Are We Getting the Real Stuff in Popular Science?

Sean Carroll is one of the best writing scientists in the business. He’s the paragon of a writer who understands his subject completely and can explain it with clarity and ingratiating authority. The physicist transforms concepts in his field into prose that makes lay readers like me think we can understand the emergence of spacetime and quantum mechanics and explain them to friends at dinner parties. Which I have done, thanks in part to two of Carroll’s books The Big Picture and Something Deeply Hidden.

Carroll has a felicitous phrase for his approach to describing “the world at its deepest level,” and that’s “poetic naturalism.” He adopted the phrase from poet Muriel Rukeyser, who wrote, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” Throughout his career, for years as a research professor at Caltech, and now a professor of natural philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, Carroll, 55, has told stories about the ways of the natural world—poetic in how they ring true.

Which is why Carroll’s latest book, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion—the first in a trio of books that verse readers in the laws of the universe—is a jolt. It exposes an anxiety lurking beneath the surface of popular science, which is we’re never getting the full picture. And why not? Because we’re missing math. In The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, Carroll sets out to rectify our wayward knowledge. You can read all the words you like about Einstein’s theory of general relativity, how mass and energy cause spacetime to curve, Carroll writes, “but until you understand this equation you won’t really understand Einstein’s theory”: 

Carroll fleshes out the relatively short book with patient and cogent explanations of the equation’s symbols and the