Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Sunday September 12, 2010
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THE GRAND DESIGN
Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
Bantam
ISBN 978 0 553 80537 6
198 pages
$28
Reviewed by James Trefil
In "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," Douglas Adams famously had his characters ask a computer to provide the ultimate answer to "Life, the Universe, and Everything." As Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow point out in their book "The Grand Design," the computer's response -- 42 -- was less than helpful. Hawking, who needs no introduction, and Mlodinow, a Caltech physicist with a string of excellent books to his credit, have taken on that ultimate question in a somewhat more rigorous form by asking three related ones:
Why is there something instead of nothing?
Why do we exist?
Why does this particular set of laws govern our universe and not some other set?
Deep stuff, indeed. In the first chapter, Hawking and Mlodinow launch into an accessible and elegant history of the progression of scientific knowledge from the Greeks to modern cosmology. As is customary in such treatments, the authors point out the significance of certain milestones. The first of these, the realization by the Ionian Greeks that nature could be explained by laws rather than by the whims of the gods, is really the start of modern science. The second, the discovery by Copernicus that the Earth is not at the center of the universe, opened the door for a realistic exploration of our solar system and, later, our galaxy and universe.
So far, so good, but the 20th century was not kind to scientific orthodoxy. Two new fields -- quantum mechanics, which deals with the behavior of things at the atomic and sub-atomic level, and relativity, which is our best explanation of gravity -- came on the scene, changing our perspective on the laws of classical physics. (I have to add, as do the authors, that those laws are still valid in our everyday lives.)
The authors describe quantum mechanics in clear, non-technical language using a formulation devised by the late Richard Feynman and called the "sum over histories" approach. (Typical of the breezy style of the book, when the authors first mention Feynman, they ignore his Nobel Prize and point out that he liked to play the bongo drums at a strip club near Caltech.) By Feynman's method of quantum mechanics, the probability of an event -- an electron moving from where you are to the door of your room, for example -- is calculated by adding up the probabilities of all the ways it could happen. It could move in a straight line, circle the room a couple of times or even (with very small probability) visit Mars on its way to the door.
With that background, Hawking and Mlodinow get to the real meat of their book: the way theories about quantum mechanics and relativity came together to shape our understanding of how our universe (and possibly others) formed out of nothing. Our current best description of the physics of this event, they explain, is the so-called "M-theories," which predict that there is not a single universe (the one we live in) but a huge number of universes. In other words, not only is the Earth just one of several planets in our solar system and the Milky Way one of billions of galaxies, but our known universe itself is just one among uncounted billions of universes. It's a startling replay of the Copernican Revolution.
The conclusions that follow are groundbreaking. Of all the possible universes, some must have laws that allow the appearance of life. The fact that we are here already tells us that we are in that corner of the multiverse. In this way, all origin questions are answered by pointing to the huge number of possible universes and saying that some of them have the properties that allow the existence of life, just by chance.
I've waited a long time for this book. It gets into the deepest questions of modern cosmology without a single equation. The reader will be able to get through it without bogging down in a lot of technical detail and will, I hope, have his or her appetite whetted for books with a deeper technical content. And who knows? Maybe in the end the whole multiverse idea will actually turn out to be right!
James Trefil is a professor of physics at George Mason University. His next book will be an illustrated tour of the multiverse.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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DIRTY SEXY POLITICS
Meghan McCain
Hyperion
ISBN 978 1 4013 2377 6
194 pages
$23.99
Reviewed by Steven Levingston
First, let's get past the risque cover of Meghan McCain's campaign memoir, "Dirty Sexy Politics." In front and back photos, the daughter of Sen. John McCain is, shall we say, fully engaged with an elephant. On the book's front, the blue-jeaned, barefoot author sits on the pachyderm's trunk as it curls up and locks around her thighs. The photo raises the question: Who's in charge here? That brute symbol of the Republican Party or the free-thinking college grad who brought scandal to her father's 2008 presidential campaign? Flip the book over and you get your answer. On the back, daughter McCain is free of the trunk; now she's dressed in tight black pants and knee-high boots, looking like a seductive animal tamer who has just had the wrestle of her life. The elephant, for his part, is slumped on his belly, staring straight ahead dazed and defeated. Feisty young McCain, apparently, has taught the party a thing or two.
And that's just the way she'd like it. Her memoir is as much a scathing critique of the Republican Party as it is a passionate tale of life on the campaign trail. McCain takes repeated jabs at the intolerant ethos of today's Republicans. She rails at feeling left out: The party, she says, has been hijacked by the right wing and has rejected -- to its detriment -- the moderate politics that she and millions of other young conservatives espouse. While she admires the ideas of Barry Goldwater and has her father's Republican pedigree, she feels she is never viewed as conservative enough by the far-right standards of angry radio and TV hosts. Complicating her acceptance among those who control the "groupthink," as she calls it, is that she loves to wear over-the-top clothes, drops the F-bomb with ease and has gay friends. Not only that, but she is both "passionately pro-life" and "passionately pro-contraception," and chastises conservatives for their narrowness of vision on the issue. "They go on and on about how evil and wrong abortion is, but don't like to talk about how easy it is to not get pregnant."
McCain leaped aboard her father's Pirate Ship, as the campaign was called, in July 2007, shortly before her 23rd birthday, after graduating from Columbia University with a degree in art history. She began blogging -- to the consternation of some campaign heavies -- and made some regrettable statements in a GQ article, such as her quips that Obama was "sexy" and that she was a fan of the burlesque stripper Dita Von Teese. She was relegated to a back bus on the campaign trail, the prospect of her introducing her mother at the Republican National Convention vanished, and even the Secret Service kept mistaking her for another blonde. All the tears she spilled and the slights she felt pour out here in this youthful narrative -- made all the more enjoyable by its healthy sense of humor.
When McCain met Sarah Palin, she "felt shaken and troubled," worrying like many others that the Alaska governor was not prepared for the national stage. As a running mate she preferred Sen. Joe Lieberman, "a brilliant politician ... one of the kindest, friendliest, and funniest people I have ever met," and feared the slot would go to Mitt Romney, "the politician I most loved to watch and ridicule." She blames the choice of Palin on a secret cabal of campaign advisers and particularly excoriates Steve Schmidt, whom she describes as "our bullying campaign manager."
Once the Palin clan climbed aboard, the Pirate Ship started to sink. "From the minute Sarah arrived," McCain writes, "the campaign began splitting apart. And rather than joining us, and our campaign, she seemed only to begin her own." Palin's arrival -- this "sudden, freakishly huge, full-fledged phenomenon" -- was jarring for the potential first daughter, who found herself shoved into the background. Soon, she was misbehaving, becoming a distraction, and finally was effectively banished from the campaign. "The irony wasn't lost on me," she recalls. "Here I'd been ruminating about how the Palins weren't 'ready for prime time' when, in fact, it was me all along."
McCain writes movingly of election day, when her father pulled the family into a huddle and delivered the bad news that was already evident in the campaign's own polls. She couldn't believe it was over -- at 5 p.m. "Election nights are supposed to go on and on. ... The sun wasn't even down. My dad hadn't even eaten dinner." She ended the campaign feeling alienated from her party and worried about its domination by the Christian right. Calling herself a passionate Christian, McCain fears the party will shrink and possibly become irrelevant if it narrows its agenda to "accommodate only one moral code." On the night of her father's defeat, she felt gloomy enough to imagine the worst for the party. "That night," she writes, "I was standing at its funeral and saying good-bye."
Steven Levingston is nonfiction books editor of The Washington Post and edits the blog Political Bookworm. He can be reached at levingstons(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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