Have you ever wondered how hungry rats feel? Or how many primary colors there are, if you look beyond the horizon of human vision? And how does that relate to the self-legitimization of doomsday cults? According to Hannah Fry and Adam Rutherford, at least the latter can be answered very quickly, because everything has to do with each other – and nothing.
Under the motto “Curiosity alone is not enough”, the geneticist and the mathematician bring together nine vaguely related matters that concern people in a collage that is hardly suitable as a compendium entitled “The Ultimate Guide to Absolutely Everything”. All of them are based on questions whose answers cannot be found in the pit of the stomach, or wherever human intuition resides. They are part of a sphere that man can only explain with scientific methods.
The Library of Babylon
The very first fantasy that the authors work through is the all-encompassing library, as designed by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941 with the Library of Babel. “A library that contains all conceivable knowledge might just as well not contain any trace of knowledge,” says a book of all things that claims in its title to explain nothing less than everything, and there is room for on three hundred pages a tale of the universe, time, geometric figures, free will and the love of animals.
That is why one paints in broad strokes, omits generously and already announces this in the title in a footnote (“abridged”), which is only the first of quite a few. After all, as a place of humorous digressions and personal admissions, they often provide punchlines and subtleties. Special treat: numerous completely obsolete and therefore all the more exciting film references, which are probably due to Rutherford.
Hannah Fry and Adam Rutherford: “The Ultimate Guide to Absolutely Everything* (*abridged)”.
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Image: CH Beck Verlag
In contrast, the thematic selection of this hymn of empiricism remains rather colorless. You think you’ve heard almost everything somewhere before, and in fact the book contains little material for aha moments. Those readers who are close to science may feel a vague sense of disappointment at so much inaccuracy and oversimplification.
Humorous instead of insightful
If the use of algorithms is stylized on the stock market as “predatory capitalist high-frequency trading” and elsewhere social media function as “echo chambers of confirmation bias”, it is less the assessment of the scientists employed at University College London than their humor that still matters himself. Incidentally, they have been curating it since 2016 as moderators of the BBC podcast series “The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry”.
It’s only fitting that the one thing you’ll probably learn for the first time in this book of known things is an oddity: All mammals, a 2014 study showed, took just under 21 seconds to empty a full bladder ( Error tolerance: 13 seconds). Does that make a “guide” to the world? That, Rutherford and Fry insist with devotion (and redundancy), only science teaching ignorance can provide. The fact that the latter, just like the dog look favored by breeding, is of course “man-made” and as such is operated by biased, intuitively acting people like the authors is probably the real point of this reading.
It’s hard to say whether the project was designed with such ironic self-reference in mind from the outset, the authors would be capable of it. But now, the “ultimate guide” is a good example that some things are better served in small portions before getting lost in the big loops of constant relativization. Incidentally, an edition of the original is circulating with the subtitle “Adventures in Mathematics and Science”. Even with correspondingly adjusted expectations, you can allow yourself the following hint: You are better off with the English-language podcast.
Hannah Fry and Adam Rutherford: “The Ultimate Guide to Absolutely Everything* (*abridged)”. Translated from the English by Hans-Peter Remmler. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2023. 286 pages, illustrations, hardcover, €23.