Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything, Amanda Gefter, Bantam Books, 2014. $28.00 (418 pp.). ISBN 978-0-345-53143-8
Amanda Gefter’s Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn comes with a super-sized subtitle: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything. It’s a mouthful, but also rather fitting for a book that manages to be many things simultaneously. The book is a personal memoir, a popular-level introduction to cosmology, a collection of interviews with major figures in theoretical physics, and a self-referential story of how it came to be written. It’s a heady mix that occasionally threatens to fly apart at the seams, but Gefter holds it all together, and the end result is thoroughly charming.
The story begins with a conversation about nothing—literally. As a teenager growing up in Philadelphia, Gefter and her father, Warren, a radiologist with an amateur interest in philosophy and cosmology, strike up a conversation over dinner about how our universe arose from nothing at all. He then suggests, “We should figure it out,” launching a father–daughter research project that forms the core of the book. Later on, that project becomes more than a hobby when Gefter realizes she could use her dubious media affiliation—stuffing envelopes for Manhattan Bride magazine in a one-room apartment—to obtain press credentials for the 2002 “Science and Ultimate Reality” symposium at Princeton University in honor of John Wheeler. She accomplishes that by leaving off the second word of the magazine’s title.
She and her father attend the symposium, more than a little starstruck, and even speak briefly with Wheeler. (They also take a side trip to Albert Einstein’s house and take pictures of themselves on the lawn.) That symposium inspires Gefter to become a science journalist so she can have direct access to the scientists studying the biggest of the big questions. By talking to those scientists, she and her father hope to get the clues needed for their quest to figure out the origin of the universe and the ultimate nature of reality.
Thus begins an unlikely career path, winding from Manhattan Bride, to freelance writing, to the London School of Economics for a degree in philosophy of science, to New Scientist, first as a full-time editor and then as a consultant. Gefter, sometimes accompanied by her father, attends conferences and interviews scientists. They pore over decades of Wheeler’s notebooks at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. She even arranges and moderates a debate between David Gross and Leonard Susskind about the anthropic principle. What starts as a minor deception to gain access to famous physicists turns, bit by bit, into a very real and successful career as a science journalist and eventually culminates in the book itself.
Throughout, Gefter provides engaging descriptions, often presented in conversations with her father, of some of the deepest issues in modern physics. Their quest for the nature of reality goes through topics as diverse as quantum measurement, inflationary cosmology, the philosophy of structural realism, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Hawking radiation, string theory, and field theory’s anti–de Sitter/conformal field theory duality—all of which she discusses in detail. Wheeler’s “it from bit” proposal and the idea of a “self-excited” universe observing itself are recurring themes. Indeed, Wheeler’s struggle to reconcile the perspectives of multiple observers is paralleled both in physics developments like black hole complementarity and in the evolving nature of Gefter’s book from a coauthored work with her father to the more personal and individual final product.
Many of the explanations are excellent. For example, Gefter’s description of the black hole “firewall” debate (as of early 2013) is among the clearest I’ve seen. From the perspective of a physicist, though, the book’s greatest strength is the author’s enthusiasm. Big ideas spill out in a breathless rush, and the reader can’t help being caught up in it. Dozens of other popular authors have written about black holes and string theory, but Gefter’s excitement makes even such overdone subjects seem fresh. And through the whole process, she and her father remain awed by the physicists whose work they’re studying—late in the book, her father even asks Susskind for an autograph. For those of us who have become a little jaded, it’s nice to be reminded that physics is an amazing field full of people who are both brilliant and personable.
For some readers, however, that breathless enthusiasm will be a weakness: Those who come to the book with no prior knowledge of physics might easily find it somewhat bewildering. Some weighty concepts in physics and philosophy are brought up quickly, and while the key notions are returned to many times, the density of ideas might seem daunting. To my mind, there’s enough charm and personality to the writing to carry that off, but like so many other features of the universe, the ultimate success of the book will depend on the state of the observer.
For readers willing to go with the flow when things start moving fast, Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn is a witty and charming tour through the deepest questions of modern physics. It doesn’t end up providing any solid answers, but it does manage to better convey the excitement of the search than many other books by people with more impressive physics credentials. And in so doing, it reveals why, for scientists and amateurs turned science journalists alike, that excitement is its own reward.
Chad Orzel is an associate professor of physics at Union College in Schenectady, New York, where he works on experimental atomic, molecular, and optical physics with laser-cooled atoms. He is the author of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog (Basic Books, 2012).
