A Little Book About the Big Bang
By Tony Rothman
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022

From a purely packaging standpoint, it’s almost irresistible to put together a book like A Little Book About the Big Bang by former Scientific American editor and long-time physics teacher Tony Rothman in the way that the Belknap Press has done. It’s irresistible to pair the “little” in “little book” with the “big” in “Big Bang,” for instance, and it’s irresistible to make a “little book” physically little, pocket-sized, and it’s irresistible to give a book about the vastness of space an all-black dust jacket. 

Like all irresistible temptations, these should have been resisted. The all-black dust jacket will be all-smudge after roughly 70 seconds of handling; the pocket size forbids the copious illustrations that always help a work of popular science (there are a few black-and-white doodles, but when an author starts talking about Planck time and neutron-proton interconversion, I want as many pictures as I can get); and maybe worst of all, the book’s irresistible title drastically undersells its actual contents. Only a few of these 200 pages are precisely devoted to the Big Bang. 

That’s probably understandable, since the actual nature of the Big Bang is more a matter of speculation than calculation. Was it some kind of oscillating singularity? An intrusion into our dimension from some other dimension? Was it some kind of supernatural goblin who did only that and absolutely nothing else in the history of the universe? 

There might not be any way for science to know, and the great majority of A Little Book About the Big Bang is about all the things science does know. Here Rothman predictably shines. Right from the beginning, when he differentiates between astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology (who knew they weren’t the same thing?), he provides a calm, clear guiding voice on everything from Newtonian physics to Einsteinian refinement of Newtonian physics to dark matter to string theory to the Higgs boson, and he does it all right alongside the minor miracle of including virtually no complicated math. This book is a slightly pared-down version of your university’s “Intro to Physics” class, only it fits in the palm of your hand and doesn’t cost $15,000. 

True, sometimes the narration is a little too calm – it’s a startling little moment in any book like this to come across a line like “In the previous discussion, I oversimplified – and even lied” – and Rothman’s occasional irreverence is clearly the type that was polished on many classrooms of indifferent students. “Contrary to popular belief, Einstein was not the first person to show that mass and energy were related and, although it is heretical to say so, he never satisfactorily proved E=mc2,” goes one such passage. “His famous paper on the subject contains a mistake, which he attempted to patch up on subsequent occasions without success.” Well OK.

But the flair added by such notes helps a good deal in defusing the intimidation factor some non-specialist readers will feel when wading into such deep waters. Those readers are clearly the target audience of this book. Some of them might end up wishing the thing were a bit bigger.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.