COMMENT SPRING BOOKS

(My quick check online showed that pairs

from three species of cotinga sell for US$25 to
$45. I easily found feathers on sale from birds
on the International Union for Conservation
of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species.)
US thief Willie Sutton allegedly said that
he robbed banks because “that’s where the
money is”. Museums are where the feathers
are. In July 2009, senior curator Mark Adams
found the drawers with missing specimens;
16 months later, Rist was caught. He pleaded
guilty to burglary and money-laundering.
The court fined him £125,150 (US$200,000 at
the time), of which he had about 10%. He also
got a mere 12-month suspended sentence,
owing to a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome
(an autism spectrum disorder).
Of the 299 skins stolen, police retrieved
only 102 with the labels intact. More had
been stripped of the essential data that such
labels provide, and 106 were missing. John-
son’s exhaustive sleuthing tracked down some
feathers in 2016, but nothing more.
Museum specimens are a unique, con-
textualized archive, as Robert Prys-Jones,
a scientific associate at the Natural History
Museum, makes clear in the book. They hold
information about where and when species
lived, who collected them and perhaps why;
and they can be studied for visual and genetic
clues. But after interviews with individuals PH YSI CS

Stop all the clocks

in the fly-tying community, Johnson feels
that only some are horrified by the theft. His
investigations revealed that the bulk of the
birds “dissolved into the bloodstream of the
feather underground”, some realms of which
seemed to trade in endangered species and
flout the Convention on International Trade
Andrew Jaffe probes Carlo Rovelli’s study arguing
in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and that physics deconstructs our sense of time.
Flora. As Blinken told me, the art can become
“a pursuit of perfection so intoxicating that its

A
practitioners lose all sense of ethics”. ccording to theoretical physicist network of events onto which we project
The Feather Thief is a riveting read. It also Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: sequences of past, present and future. The
stands, I believe, as a reminder of how an our naive perception of its flow whole Universe obeys the laws of quantum
obsession with the ornaments of nature — be doesn’t correspond to physical reality. mechanics and thermodynamics, out of
they feathers, bird eggs or ivory — can wreak Indeed, as Rovelli argues in The Order of which time emerges.
havoc on our scientific heritage. ■ Time, much more is illusory, including Rovelli is one of the creators and
Isaac Newton’s picture of a universally tick- champions of loop quantum gravity theory,
Stuart Pimm is professor of conservation ing clock. Even Albert Einstein’s relativistic one of several ongoing attempts to marry
at the Nicholas School of the Environment space-time — an elastic manifold that con- quantum mechanics with general relativ-
at Duke University in Durham, North torts so that local times differ depending ity. In contrast to the better-known string
Carolina, and directs the non-profit group on one’s relative speed or proximity to a theory, loop quantum gravity does not
SavingSpecies, www.savingspecies.org. He mass — is just an effective simplification. attempt to be a ‘theory of everything’ out of
tweets at @StuartPimm. So what does Rovelli think is really going which we can generate all of particle phys-
e-mail: [email protected] on? He posits that reality is just a complex ics and gravitation. Nevertheless, its agenda

Drawing Physics Grave New World: The End of Globalization,

Don S. Lemons MIT Press (2018) the Return of History
For millennia, drawings have elucidated Stephen D. King Yale Univ. Press (2018)
chewy concepts in physics, providing a “pre- Economist Stephen D. King’s analysis of
mathematical picture of reality”. Don Lemons globalization is searing and timely, offering
delves into the archive for powerful sketches historical lessons on how political narratives
representing ideas and results from Isaac that abandon the global agenda, such as Brexit,
Newton’s colour theory to the Higgs boson. threaten our economic order.

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 SPRING BOOKS COMMENT

into three parts. In the first, “The Crumbling causality between them.
of Time”, Rovelli attempts to show how In the final section, “The Sources of
established physics theories deconstruct Time”, Rovelli reconstructs how our
our common-sense ideas. Einstein showed illusions have arisen, from aspects of
us that time is just a fourth dimension and thermo­dynamics and quantum mechanics.
that there is nothing special about ‘now’; He argues that our perception of time’s flow
even ‘past’ and ‘future’ are not always well depends entirely on our inability to see the
defined. The malleability of space and time world in all its detail. Quantum uncertainty
mean that two events occurring far apart means we cannot know the positions and
might even happen in one order when speeds of all the particles in the Universe.
viewed by one observer, and in the opposite If we could, there would be no entropy, and
order when viewed by another. no unravelling of time. Rovelli originated
Rovelli gives good descriptions of the this ‘thermal time hypothesis’ with French
classical physics of mathematician Alain
Newton and Ludwig Connes.
Boltzmann, and The Order of Time
of modern physics OUR PERCEPTION OF is a compact and
through the lenses of
Einstein and quantum TIME’S FLOW elegant book. Each
chapter starts with
mechanics. There
are parallels with
DEPENDS ENTIRELY an apt o de f rom
classical Latin poet
thermo­dynamics and ON OUR Horace — I particu-
Bayesian probability
theory, which both INABILITY larly liked “Don’t
attempt abstruse cal-
rely on the concept
of entropy, and might TO SEE THE WORLD IN culations”. And the
writing, translated
therefore be used to
argue that the flow
of time is a subjective
ALL ITS DETAIL. from Italian by Erica
S egre and Simon
Carnell, is more styl-
feature of the Uni- ish than that in most
of joining up these two fundamentally verse, not an objective part of the physical physics books. Rovelli ably brings in the
differing laws is incredibly ambitious. description. thoughts of philosophers Martin Heidegger
Alongside and inspired by his work in But I quibble with the details of some of and Edmund Husserl, sociologist Émile
quantum gravity, Rovelli puts forward the Rovelli’s pronouncements. For example, it is Durkheim and psychologist William James,
idea of ‘physics without time’. This stems far from certain that space-time is quantized, along with physicist-favourite philoso-
from the fact that some equations of quan- in the sense of space and time being packaged phers such as Hilary Putnam and Willard
tum gravity (such as the Wheeler–DeWitt in minimal lengths or periods (the Planck Van Orman Quine. Occasionally, the writ-
equation, which assigns quantum states to length or time). Rather, our understanding ing strays into floweriness. For instance,
the Universe) can be written without any peters out at those very small intervals for Rovelli describes his final section as “a fiery
reference to time at all. which we need both quantum mechanics and magma of ideas, sometimes illuminating,
As Rovelli explains, the apparent exist- relativity to explain things. sometimes confusing”.
ence of time — in our perceptions and in In part two, “The World without Time”, Ultimately, I’m not sure I buy Rovelli’s
physical descriptions, written in the math- Rovelli puts forward the idea that events ideas, about either loop quantum gravity or
ematical languages of (just a word for a given time and location the thermal time hypothesis. And this book
Newton, Einstein and at which something might happen), rather alone would not give a lay reader enough
Erwin Schrödinger than particles or fields, are the basic con- information to render judgement. The Order
— comes not from stituents of the world. The task of physics of Time does, however, raise and explore big
knowledge, but from is to describe the relationships between issues that are very much alive in modern
i g n o r a n c e . ‘ F o r- those events: as Rovelli notes, “A storm physics, and are closely related to the way
ward in time’ is the is not a thing, it’s a collection of occur- in which we limited beings observe and
direction in which rences.” At our level, each of those events participate in the world. ■
entropy increases, looks like the interaction of particles at
and in which we gain The Order of Time a particular position and time; but time Andrew Jaffe is a cosmologist and head of
information. CARLO ROVELLI and space themselves really only manifest astrophysics at Imperial College London.
The book is split Allen Lane (2018) out of their interactions and the web of e-mail: [email protected]

Life’s Vital Link: The Astonishing Role Mistress of Science

of the Placenta John S. Croucher and Rosalind F. Croucher
Y. W. Loke Oxford Univ. Press (2018) Amberley (2018)
This exploration of the placenta’s evolution Nineteenth-century British mathematician Janet
devotedly details the ‘forgotten’ organ’s vital Taylor has been overlooked by history, yet she
role in the womb, and other complex functions. invented navigational tools such as the mariner’s
Immunologist Y. W. Loke also ponders how such calculator, founded an academy and authored
findings could provide insight into his field. textbooks. A fitting tribute to a gifted trailblazer.

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