The Great Unknown

Book Review : The Great Unknown

Author : Marcus du Sautoy

My Rating : 4 out of 5 stars

The complete title of the book is “The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science”.

Author Marcus du Sautoy has chosen to take a “one pot meal” approach in this book and has greatly succeeded. It’s a tour of the areas of scientific knowledge that we struggle to find answers, and which have a strong possibility that the questions there may remain forever unanswered.

This is a challenging task. You can easily find full length books on each of the seven topics covered here. Condensing them to just one section of a book comes with a two pronged risk. Either it can become a shallow overview that’s too simplified, or it can become too narrow, focused only on certain aspects. To his immense credit, the author has managed that balance extremely well in first five sections. The final two sections were good too, but did not impress me as much as the previous sections.

The first section explains the recent branch of mathematics “Chaos Theory”, famous for the commonly referred, and commonly misunderstood “Butterfly Effect”. This section explains how a small gap in initial conditions of certain systems can lead to very large differences in eventual outcomes. The next section is about matter. Currently our experimentally verified understanding stops at quarks, the smallest building blocks of matter. Will we ever know if this is really the limit? There is a lot of “stuff” that we don’t know much about, like dark matter and dark energy. As you can expect the next two sections are about Quantum Physics and Universe, respectively. Quantum Physics literally puts a limit on our knowledge. At the largest scale, Black Holes and Multiverses may limit what we can know. The next section, and the last one about Physics is on “Time”. 

All those sections are well written, well explained and fun to read. The next section is first to veer directly into philosophy - Consciousness. The author prefers to look at using his mathematical lens to examine what it means to have consciousness. It’s an interesting approach, and I learned about advances in this field that of course are not covered by books on physics. Still, I felt this section wasn’t as deep as previous sections. The last section, at least to me, should have been the most exciting. It tackles the limits of mathematics, using Godel’s theorems and Cantor’s theorems about infinity. Godel’s theorems are simple to state, but trying to understand them is dizzying. Their importance for axiomatic systems (such as Mathematics) is monumental. I don’t think this section does justice to the beauty and creativity involved in these theorems. I learned something new about the theory of infinity (specifically the continuum) and it felt great.

Each section has a very personal touch. The author is not shy in admitting his preferences, biases and his struggles to understand many of these concepts. Each section also has dialogues with one or more prominent intellectual forces of that field. All this makes the book easier to read.

It’s a long book, and needs some investment of time from the reader. I think it’s worth it. You don’t have to read it in one go, and can take a pause between sections. It’s a nice tour of many prominent fields of knowledge where we are trying hard to push the limits of knowability. It’s especially useful to those who read only a few books on science if at all, because a lot is covered in one single book. So take your time, and read this one.