Book Review: Genesis
By Guido Tonelli
The comparison essay is one of the hoary old men of Comp 101, and if I had a dime for every thesis statement in every paper I ever graded that followed the shaggy-browed, big-eared, gin-blossomed-nose format of “X and Y are alike, but they are also different,” I would be able to buy a deeply discounted hardback book at Amazon. The modesty of my purse is accounted for not by my former students’ rhetorical brilliance at avoiding the cliché but rather by the brevity of my teaching career: after three and a half years, it became apparent to me that if I continued to teach freshman comp, somebody was going to die, and I wasn’t sure whether it was going to be one of them or me. So academia and I parted ways, both of us doubtless better for the break up, but the heart of the academy—the drive to learn, to know, to show—still beats in my heart, which is why I am sitting here on a Saturday afternoon staring at a computer screen in the foreground and the long, low light of the western sky sliding toward night in the background gathering my thoughts into a review of Guido Tonelli’s Genesis: The Story of How Everything Began. I’m a recovering academic; I just can’t help myself.
Tonelli is a particle physicist, and his volume leverages the biblical creation story not to compare the stories of beginning told by religion to the one told by science but rather to serve as a familiar frame on which to hang the likely less familiar concepts of virtual particles, inflation, super symmetry and stellar evolution, chunking contemporary cosmology into chapters that take us from the beginning void through 13.8 billion years in seven “days” whose durations range from 10-43 seconds to 4.8 billion years (making it pretty damned hard to set your watch to a constant hour). The events of Tonelli’s days and those in the Bible are more a study in contrast than in comparison—per the Bible, the creator turned the lights on on Day 1, while the primordial photons of the cosmic background radiation begin finally to fly in the “Day Four: And Then, at Last, There Was Light” chapter of Tonelli’s recounting. But take the frame as just that, and those “day”-long chapters serve the science in good stead, allowing the author to focus on what happened at key points in the universe’s history—and have some fun with chapter names:
· In the Beginning Was the Void – The quantum vacuum fluctuation that birthed the universe and time
· Day 1: An Irresistible Breath Produces the First Wonder – Inflation (from 0 to 10-11 seconds)
· Day 2: The Delicate Touch of a Boson Changes Everything – The Higgs field/boson, super symmetry, symmetry breaking re: matter and antimatter and the breaking of the weak force from electromagnetism (10-11 seconds to 10-6 seconds)
· Day 3: The Birth of the Immortals – The quark-gluon plasma; the formation of protons, neutrons, electrons and neutrinos (10-6 seconds to 3 minutes)
· Day 4: And Then, at Last, There Was Light – An opaque, electromagnetic universe in which the first atoms form becomes transparent (3 minutes to 380,000 years)
· Day 5: The First Star Lights Up – The light elements (hydrogen and helium) form, and the reign of gravity leads to the formation of the first generation of stars, the megastars (up to 300 times the mass of our sun) (380,000 years to 500 million years)
· Day 6: And Chaos Disguised Itself as Order – Gravitational force draws stars, black holes, dark matter, etc., together to form galaxies and clusters of galaxies, and stellar evolution generates heavier and heavier elements (500 million years to 9 billion years)
· Day 7: A Swarming of Complex Forms – Nebulae filled with elements born through the lifecycle of the stars condense into new stars with planetary systems, including ours in the Orion arm of the Milky Way (9 billion years to now)
As these chapter titles might suggest, Tonelli uses the biblical Genesis as a conceit rather than as a comparison to contemporary cosmology. That a particle physicist has wandered into cosmology at all, much less pen a book on the subject, may be surprising to some, but as Tonelli notes, it is only by crashing particles together at the sort of super-high energies and near-light speeds that can be obtained in immense supercolliders that we can come close to recreating the physics that governed the infant universe in its first second—in this era, cosmology is particle physics. As a member of the team that used the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN to detect the Higgs boson, Tonelli’s bona fides are beyond question. The first 96 pages of his 222-page book are devoted to the period from Big Bang to 10-6 seconds after Big Bang, a time when the initial symmetry of the universe was broken: as the temperature in the early universe dropped, the Higgs field—which permeated the universe then and still does, at least according to the Standard Model—dropped from an excited state into a state of equilibrium, which caused the electroweak force to break into the weak nuclear and electromagnetic forces and those particles that interact with the Higgs field (the W and Z bosons [the weak force], leptons, quarks, etc.) to acquire mass, while those particles that do not interact with the Higgs (photons and gluons) remained massless. If none of the above makes any sense to you—and I will admit that, even after reading Genesis and poking around on the internet to learn more, I’m still not sure why the Higgs field’s drop from an excited state to a state of equilibrium triggered the split in the electroweak force, but I am a little too old and a lot too lazy to go back and get that physics degree, so I’m just going to trust that the folks who speak the language have done their math homework and know what they’re talking about—that’s okay since my real point was not the physics but rather the fact that Tonelli’s particle passion accounts for roughly half the book, while the 13.8 billion years after the Higgs’s heyday at 10-11 seconds post-Big Bang is covered in, yes, more chapters but roughly the same number of pages.
Translating abstruse concepts into prose that may be easily comprehended by those who are not themselves initiates in a field is a challenge, one that Tonelli attempts to mitigate not only by hanging the science on the “seven days” conceit but also by employing present tense when describing past events in an effort to create a sense of adventure and immediacy and evoke in the reader a “you are here/now” sensation. I’m sure many readers will find this effective, but it drove me batshit crazy. I am more than fine with talking about the past as the past and don’t need to be breathlessly present at the birth of the first star to be interested in said birth—I mean, I can see how paying $80 to be immersed in a van Gogh could be really cool (though I’d rather not have to pay $80 for the experience), but being immersed in the core of the first megastar as fusion commences? That’s a little too toasty for my comfort. I’m okay with watching stellar nativity from the vantage of history. And don’t get me started on those departures into describing future state in future tense while pretending to be present in the past (I think all of Dickens’s ghosts manifest in the carnage of tenses that is pages 97 through 99). Because this is a translation—and because my lazy ass is not going to learn Italian so I can do my own translation from the original—it’s hard to know where Tonelli stops and his translators begin. But the shifts in verb tense are so frequent and brutal they gave this old English teacher whiplash. Combine my tension over tenses with frequent sentence fragments and the seeming employment of what I call the “bucket’o’commas” philosophy of punctuation—i.e., take a bucket, fill it with commas, and toss said commas into the air over the manuscript; wherever they land is where they stay—and there’s at least as much blue ink from my pen as black ink from the printing press spread across my copy. Note to Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Hire a fucking copy editor next time. I’m available . . . for a fee.
Quibbles with rhetorical choices and mechanics aside, Genesis conveys the history of our universe as current cosmology understands it with clarity so that readers new to the topic can comprehend the general outline of how what is came to be and with sufficient detail that those more familiar with the science can find some new illumination within its pages (the discussion of the Higgs boson’s role in the breaking of symmetry between matter and antimatter in Chapter 2 shed some light for me). Tonelli knows his physics like I know the age spots on the back of my right hand, but for all his knowledge, it’s his very human heart that drives this book. The wonder and awe that surely led him to physics in the first place are evident everywhere in the work, but they come to the fore in the last two sections, “The Human Factor” and “Epilogue: The Massacre of the Assumption.” In the former, he meditates on the power of imagination and the symbolic as drivers of human culture and society, tracing them from 65,000-year-old paintings made by Neanderthals in the caves of Spain to the equations of modern science. In the latter, he explains the genesis of his Genesis at a conference in Modica, Sicily in February 2018. Read the matter of these last few pages, and the matter of all that has come before is realigned, Tonelli’s purpose clear. I won’t spoil this origin story for those of you who have not yet but wish to in future read the book, but I don’t think ending with Tonelli’s last words as to his purpose for writing spoils anything about the book or the experience of reading it: Genesis was written “[t]o allow everyone to have the great story of origins that modern science has given us, to understand our deepest roots, and to find ideas with which to face the future” (222).
Learn more about Guido Tonelli and his work.