Galileo’s Finger: The ten great ideas of science by Peter Atkins, Oxford University Press, £20, ISBN 0198606648 Reviewed by Robert Matthews
IN 1737, the Italian antiquary Anton Francesco Gori gained access to the 95-year-old corpse of Galileo Galilei and removed the middle finger of the venerated scientist’s right hand. This bizarre relic is kept in the Museum of the History of Science in Florence and is labelled with a lyrical inscription about how this finger pointed up to the heavens and revealed new wonders. Peter Atkins, a professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford, argues that the lifting of Galileo’s finger marks a key moment in intellectual history, when scientists shrugged off the dead hand of authority and began to discover cosmic truths for themselves.
What more appropriate title, then, than Galileo’s Finger for a guide to the 10 most important ideas that have emerged in the following 400 years? Not just any decamerous collection of ideas, note, but “the” 10 great ideas of science. And not just any guide, either: according to Richard Dawkins’s eulogy on the front cover, Atkins’s prose style should make him a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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I would not put much money on Atkins winning any time soon. Few could argue with Atkins’s choice of 10 such concepts, which begin with evolution and DNA, and end with space-time and number theory. Yet from the first page, Atkins shows a harrumphing contempt for anything that does not conform to his world view, from the “utterly but engagingly wrong” Greek philosophers and “incessant, petulant, pestering” creationists to “hyper-pessimistic” sociologists of science.
Nor is he content merely to hold his views: he seeks to ram them down our throat with a literary style that veers from tedious to florid. For example: “In short, an electron in the second s-orbital can penetrate through the region occupied by the two electrons in the first s-orbital and experience the full attractive power of the triply charged lithium nucleus”, and in the chapter on symmetry, Atkins opines that “Any brilliant sailor should be able to tell you that a graviton’s spin is 2”.
Most irksome, however, is the pervasive patronising tone: phrases such as “Be patient”, and “You will be pleased to discover you can understand” abound. Like Galileo’s finger, this dire book deserves to be in a museum, a reminder of a time when scientists thought they could convince us of their views by finger-wagging alone.