For all those who’ve decided that their Christmas treat will be the new Dr Stephen Hawking book, The Universe in a Nutshell, I can only say: just open the thing up with the belief that you’re borderline retarded. Don’t come to it with the quiet but cocky belief that you’ll understand it where a nation’s book reviewers have failed. Although there are illustrations of universes collapsing and jolly references to pizza and Star Trek, this is hard-core. Unless you regularly visualise universes made of “p-branes”, each with 10 dimensions - or how six of these dimensions could be “curled up very small”.
Where The Universe in a Nutshell does work, however, is as series of Daliesque dreamscapes. I have no idea how time-cones work, or what any of the stuff about infinite wavelengths means, but the concept of time being pear-shaped is lovely. Hawking’s suggestion that we live on a nutshell stuffed with a fifth dimension is up there with John Lennon’s suggestion that we all live in a yellow submarine. I’d like to read selections from it it at bed-time to a particularly bright nine-year-old.
It’s like Alice in Wonderland with quarks.
Perversely, the more out-there, freaky and creative science gets, the more we need to turn to the arts to make sense of what they’re trying to tell us. The world of mathematics lost me around the time of long-division, yet I have a useless and isolated yet firm understanding of a tiny area of quantum mechanics, due to Douglas Adams’s the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Dr Sam Beckett in the eighties series Quantum Leap explained wormholes in space at the start of every episode (“Time is like a piece of string”), and I’m sure I picked up something about Shadow World Theory from Deep Space Nine.
To understand concepts, we need to see their story. And it helps when that story involves a sexually-advanced race of one-eyed people who live behind the Sun.