lyrics from a Python song. He brings us up to date with the latest physics and philosophy and hops between Paris, New York and Oxford interviewing some of our leading scientists, philosophers & writers. Along the way Holt reveals his personal flirtation with ‘nothingness’ as both his dog and his mother died from cancer while he researched the book (hint – if you’ve ever lost a parent or a pet don’t read these bits on the train). In just 279 pages Holt does an excellent job covering all the bases in sufficient detail for the reader to get at least the gist of the (sometimes quite obtuse) arguments put forth.

So; where do the world’s big thinkers stand on the big question?

On the physics front there’s cosmology’s heavy hitter, Stephen Hawking with quantum fluctuations in the vacuum expanding to produce the observable Universe. Time starts at the Big Bang so ‘before’ is a meaningless concept and negative gravitational force balances out positive expansion giving the Universe a net energy balance of zero.

So; overall there is nothing, it’s just unevenly distributed.

This doesn’t sit well with all physicists who suggest the laws of quantum mechanics themselves need explaining. Perhaps multiple universes with every possible law are the answer? Holt outlines multiple ‘Multiverse’ theories though, with virtually no actual science to back them up, none are really convincing

With this big a question, mysticism can pop up where you’d least expect it. Roger Penrose, perhaps the world’s foremost mathematical physicist expounds his view that the Universe is a reflection of a literal ‘infinite realm’ of ‘perfect mathematical forms’. A position shared, according to Holt, by two thirds of mathematicians. It’s enough to give any Scientific Humanist a crisis of faith.

OK, the ship of science seems to be floundering on the rocks a bit here. How do we fare cast on the wild and wooly shores of philosophy?

Unsurprisingly, God gets a lot of the credit (or blame). From Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God that convince the young Bertrand Russell we move to modern day theologian Richard Swinburne, who claims to have used probability theory to ‘prove’ the logical existence of the Biblical God. His adversary, Adolph Grunbaum – greatest living philosopher of science according to Holt – is utterly dismissive of such reasoning; “What could be more commonplace than that something or other does exist?”

John Leslie, physicist turned priest, argues for the ethical necessity of the world and Derek Parfit, ‘Prize Fellow’ at All Souls, proposes a system of ‘Selectors’ while being “appalled at some of the crazy views contemporary philosophers argue for”.

Well. Quite.

It’s possible that somewhere in these pages, between God and quantum foam, you might find an answer that satisfies. Holt does, though I suspect his is an answer only a philosophy major could love. My money is on Martin Amis. When asked why is there something rather than nothing he responded “I’d say we’re at least five Einsteins away from answering that question”.

Optimist.

How Pleasure Works
Why we like what we like
by Paul Bloom. Published by Vintage Books www.vintage-books.co.uk

The first thing you want to do with a book like this is turn to the chapter on sex (it’s OK, you can admit it, we’re all friends here). Unfortunately, with “How Pleasure Works” you are going to be disappointed as there isn’t one. Despite the slightly suggestive title and cover, the book is mostly devoid of the more salacious aspects of pleasure. Mostly – a brief interview with a masochist in the dungeon of an… inventive… dominatrix being the only real exception. No, the simple pleasures of sex, food and sleep are not the subject of Mr Bloom’s book. Rather, he asks why we get more pleasure from a vintage than a table wine, why a genuine Vermeer is priceless while an identical copy is worthless and why anyone would pay forty thousand dollars for John F. Kennedy’s tape measure.

There are the obvious pleasures of course – we like what we learn to like. If we first taste ice cream during a wonderful summer holiday then forever after ice cream doesn’t just taste of ice cream, it tastes of summer.

There’s fiction too. At a basic level our brains can’t tell imagination from real life. Your TV friends provide you with the same emotional benefits as flesh and blood plus are better looking and funnier – life with the dull bits left out. We can also enjoy fiction as ‘reality-lite’ where the real thing is too dangerous or expensive (Bond is bullet-proof, you aren’t) or to let our imagination ‘scout ahead’. You learn about death from Dumbledore and CPR from ER.

Bloom explores a variety of pleasure theories, but his main argument is the enjoyment of the imperceptible, for, to Bloom, we are all “Essentialists’.

Élan, chi, mana – the essential, invisible essence that makes things and people what they are is a constant in every culture. From the forest spirits of Amazon tribes to the footballer’s lucky shirt, Essentialism is built into the human psyche. Rarely explicitly acknowledged in modern society, we still all want more of it. A primitive tribesman may have to eat the heart of his foe to gain his strength but we can put an eBay bid on the cast-offs of the great and the good to capture some tiny scrap of their intangible spirit. From Kennedy’s tape measure to blank paper off Freud’s desk, Essentialism is everywhere (though apparently it’s not machine washable – auctions of celebrity clothes make more money if the items haven’t been cleaned). And when it comes to acquiring essence, we want the ‘real thing’ or at least what we think is the real thing.

We’ve all laughed at wine snobs who can’t tell vintage from plonk in expensive bottles but we’re no different. Most people tested couldn’t tell páte from garnished dog food. It’s not just snobbery either. Brain scans indicate that we really do enjoy things more if we expect to enjoy them. No more so it would seem than in the field of art.

Much thicker books than this have been written on ‘what is art’ but Bloom makes a good case for it being all in the eye of the beholder. From masterpiece Vermeers that overnight become crude and ugly when revealed as fakes to a slate plinth displayed at the Royal Academy instead of the bust it was meant to support to ignored violin virtuosos busking on the underground – art is only great when we expect it to be.

So where then does pleasure arise? Is it just an evolutionary extravagance? A ridiculous ‘Peacock’s tail’ side effect of survival behaviors? Or is it a manifestation of an aching need for some ill defined hidden depths to existence – an unacknowledged search for the numinous? I don’t know at the end that I was wholly convinced by Bloom’s arguments. All I can tell you is that sometimes, just sometimes, an ice cream can be a whole summer.

Time Warped
Unlocking the mysteries of time perception
by Claudia Hammond. Published by Canongate www.canongate.tv

Time flies like an arrow (and, of course, fruit flys like a banana). But why? The ‘time flies’ that is, not the fruit flys (who doesn’t like a banana?).

Why do our childhood summers stretch for years while our middle-age Christmases seem an almost monthly occurrence? Why does time speed up as we get older or – as in the case of Chuck Berry (not that Chuck Berry) – why does it slow down when the wings fall off your glider at 2,000 feet?

Hammond is a psychology lecturer, broadcaster and synaesthete (that is, she see letters as colours) and in ‘Time Warped’ she mixes research, personal anecdote and original surveys done on her radio show to investigate that deceptively simple and surprisingly mutable concept we refer to as ‘time’.

We discover that, rather unfairly, misery and fear seem to stretch time. Telling research subjects they were rejected as partners by the rest of their group or throwing them (more or less safely) off tall buildings slowed their perception of time. At least one study suggests that people suffering from depression experience time as flowing half as fast as for non depressed people. It’s even been suggested that a simple ‘time perception’ test could help assess suicide risk.

How we perceive time seems a bit of mystery though. We have no ‘central clock’ in our brains ticking through minutes or hours yet we can perform tasks that take tiny fractions of a second and estimate (with a little work) the year of origin of every memory we hold. There are a number of competiting theories of time perception in the brain and Hammond give an overview of several. None are wholly satisfactory and it would seem our time sense is really a combination of several different mental counting mechanisms. Clever as they are, these can lead us astray either through sickness, accident of birth or, as one dedicated researcher discovered, by living underground for three months. Even how we visualize time can be surprisingly idiosyncratic – do you see time as a clock, a river, a line (straight or jagged) or, if you experience synesthesia like Hammond, are all your Mondays red?

The language of time can be tricky too. Answer quickly: next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days. What day is the meeting now?

You hesitated didn’t you? Not because you didn’t have an intuitive answer but because you knew your intuitive answer wouldn’t be shared by others. ‘Monday’ or ‘Friday’ depends on whether you subconsciously see yourself moving through time or time flowing towards you. Perhaps you find that example a little too pat and that is a flaw in ‘Time Warped’ as Hammond’s pop science might have too much ‘pop’ for some. But there’s intriguing stuff here too. There’s the difference between our prospective and retrospective systems for estimating time (or why your friend’s children seem go from toddlers to teenagers in a couple of years), the ‘Reminiscence Bump’ (or why summers don’t last as long) and our unwarranted optimism in estimating the future (or putting off projects ‘till we have more time’ – something I’ve certainly experienced – you’re reading it)

As for Mr. Berry falling from the sky? You’ll be glad to hear he activated his reserve parachute just in time and survived with only minor injuries. His unexpected experiment in time dilation made his 10 second freefall ‘last forever’.

Don’t try this one at home.

You Can Beat Your Brain
How to make better decisions and be less dumb
by David McRaney.
Published by Oneworld www.oneworld-publications.com

Before we go any further, I’d like you to take a quick look in a mirror. What did you see? A rational, insightful person with a keen awareness and nuanced understanding of people and the world around you I’ll bet. Probably more perceptive than most if you’re being honest eh? Wellll… As it turns out, not so much. Over the last few decades psychology and neuroscience have discovered that most of the time what we’re mostly good at is fooling ourselves.

Our minds are a bit like our smartphones – full of apps to help us get through our day. Most of our brain apps though were evolved when our ancestors were tree shrews and the rest when they were barely more than planes apes starting to walk upright. Mostly they are tricks to make a complex, fuzzy world seem clear and simple so you can make quick decisions and stay out of predator’s mouths’ long enough to reproduce. Unfortunately there haven’t been any updates in the last 100,000 years and certainly nothing to help us cope with fast cars or facebook friendships.

“Know Thyself” said Plato and David McRaney wants to help us with that. In “You Can Beat Your Brain” he’s assembled 17 of our brain’s blind spots to show us where our obsolete survival apps let us down in the modern world. If you know you have a bad memory you can leave Postits by the phone. If you know how your rationality goes astray you can – hopefully – factor that in when you need to make decisions and stop, as McRaney so eloquently puts it, from falling into a big hole of stupid.

For example there’s the Self-Enhancement bias that keeps you upbeat in a world that mostly wants to eat you. The Sunk Cost Fallacy tells you why you throw good money after bad. Deindividuation explains why crowds shout ‘jump’ at people on ledges (some days it’s had to be a humanist – if you ever find yourself in this situation can you do me a favor and try to get a chant of ‘go back’ going? Thanks). The Misattribution of Arousal is why rollercoasters are a good first date. The Backfire Effect demonstrates you can never win an argument on the Internet and Asymmetric Insight shows that you don’t know your friends or opponents as well as you think you do. It’s not all bad news though, the Benjamin Franklin Effect shows you how to use other people’s faulty brain apps to make friends out of enemies.

Most of these cogitative biases have been covered elsewhere in greater depth. Readers of Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” will recognize some elements including the (flawed) example of Linda the feminist bank teller in the chapter on Common Belief Fallacy for example. Rarely though have so many of the mind’s mistakes, short-cuts and prejudices been brought together in so readable a format. While underlining interesting bits in the introduction (yes, I write in books, try and move past it) I realised I was underlining almost every second sentence. You shouldn’t take this to indicate that I am a profligate underliner but rather that even the introduction is chock full of interesting insights. If you don’t have time for the whole 274 pages you can try this bit out on Amazon for free. Be warned though – once you do, you will be clicking ‘purchase’.

The one problem with ‘You Can Beat Your Brain” is that it is itself one of the oversimplifications it warns us about. These are not scientific papers. There are no error bars. The chapters are popularised accounts of what are, in many cases, already popularised descriptions where irregularities and uncertainties have been smoothed over for brevity and impact. Bare in mind that things are usually more complicated than they seem even when you’ve allowed for the fact they’re more complicated than they seem and just maybe we can beat our brains.

The Norm Chronicles
Stories and Numbers about Danger
by Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter
Published by Profile Books www.profilebooks.com

Wow! What are the chances of that? Well, according to Blastland and Spiegelhalter, for any given ‘that’, the chances are that you don’t know what the chances are.

In a rather unusual move the authors have put their conclusions in the introduction so I don’t feel I’m being too spoilery sharing them here; for people, probability doesn’t exist. They spend the rest of the book examining just why that is and what we may be missing.

Now, a book on statistics might sound a little dry. Even the authors suggest ‘dipping’ but they do themselves something of a disservice as their eminently readable style is breezy with a touch of black humor and the content is intriguing. Putting a human face on the numbers are three characters: devil-may-care Kelvin, paranoid Pru and Norm, our exactly average hero who always calculates the odds. We follow the friends from birth to death as each chapter opens with a brief vignette illustrating a different period in their lives and the risks they (and we) face in everything from crime to drugs to lifestyle to unemployment etc.

While I can’t argue with Blastland and Spiegelhalter academic qualifications (Eng. Lit radio producer and statistician – self proclaimed “so geeky our anoraks have two hoods”) their mastery of narrative structure leaves a bit to be desired. While a couple of these vignettes are clever, most are awkward if not downright confusing and really could have benefited from a firmer editing hand.

Along with our trio we’re also introduced to the standard ‘Micromort’ – a one-in-a-million chance of death and a ‘Microlife’ – one of a million half hour segments that comprise (roughly) the average life expectancy.

So you run a 1 Micromort risk per 7,500 miles of commercial flying, 7 per marathon run and a whopping 1,020 per year if you are a commercial fisherman. On the other hand 20 minutes of moderate exercise gains you 2.2 Microlives and that first drink of the day gains you 1.1 (though subsequent drinks loose you .7 each). The authors don’t take their estimates too seriously and neither should you but both are handy common denominators to roughly estimate disparate risks and benefits.

Of course there are lies, damned lies and… well, you get the picture and The Norm Chronicles are worth buying just for the insights into how the media manipulate statistics for impact. “Daily Fry-Up increases pancreatic cancer risk by 20%” was a Daily Express headline. Scary enough to put you off sausages for life. Slightly less scary when you know that five people in 400 develop pancreatic cancer anyway in their lifetimes so a 20% risk means one extra person in the 400 will succumb. A lifetime of sausages will change your chance of being just fine from 396/400 to 395/400. Not much of a headline. As the authors point out – it’s all in the framing.

You can’t blame the media too much though; people are designed to put more weight on anecdote then evidence. We care more about what happens to the 5% than what doesn’t happen to the 95%. No news is, after all, no news but it means we vastly overestimate the occurrence of conspicuous risks and ignore mundane threats. Asthma kills many more people than tornadoes, murderers or plane crashes but it doesn’t make good TV.

So, next time you’re walking out of the corner shop with your lottery ticket in hand and wondering what you’d do with the jackpot don’t get too excited. You’re more likely to die before the draw takes place than win it.

It could be you – but it probably won’t be.

Farewell to Reality
How Fairytale Physics Betrays the Search for Scientific Truth
by Jim Baggott. Published by Constable www.constablerobinson.com

“Can you design an experiment to prove the existence of angels?” asked a friend of mine during a recent theological discussion. ‘No’ is the obvious answer but then I started thinking about it a bit more. I have no working hypothesis of the mechanisms of angels but I could spend a few decades imagining how they might work if they did exist. And then… Well then I’d be in the same position Jim Baggott thinks physicists are with String Theory.

“Farewell to Reality” is broken into two sections and while it covers some of the same ground as Lee Smolin’s “The Trouble with Physics” it does so without Smolin’s faint air of ‘damn-string-theorists-get-all-the-best-jobs’ petulance. The first section is an overview of current physics’ ‘Standard Model’ with a crash course in relativity (the description of time dilation is especially clear and snappy), frame dragging, the difference between fermions and bosons, Quarks, Casmir force etc. Now, you could stack physics books floor to ceiling and still just be scratching the surface of the subject but if it has anything to do with physics or cosmology, Baggott gives it at least a name-check here. The problem with the Standard Model is that while it’s solid as far as it goes, it doesn’t go far enough. It says nothing about why the particles and forces have the masses and energies they do and it’s silent on the Dark Matter and Dark Energy that comprise 96% of the Universe. The Standard Model tells us almost everything about almost nothing.

In the second part we enter the wilder realms of physics speculation – the ‘here be dragons’ territory that scientists have quested into looking for new physics beyond the Standard Model. Over here we have Branes, there Calabi-Yau manifolds, beyond them holographic reality and multiple universes and, of course, Supersymmetry with its Squarks, Higgsionos and Winos (don’t laugh, you’re paying for this) along with the theory it underpins known as String Theory.

Ever since Leonard Susskind’s unloved, left field idea about vibrating strings burst from obscurity to the theory du jour in the 80’s, String Theorists have been elaborating the mathematics behind the basic idea. So much so in fact that there are 10 to the power of 500 possible interpretations. Edward Witten (you may not have heard of him but a lot of the smartest people on the planet think he’s the smartest person on the planet) proposed ‘M Theory’ to corral all the various String Theories under one mathematical roof. Well, not so much a theory really as a bunch of suggestions as to what such a theory should contain. Really just speculation that such a theory could exist.

For Baggott, this is the main problem. All of these exciting, headline grabbing ideas are really just that; speculation based on assumptions based on unproven mathematics with almost no experimental or observational evidence. While physicists love String Theory for its beauty, elegance and ‘tightness’, it has not managed to produce a single prediction in 30 years. There’s no ‘E=MC2’ eureka moments here. “This all seems rather mad” says Baggott at one point (which I couldn’t help but hear in Father Dougal’s voice) but so what? Why the hate?

Richard Feynman defined the process of science as ‘guess-predict-observe’. But if this is what science is then String Theory isn’t science – there’s no ‘predict’ and certainly no ‘observe’. Some of the “lost generation” of physicists who’ve spend a career only on String Theory are pushing for a new interpretation; if what they do isn’t science, then re-define science as what they do. The problem with that, as Baggott stresses, is that last step, the litmus test of checking your ideas against reality, is the only thing that stands in the way of humanity’s endless capacity to fool ourselves. Without that (however unpalatable) step there’s nothing to separate science from pseudo-science, theory from theology or physics from fairytale.

The Elements of Eloquence
How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
by Mark Forsyth. Published by Icon Books  www.iconbooks.net

“Shakespeare was not a genius” is a bold and attention-grabbing opening line (so much so I’m stealing it here). Mark Forsyth would have us believe he was merely a jobbing writer who learned the tricks of his trade and got better with practice. With ‘The Elements of Eloquence’ he wants to show us those recipes for forging a great line. The same sort of tricks that Shakespeare would have learned at school and certainly put into practiced in his writing have long since disappeared from any modern curriculum. But even if you never write a word, ‘Elements…” aims to give you an under-the-hood look at the working of the language at its best and show you just why a particular quote or poem or lyric is so powerful and memorable.

This is a book that champions style over substance – not what is said but how it’s said. Everybody remembers “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” but who remembers “Romans, countrymen and lovers!” (Brutus’ speech)? And as Forsyth points out, saying “Full fathom five thy father lies” makes you a great poet while “Your father’s body is 29 feet down” just makes you a coast guard delivering bad news.

I should mention here that Forsyth has something of a cavalier attitude to definitions. Serious English scholars may disagree with the exact meanings given for some of the elements in the book. If you are one of those, Forsyth makes it quite clear that he will be happy never to hear from you. Really. Quite clear. It involves brambles and sticking your objection… Well, let’s just say; quite clear.

Each ‘element’ gets a little chapter of it’s own. You’re doubtless familiar with ‘alliteration’ – a style beloved of newspaper headline writers. You probably already know ‘hyperbole’ and ‘rhetorical questions’. You might even be willing to have a bash at ‘assonance’. However, by the time you reach ‘Polypoton’, ‘diacope’ or ‘epizeuxis’ you would doubtless, like me, be thoroughly lost were it not for Forsyth’s little guide.

Most of the chapters start out with a few samples of the element illustrated quite cleverly in the opening paragraph before heading into the source of the style (the Romans have a lot to answer for) and its use in everything from classic poetry to pop songs. How you place your nouns and verbs, the rhythm of words, all the tricks and rhythms used to make the dull phrase sing are examined. And the book itself sings. Though the subject matter conjures up grey memories of ghastly dull school lectures and the book cover is not prepossessing, Forsyth – unsurprisingly – really knows how to turn a phrase. ‘Elements of Eloquence’ is definitely in the ‘laughing-out-loud-in-the-bookstore’ category.

Aside from being entertaining in its own right and a must-have for lovers of language, this book will do two things for you. One: it will help inoculate you against the sway of empty rhetoric and two: if you do have something worthwhile to say, it will help you say it well.

The Heretics
Adventures with the Enemies of Science
by Will Storr. Published by Picador www.picador.com

“Pan narrans” – the storytelling ape, Terry Pratchett’s epithet for Homo Sapiens, is the phrase that stuck in my mind when reading ‘Heritics’. At heart, the book is about stories. Not the Hollywood blockbuster or novel or campfire tale sort. Rather, it’s the stories we tell about how we want people to think of us. It’s the stories we tell about how we want to think of ourselves.

Storr isn’t a professional skeptic or science writer (his last book was about ghost hunters) but he is a journalist interested in what makes people tick. Particularly, people with viewpoints that put them at the outskirts of society. Why do they believe – sometimes in spite of overwhelming evidence and at great personal cost – what they believe? How do they cast themselves as the heroes of their personal stories?

He is candid about his own story. His failures as a boyfriend, dropping out of college, shoplifting, his years on a psychiatrist’s couch trying to deal with his own sense of – as he describes it – ‘wrongness‘. It’s a disquieting set of insights for the reader. Not at all what we expect of our dispassionate purveyors of popular science. A little as if David Attenborough took five minutes in the middle of a lecture on the lifestyle of the Meerkat to enlighten us on his relationship problems. But Storr uses this – eventually- endearing vulnerability as a mental skeleton key to get us inside the world of the heretics, these people for whom evidence seems irrelevant and against who’s beliefs ‘facts don’t work’.

Some of the book is interviews with psychics and scientists, past life therapists and psychologists – the standard ‘talking head’ approach to science reporting. This, in itself, is fascinating reading. We discover the ‘makes sense stopping rule’ where the we look for evidence in a debate only until we find enough to confirm a previously existing bias then stop, satisfied that we have examined all the evidence. Or ‘cognitive dissonance’, where the brain works overtime to smooth out conflicts between what we want to believe and what the facts tell us, even giving us a little neurochemical pleasure ‘kick’ when we’ve satisfactorily rationalised away conflicting information so that we can, Alice-like, believe six (or more) impossible things before breakfast.

The greatest insights come though when Storr inserts himself into these ‘heretical’ belief systems. He sits with a bickering UFO group in a forest at midnight trying to psychically contact aliens. He joins with thousands of followers of Swami Ramdev in Alexandra Palace to practice his yogic breathing exercises to cure (almost) all ills. He goes undercover (at some personal risk) with a group of fascists on a tour of concentration camps led by Holocaust denier David Irving. He joins a skeptics group and gently grills that doyen of rationalists, James Randi.

Despite the delving, Storr doesn’t completely expose the core of what drives these people but we get definite glimpses. Brief clearings in the clouds of mutual incomprehension that allow us to almost understand some of their stories. “How free is a mind that never travels an inch” ask Storr and by the end of ‘Heritics’ I felt that I traveled at least a little way in understanding the ‘enemies of science’. Perhaps Irving isn’t quite the villain. Perhaps Randi isn’t quite the hero. Perhaps it just depends on which story you choose.

Our Future Earth (also published as Deep Future)
How the planet will change in the next 100,000 years
by Curt Stager. Published by Duckworth Overlook www.ducknet.co.uk

The first thing I thought when I saw this book with it’s garish orange cover with penguin & palm tree motif so reminiscent of ’70’s eco-doom genre was ‘they can’t get the weather for next Tuesday right never mind predict 100,000 years of climate change!’.

However, I’m a sucker for deep futures so I picked it up anyway. In fact, the book was previously (2011) published under the title ‘Deep Future’ with a much more sober cover. Obviously the publishers thought a more alarmist cover would shift more units. A slightly misleading decision as Stager is anything but alarmist in his prose. He is a paleoecologist – one of those people who can tell you that hippos waded through the Thames in 50,000BC or whether Southern France was swamp or tundra in 120,000BC from pollen grains in sediment samples and ice cores.

Here he uses his knowledge of the deep past’s climate to assess the effects that rising temperatures will have on the global scale in the future. This is not ‘rising seas will swamp us all by 2100’ fearmongering but rather a reflection on the longer term changes to come. Even if we stopped carbon dioxide increases right now, the world will continue to warm for thousands of years and take tens of thousands to slowly cool back to today’s norms. The question he raises is how long we want that temperature spike to last – tens of thousand’s of years in a moderate carbon emission scenario or hundreds of thousands of years in a strong emission scenario.

He readily admits that our current climate models (of which there are many) simply are not up to the job of providing anything like reliable local (i.e. country or region) prediction. The only thing they agree on is the broad global overview – poles will get warmer, the equator will get drier, mid-latitudes will get wetter and the oceans will get more acidic. Possibly.

These broad changes are enough to outline some drastic alterations to the lifestyles and welfare of tens of millions of people and many, many endangered species. It’s not all bad though. While there will doubtless be many losers in the warming world – we may have to say goodbye to polar bears and the poor of many low-lying countries will suffer most as the poor always have – there will be winners too. Earth has been this warm or warmer in the deep past. Melting ice fields will open up new trade routes and fisheries, as well as new territories for warmth-loving animals. Many species will move North or to higher ground in the face of rising temperatures – local extinction does not necessarily mean global extinction. People will adapt too over generational timescales and may suffer more in the global cooling trend to come.

We may actually be doing the world a favor by pumping out CO2. Without us, a new ice age would shortly scour all of Northern and min-latitude Europe, North America and Russia causing vastly more extinctions and environmental damage than global warming will. Uniquely, Stager suggests we leave our coal in the ground, not only to stem excessive CO2, but so that our far future descendants can use it to stave off future ice ages!

Stager’s book doesn’t try to scare you or lull you into a false compliancy. It’s a sensible and well-balanced look at the losses and possible gains a warmer world might bring and can thus be heartily recommended as a book that will probably annoy both green campaigners and climate skeptics equally.

Lucky Planet
Why Earth is Exceptional – and what that means for life in the Universe
by David Waltham. Published by Icon Books www.iconbooks.net

‘Four billion years of good weather’ sums up David Waltham’s argument for the uniqueness of planet Earth. Of course, by ‘good weather’ he doesn’t necessarily mean the sort of pleasant afternoon that would see you dusting off the barbecue tongs. Good weather by planetary standards means that the Earth’s average temperature has not dipped below about –50 degrees or soared above +50 degrees centigrade in the 3.5 billion years since life began. Considering that the Earth’s atmosphere, orbit and amount of heat received from the Sun have varied considerably over the same period, it is, Waltham argues, only a remarkable series of coincidences that have allowed these influences to effectively balance each other out. Coincidences so unusal that we are almost certainly the only intelligent life in the galaxy and possibly in the observable universe.

Waltham’s forte is geology (he is currently head of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London) so a lot of the book concerns deep time; geology, chemistry and early life over billion of years but with only one current example for planetary life Waltham leans heavily on the Anthropic Principle and observer bias – i.e. if conditions for life weren’t exactly as they are there would be no observers.

For example: many, including Carl Sagan, have argued that since life began pretty much immediately after Earth’s surface cooled enough to allow liquid water, it must be relatively easy to get going. But by the same argument, intelligent life must be a pretty difficult trick since it’s taken so long to get to us (scale the lifetime of the Earth to the average 80 year lifetime of a human and Earth has just turned 70). Waltham argues that this is just another observer bias. Worlds that don’t throw that double six for the first ‘origin of life’ move simply don’t have time to develop intelligent observers. Our Sun is gradually getting warmer and in half a billion years even a zero level of Carbon Dioxide will not be enough to stop the planet baking. A more leisurely life inception would mean intelligence wouldn’t have time to show up before plant life went extinct and the oceans boiled away.

A keen amateur astronomer from his youth, Waltham doesn’t ignore astronomical conditions either. He spends a lot of time on Earth’s place in the solar system, chance orbital resonances and the double-edged sword of a large moon (suggesting these celestial coincidences, over which life has no sway, argue against the Gaia hypothesis). Since all habitable planets need the same lunar conditions, an interesting side effect would be that any aliens that do exist experience solar eclipses!

He also spares a chapter for cosmology – you can’t have a lucky planet without a lucky Universe. He touches briefly on the main cosmological theories and the evidence (where such exists) supporting each. He spends some time on the ‘Horizon Problem’ – why the Universe is almost the same temperature in all directions and the coincidence of what variations there are being just the right size to seed galaxies.

(Let me take a moment here. I’ve never understood why this was a problem and maybe some kindly cosmologist can help me out: If I make a cup of tea in Dublin and Dubai, they will be in thermal equilibrium not because they’ve exchanged energy but because they were created by the same process. Similarly, if the same creation event is responsible for this bit of spacetime over here as that bit over there, isn’t having the same thermal – and other – properties what you would expect?) .

Astronomers suggest there may be a billion Earth-like worlds in the galaxy but Waltham’s cogent argument maintains the odds against intelligent life are much longer than that and we’ve just been lucky so far. If we want to find intelligent life among the stars, let’s hope we stay lucky long enough to put it there ourselves.