Book review: Our Mathematical Universe, by Max Tegmark
British writer Douglas Adams wrote in the humorous The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that the secret of the universe was a number.
by Max Tegmark
Knopf
4.5 stars
Richard James Havis
British writer Douglas Adams wrote in the humorous The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that the secret of the universe was a number. According to Max Tegmark, a cosmologist and physics professor at MIT, he was on the right track.
Readers of popular science books will have observed that when trying to describe the concepts of theoretical physics, words simply aren't up to the job: the concepts have to be expressed in terms of mathematics.
In Our Mathematical Universe, Tegmark goes one step further: he says the underlying nature of our universe is not something that only has to be described in maths (although that is still true), but that it actually consists of maths. Or, in short, that we and everything we know are mathematical constructs.
Tegmark is a well-respected physicist, but he admits that this idea has sometimes been thought to be mad by his colleagues. Indeed, some of his friends had warned against publishing any scientific papers about it, in case it damaged his professional credibility.
But this book, which distils his work for the non-academic reader, is brilliantly argued, and has received encouraging reviews in science magazines such as the New Scientist. Our Mathematical Universe deals with highly complex theoretical issues, but Tegmark succeeds in making his theories accessible to armchair scientists. There are tables at the end of each chapter which clearly summarise the main points, and user-friendly diagrams to explain the concepts.