Atom: An Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth … and Beyond Lawrence M. Krauss Little, Brown, New York, 2001. $26.95 (320 pp.). ISBN 0-316-49946-3
Lawrence Krauss is a physicist who works on cosmological problems and who has been led by this interest to work on such astrophysical topics as the ages of globular clusters. He has written Atom: An Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth … and Beyond for the well-educated lay reader. It is the story of the universe from the distant past to the distant future, with many topics of interest to the human race in the middle. When I was asked to review this book, I thought I would seek an opinion from someone interested in science but with no training in physics. I quickly concluded however, that you really do need to understand physics at the level of a college course or two to appreciate the book. In other words, this is not a tutorial; it makes little attempt to describe the underlying physical processes in the events that unfold as the universe evolves.
In an attempt to make the story of the universe accessible to the reader, Krauss uses an oxygen atom to give a microscopic point of view to the evolutionary processes. In the early universe, this oxygen atom exists simply as its constituent nucleons, which become 12 hydrogen atoms and a helium atom as a result of Big-Bang nucleosynthesis. Then these constituents participate in star formation, but Krauss takes them through several scenarios before they become fully synthesized into 16O. The oxygen atom is presented during the formation of the solar system and manages to be part of the processes occurring in Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and rocks. But this participation is somewhat limited, until Earth develops its oxygen atmosphere and the atom can participate in life’s respiratory cycles. In the long run, the Sun heats up, expands, and the atom is blown into space, where it can participate in further adventures. A remarkably versatile atom!
Viewing the course of the universe through the eyes of an atom is a clever idea, but I don’t think Krauss carries it out as successfully as he had hoped. Krauss concentrates on telling the story of universal evolution, and from time to time he tells us in a paragraph or two how this affects his atom. Thus the atom is not really central to the theme of the book. In fact I found it a distraction, partly because the participation of the atom in the events is artificially contrived, and I found the events themselves—from creation to extinction—much more interesting. In the book these events just happen, for the most part, and I think many readers would like a little more explanation of why they happen. Why does a star expand when it finishes burning hydrogen in the core, for example? At the level of physics understanding assumed by Krauss, I think that some indication could have been given of how physical processes like this work. But I will be interested in a review of this book by someone who has had just those one or two courses of college physics, to see if that reader feels the same way.
The book contains only three illustrations, diagramming the gathering of a dense gas of quarks into bound clumps as the gas expands. Although Krauss exhibits a mastery of smooth, vivid, and colorful language in his word pictures, many of his explanations would have been much clearer if they had been accompanied by real illustrations.
Despite such carping, I must endorse this book as a good example of the attempts that should be made to educate the public in scientific matters, to show that science is interesting in its own right, and to deal with the complexities of modern science in all of their interdisciplinary glory. Krauss tells us of his efforts to expand his own understanding of the planetary, geological, and life sciences as he prepared to write the book. As far as I can tell, he became, in the process, quite current on the thinking at the frontiers of these subjects. The only area in which I found his work deficient concerned the attempts to date the events in the formation of the solar system, including Earth, using the extinct radioactivities. There are many more of these radioactivities now known than Krauss describes, and some of them indicate that things went much faster than he indicates.
It is said that the future of physics lies in understanding complexity. But there is no magic shortcut. The physicist must identify all the important processes and find which ones govern the behavior of a system. Then the principal properties of that system will usually become clear. To a considerable extent that is what Krauss has done here, but the physical reasoning is in the background, and only the conclusions are presented as an entertaining story.
