You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe by Christopher Potter
Hutchinson, £20
THE three essentials which distinguish homo sapiens from other hominoids are art, ritual burial and fish. Neanderthals lived alongside abundant supplies of fish but were such gastronomic apes they never had the good taste to eat any. So, sorry guys, despite the impressive toolmaking you do not qualify as human.
The first known example of art is 75,000 years old, engraved beads made from shells unearthed at the Blombos cave in South Africa. But if the artists did not choose from the fish section of the menu then their human credentials are incomplete and they are out of the genus.
You Are Here is the sort of book you ought to have open under a table if you are inclined to cheat in pub quizzes, full of fancy little factoids to amaze and impress. Did you know, for example, the reason the polar ice-cap is melting is that we are still coming out of the last glacial period of the Holocene epoch? Climate change is only to blame for it thawing faster than it should.
Or have you considered what would happen if you put a single grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard and kept doubling the amount on each of the subsequent 63 squares? No? Let Christopher Potter assist. By the last square you would have more grains piled up than all the rice crops in the history of the world. And if you want to test his claim he tells you exactly how to carry out the calculation.
Potter is a former publisher, which might explain how the glowing reviews on the dustcover got there before the review copies went out. “A wonderful, miraculous book: the whole universe bottled for your delight” – Stephen Fry. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.
While Potter was managing director of 4th Estate, there was always a scientist inside him desperate to get out. So he splurges seemingly everything he has ever learned about science onto these pages, making it less a narrative of the universe and more a work of reference.
If you want to read this stuff Marcus Chown is easier to follow, while Paul Davies and Michio Kaku deliver it with more expertise. Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything comes closest to what this book is like, but although he was a bit cavalier with the science he did write it so beautifully.
But I am glad I read Potter’s book. It will go up on the shelf alongside theirs, in easy reach when I need to throw some half-remembered light onto quarks or string theory or stone age funerals on quiz night down at the local.
Did you know that James Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh, worked out the Biblical date of creation as Sunday October 23 4004 BC? You would if you kept Chris Potter’s book about you.
Nigel Nelson
