What Was That Bang?

THE eminent British-Indian scientist and populariser of science, J.B.S. Haldane oncecautioned us that "the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it isqueerer than we can suppose". Every culture known to us has its cosmology, a termderived from combining two Greek words, kosmos , meaning "order","harmony" and "the world", and logos , signifying"word" or "discourse". Our view of the universe has undergonetremendous changes since the first hunter-gatherers wondered about the heavens and drewpictures in caves to the discovery of black holes and the concept of space time warps. Andthe interesting thing is that our knowledge is still nowhere near complete. Everyday, newobservations confirm or refute hypotheses and models which our diligent scientists make ofthe universe. J. V. Narlikar’s book takes us on a fascinating journey of the cosmosas we know it today.

Jayant Vishnu Narlikar does not need an introduction. He is, with the possibleexception of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the best known living Indian scientist. He is well knownfor his work on steady state cosmology, which is proposed as an alternative to thegenerally accepted model of the universe, known as the Big Bang cosmology. He is also avery prolific writer and has written several books on popular science and even sciencefiction. In fact, he won the prestigious Unesco Kalinga Prize for science popularisationin 1996.

The ‘Wonder’ in the title refers to phenomena or objects which have mystifiedhuman beings and have often defied explanation (though in this context, why only seven ismysterious). Narlikar starts his fantastic voyage from the earth, moon and the solarsystem. From here, he moves outwards and travels to the stars and the universe as whole.Several different phenomena are discussed in the book, including the life-cycle of stars,the death of stars and the formation of new stars from the cosmic debris and the expansionof the universe. We meet mysterious and amazing inhabitants of the universe — likepulsars (the cosmic time-keepers, stars which send out radio pulses at a rate which ismore regular than the most accurate atomic clocks) or quasars (objects at the edge of theuniverse which give out thousand times more energy than a galaxy!). Is the universe going to continue expanding forever or are we doomed to a final crunch? How much matter isthere in the universe and of what kind? These are some of the other speculative topicswhich Narlikar touches upon.

Among the sciences, cosmology holds a special place because unlike other sciences wherewe can carry out controlled experiments, here we can only observe the universe. Yet, it isa triumph of the scientific method that we can yet understand the cosmos as well as we do.The laws of physics which we discover and test in the laboratory are found to be valid inthe whole cosmos as far as we know. This itself is a remarkable fact that across space andtime, the laws of ‘nature’ remain immutable.

Ever since the infamous Tao of Physics , there has been a whole genre of‘pop’ science books which seek to trivialise the complicated and subtle issuesin science. Happily, that is not the case with this book. Narlikar simplifies withouttrivialising and the explanations given are very lucid and easily followed by the layreader. His style is extremely engrossing and user-friendly. The one thing missing is abibliography for further reading which could be used by the interested reader to follow upon the subject of his/her interest. The other major lacuna in the book is the lack ofsufficient detail on any one topic. For that one will have to go to a more detailed booklike Wienberg’s The First Three Minutes . But if you want to just get aflavour of how amazing and mysterious our universe is, and how much of it we understand,read this book.