Einstein and Lemaître

The first two books in Stuart Clark‘s trilogy of scientific novels (see May 2012) offered up a heady mix of history, physics and intrigue, concentrating on periods when political upheaval coincided with scientific revolution. In the first instalment, The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth, the main characters are Galileo and Kepler; in The Sensorium of God Halley, Hooke and Newton take centre stage. This pattern continues in the trilogy’s concluding novel, The Day Without Yesterday, which begins in 1914 with Albert Einstein fretting over relativity in Berlin while the cosmologist Georges Lemaître dodges bullets in the trenches of his native Belgium. Einstein is the obvious choice for a central character and, initially, Lemaître makes a highly effective foil. A devout Catholic who was decorated for his wartime service and later became a priest, he could hardly be more different from Einstein, a non-observant Jew whose Swiss citizenship kept him out of the fighting. The wartime setting also gives Clark a chance to explore the rise of antisemitism in Germany and the roles that Einstein’s (mostly Jewish) colleagues played in the war effort. The postwar period presents Clark with a problem, however. By the 1920s Einstein’s resolute opposition to quantum theory was starting to nudge him out of the scientific mainstream. Lemaître, for his part, did not make his seminal contribution to cosmology until 1927, when he published a (largely overlooked) paper suggesting that the universe was expanding. That leaves a gap of several years in which the pairing of Einstein and Lemaître seems forced, and the book loses its way somewhat. Another problem is that the minor characters in The Day Without Yesterday – Arthur Stanley Eddington, Edwin Hubble and Niels Bohr among them – are largely one-dimensional, and prone to disappearing from the narrative as quickly as they are introduced. The exceptions are Einstein’s first and second wives, Mileva and Elsa; as in the trilogy’s first two books, the central character’s family life is described, warts and all, in a way that is both detailed and believable. One might have wished for a stronger conclusion to this generally excellent trilogy, but overall, the strengths of The Day Without Yesterday outweigh its weaknesses.

• 2013 Polygon £12.99hb 252pp

Elementary misgivings

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” As a scientific motto, Sherlock Holmes’ famous aphorism takes some beating. Indeed, there are plenty of scientists out there (your reviewer among them) who trace their interest in the subject back to a childhood spent reading and re-reading the adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective. Couple this reservoir of scientific interest with the recent resurgence of Holmesian characters in popular culture, and a book that explains Sherlock’s scientific side with wit and flair ought to find a ready audience. Unfortunately, The Scientific Sherlock Holmes is not that book. For starters, author James O’Brien takes quite a long time to get on to his actual subject. Instead of beginning with the science, he devotes the first 47 pages (nearly a third of the book’s main text) to a largely irrelevant analysis of how the 60 stories in the Holmes “canon” differ from previous works of detective fiction, followed by a flabbily repetitive summary of the main characters. The latter might be useful for readers less familiar with the canon, but O’Brien’s copious references to past works of Sherlockian scholarship will put many newcomers off long before they get there. Likewise, anyone unversed in Holmesian abbreviations such as BOSC (short for The BOSCombe Valley Mystery) or CROO (The Adventure of the CROOked Man) will quickly tire of flipping back to the table in which they are defined. Hard-core enthusiasts won’t mind either of these things, of course – but if they are O’Brien’s real audience, then why frustrate them with such a laboured introduction? Once the book gets going, it is possible to see glimpses of how good it could have been. For example, the chapter on chemistry includes a superb explanation of how Holmes deduced that a character in The Musgrave Ritual had been dead “some days” before being discovered in a tiny sealed chamber. By estimating the volume of the chamber and using the ideal gas law to estimate the quantity of oxygen present, O’Brien, an emeritus professor of chemistry at Missouri State University, is able to show that the man must have expired at least three days before Holmes finds his body. There are several such passages, but not enough to sustain a whole book.

• 2013 Oxford University Press £18.99/$29.95hb 200pp