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BOOK REVIEW
ThE BOOk OF NOThINgNESS: VACUUMS, VoIDS AND THE LATEST IDEAS oN THE oRIgIN oF THE UNIVERSE JOhN BARROw
reviewed by gabrIeLLe chOng The Book of Nothingness: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe by John D. Barrow (2002) (Vintage Books, 384 pages)
one of the most stunning revelations in any scientific field in the last half-century came in 1998, when Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt, and Adam g. Riess discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This subsequently earned them a shared Nobel Prize in Physics. The Book of Nothingness, written by noted British astrophysicist/mathematician John D. Barrow and published just four years later, was one of the earliest attempts to explain the profound implications of this discovery to the general public. Unlike more recent books on the same topic, such as the current bestseller A Universe Out of Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing by Lawrence Krauss - which dive rather straightforwardly into the heady technicalities of physics, The Book of Nothingness is more of a generalist treatise on the broad history of ideas on the vacuum. In fact, the first 40% of the book is completely devoted to the concept of vacuums in a wide variety of non-scientific literature.
S C I E N T I F I C M A L AY S I A N
