How the Universe Got its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space [Hardcover]

How the Universe Got its Spots is the diary of a couple of years in the life of Janna Levin, a young theoretical physicist specialising in cosmology. Combining a discussion of her research with more personal reflections on how her work and personal life interact, it's a warm and revealing record of the working life of a scientist.

Levin's current specialism is topology, the global shape and connectedness of space. With the aid of numerous diagrams she manages to explain the basic ideas in lay terms, which is no mean feat for a theory that strives to move beyond Einstein. General relativity tells us how space curves locally, but it can't determine the overall shape of the universe, nor whether it's infinite or bounded. If it's finite, light travelling in a straight line will eventually return to its starting point, like a ship sailing around the Earth. In a tiny universe we would see multiple copies of ourselves as light circled around and around. The real universe is at least billions of light years across, and Levin is modelling the patterns of spots that would appear in the microwave background radiation if space had various different topologies.

One day, orbiting telescopes may give us the data we need to determine the actual shape of the universe. We may not have the answers yet, but what this book does have is a real insight into the motivations of a theoretical physicist as she plays with notions so far beyond everyday life that they boggle the mind. It's reassuring to know that Levin is boggling too. --Elizabeth Sourbut

'Theoretical physicists don't come much funkier than Janna Levin.'

'Janna Levin is one of the most talented and original of the young cosmologists.'

Author PR 18 copy dumpbin, header and sales presenter --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

HOW THE UNIVERSE GOT ITS SPOTS looks at how science is coming up sharp against the mind-boggling idea that the universe may be finite. Such a revelation would provide the ultimate twist to the Copernican revolution, for we would find out exactly where we are in the cosmos. Beautifully written in a colloquial style by a world authority, Janna Levin explores our aspirations to observe our universe and contemplate our deep connection with it. While relating her own personal and intellectual journey through space and time, the author gently takes in such gravity-defying concepts as black holes, time-warps, invisible 'strings' and chaotic flows. It is a fantastic voyage, impressing on us the extraordinary fact that we are progeny of this universe and that our ability to understand it is an inheritance.

Janna Levin is PPARC Advanced Fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. She has published widely in academic journals and her work has been featured in science magazines and newspapers worldwide.

I’m on the train back from London – gives me time to write, this time about Albert Einstein, hero worship, idolatry and topology. Somebody told me he is reported to have said, ‘You know, I was no Einstein.’ He couldn’t get a job. His dad wrote letters to famous scientists begging them to hire his unemployed son. They didn’t. The Russian mathematician Herman Minowski (1864–909) actually called him a ‘lazy dog’. Can you imagine? He worked a day job as a patent clerk and thought about physics maybe all the rest of his working hours. Or maybe the freedom from the criticism of his colleagues just gave his mind the room it needed to wander and let the truth hidden there reveal itself. In any case, in the early 1900s he developed his theory of relativity and published in 1905 a series of papers of such import and on such varied topics that when he received the Nobel prize it wasn’t even for relativity.

Now we love him and his crazy hair and he’s considered a genius. We try to make him the president of a small country. He’s a hero. And he deserves to be. When I think of his vision, his revolution, it’s an overwhelming testament to the human character, one of those rare moments of pride in my species. Nonetheless, we’ve been led astray by our faith in Einstein and his theory. General relativity, as I’ll get to later, is a theory of geometry, but it is an incomplete theory. It tells us how space is curved locally, but it is not able to distinguish geometries with different global properties. The global shape and connectedness of space is the realm of topology. A smooth sphere and a sphere with a hole in the middle have different topologies and general relativity is unable to discern one from the other. Because of this, people have assumed that the universe is infinite – seemed simpler than assuming space had handles and holes.