Big Bang
Simon Singh’s family is originally from a Punjabi backwater. That didn’t stop him from completing a doctorate in particle physics at Cambridge or writing a number of books on popular science. His most recent book is a magisterial account of humankind’s quest to discover the origins of the universe. Singh focuses on the personalities who contributed crucial insights to the regnant hypothesis, known as the Big Bang.
In science, consensus does not emerge convivially; too many people who have invested lifetimes in faulty theories will stand in the way of novel approaches. Sometimes, the old guard has to die out before the new receives full consideration. Resisters to the Big Bang included, for a time, Einstein; a group of scientists who proposed a "Steady State" model that posited an eternal universe; and even the Soviets, who worried that the Big Bang implied a divine creator, subverting their materialist worldview.
If there is any defect at all in the work, it’s the uncompromising Eurocentric vantage point. Singh early on avers that the Greeks invented science, whereas, say, the Egyptians, demonstrated proficiency in technology, but not in the investigative process we call the scientific method. He ignores the astronomical insights of ancient Indian mathematics entirely.
Truth be told, science has been a principally European (and American) endeavor for several hundred years. Has Europe achieved so much because they possess an inordinate number of geniuses? I think not. Rather, since the Enlightenment, the culture of Europe encouraged - and funded - the pursuit of scientific work. Many discoveries that proved crucial to the Big Bang hypothesis were not flashes of genius but serendipitous occasions: after hundreds of hours in the cold at the Mt. Wilson observatory, Edwin Hubble discovered a crucial variable star that equipped him to calculate the size of the universe; a couple of scientists at Bell Labs in New Jersey happened upon a noise that turned out to be the cosmic background radiation predicted by Big Bang proponents years before. As Louis Pasteur said: "Chance favors the prepared mind.”
