This Way to the Universe: A Theoretical Physicist’s Journey Into Reality

This Way to the Universe: A Theoretical Physicist’s Journey Into Reality by Michael Dine 

This Way to the Universe: A Theoretical Physicist’s Journey Into Reality (2022) is Michael Dine’s worthy contribution to the popular physics/cosmology bookshelf, though readers may have to work a little harder at this one than similar books. That extra work is worth it, though, for this up-to-date and engaging exploration of modern science.

Dine moves between the very large and very small, covering particle theory, quantum theory, the Standard Model, dark energy and dark matter, gravity waves, the expansion of the universe, time’s arrow, Einstein’s various theories, the Big Bang, black holes, the Higgs Boson, string theory, and more. It’s about as comprehensive a book as one could want. And for the most part as lucid as one would want, as well. Though, as noted, not quite as easy to follow as similar books I’ve read. Dine doesn’t throw much math at the reader, or equations, but the depth and terms and concepts can get a bit hard to follow in spots (it is theoretical physics, after all), and I found myself doing a lot more backing up and rereading than typical, in particular with the discussion of breaking symmetries.

Some of that, I think, is that Dine will often give numbers where other authors might give generalities: for instance, noting one particle might have 200 times the mass of another whereas someone else might simply say it is much heavier. Similarly, Dine may offer more details/terms than others, as when he notes there are three types of muons, and while others would simply say the difference is in their charges (one positive, one negative, one neutral), Dine goes the extra step and gives their symbols, as well. It’s not so much that these add a lot of confusion, but they do increase the density of the work and give readers more to remember or hold in their heads, which may explain, in part, why this text seems a little more difficult (and to be clear, it is only a little; no one should be fearful of the math or science in This Way to the Universe).

Dine brings his own experience in here, sometimes in self-deprecating manner, and one of my favorite aspects of the book is how Dine is not so proud that he won’t admit prior error or the difficulty, even for him, of his profession, as when he notes about another research team’s results that “Many — including me — were skeptical that this measurement was telling us anything interesting” and later, “For skeptics like me, this was a lot to swallow.” The results turned out to be correct, though. Nor is Dine afraid to be skeptical of his own chosen area of string theory, happy to note both its exhilarating potential but also its many criticisms. At another point he describes trying to figure out how the LIGO gravity wave detection experiment worked: “I wandered the halls of my department, asking questions about how this was done. No one could give me a complete answer. I had to pore through papers and articles online (and, at the risk of my professional pride, I acknowledge watching an assortment of YouTube videos) to sort it all out.” Not only does this sort of thing make our tour guide much more relatable, but it also emphasizes how science works — painstaking experimentation combined with hypotheses subjected to rigorous examination and challenge with an acceptance that being wrong is not “failure” but instead merely another step in the process, one that forecloses certain paths and opens up others.

Dine doesn’t quite have the winning stylistic voice of some of these popular science works, such as Harry Cliff’s How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe, but there is a voice there, a sense of personality and an interesting, likable one at that. And if you have to work a bit harder, or might feel a little lost here and there, neither of those cause any major issue, making This Way to the Universe an easy book to recommend for those wanting a better understanding of what we know about how our world and the universe works, as well as what we don’t know about those things.