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Read this review of a popular science book and then read the sentences (26-30) that follow. Your task is to choose the option (A-D) that best corresponds to what the review says. Use the arrows <= and => to move between the questions. You needn't answer the questions in the given order but you must answer them all to complete this task. If you make a mistake, you must try again until you find the right answer.

Shut up and calculate!

You are here: A Portable History of the Universe by Christopher Potter

For the past 20 years or so, popular-science books have attempted to explain to an incredulous public the latest theories put forward by scientists to explain mystifying stuff such as quarks, various types of subatomic particles, black holes, and so on. Reading these books you occasionally note a tone of slight impatience from the author when the really tricky stuff comes along. “Look, you dummies, it just is, ok?”

Or, as Christopher Potter repeatedly puts it in this elegant and thoughtfully constructed contribution to the genre: “Shut up and calculate!” Even Feynman, a brilliant Nobel prizewinning scientist, who tried to get the message across a generation ago in Six Easy Pieces, struggled; not all of those pieces are that easy, to be honest.

Potter’s book works because he is not (quite) a physicist, but nor is he merely a layman. He is a publisher with a fairly modest (he suggests) academic background in mathematics and the history of science. And this is the root of the book’s brilliance: Potter becomes a link between the bizarre world of the quantum physicists and our own rather more limited imaginations.

He makes complicated numbers comprehensible by taking us from the world we know and recognise − everything around us for ten metres, for example, from the size of a giraffe to the size of a human being − in stages down to things so small that size has no real meaning, and upwards to distances that, without his guidance, would seem so great as to be meaningless. The distances and the scale become comprehensible.

Potter takes us beyond the realms of the solar system, past our nearest neighbouring star (four light years away), beyond the outer boundaries of our galaxy, the Milky Way, until, near the end, we hit a solid supercluster of galaxies one billion light years away. And then, a little later, we are dragged through ever-diminishing stages back down to the quarks, which are at the very boundary of what we might call both “size” and “reality”.

This is the most thoughtful pop science book of the last few years, and, along with The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, the most useful to the layman.

1. In the past 20 years or so incredible scientific discoveries have been made.
2. Modern scientific theory should be explained in more straightforward language.
3. Readers of popular science books are made impatient by complicated new theories.
4. Science book writers have found it hard to explain new theories in simple terms.
1. Potter is an elegant and thoughtful man.
2. Potter’s Portable History is a popular science book.
3. Feynman won the Nobel-prize for his Six Easy Pieces.
4. Even Feynman had difficulty understanding some new theories.
1. Potter succeeds in making scientific theory accessible to the general public.
2. He has written various books on mathematics and the history of science.
3. He has carried our research and taught quantum physics at an academy.
4. His Portable History has been influenced by his teaching experience.
1. Potter has a way of making numbers meaningful to the non-specialist reader.
2. The best parts of Potter’s book describe things that readers are familiar with.
3. Potter makes some scientific claims that appear completely meaningless.
4. It is hard to understand what Potter is trying to say about great distances.
1. Potter starts out on his imaginary journey from our nearest neighbouring star.
2. Potter gives a description of the Milky Way towards the end of the book.
3. Potter takes the reader to the very edge of the universe.
4. Potter suggests that quarks have neither size nor reality.
1. The reviewer believes Potter’s Portable History is an outstanding book.
2. The reviewer says no comparable books have been published recently.
3. Potter has contributed to the Oxford collection of modern science writing.
4. Potter’s book is even more useful to the layman than the Oxford publication.

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