Page 45 Review by Stephen
You remember that advertisement with an amphitheatre full of children asking seemingly simple questions you'd actually have difficulty answering with any degree of conviction or coherence?
"Why is the sky blue?"
"Why do bad things happen?"
"Why must we study trigonometry?"
"If the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, what will happen in the next ten seconds after I flick Mary-Beth's pigtails?"
Now Richard Dawkins and Dave McKean have teamed up for a book of scientific enlightenment both for those of school age and those of us who failed to pay close enough attention in class. Dawkins proposes that reality is even more magical than myth, although McKean does have enormous fun illustrating both. Yes, he's brought the entire contents of his usual bag of tricks into play from line and colour to photo-collage. You wait until you meet your 170,000,000-greats-grandmother (she so scaly!).
The myths themselves are pretty special, like the origin of the rainbow. Those of a Christian, Jewish or Islamic persuasion will know the story of Noah well, the rainbow appearing post-flood as a promise from God not to get so tetchy on our asses in future. But this is actually just a retelling of a Sumerian legend from Mesopotamia over 5,000 years ago: part of the epic of Gilgamesh. It's almost identical apart from God's wrath stemming from us being absolutely beastly on all fronts, whereas the multiple gods in the first version were merely kept await at night because we all kept our tellies on too late and too loud.
Anyway, I love refraction and Dawkins explains not only the real truth behind rainbows (both refraction and then reflection within each drop of rain which is why you need the sun behind you; also, each rainbow is a circle - it's just that half of it is 'underground' - and it's a lot more complicated than I thought), but also the steps behind Newton's ingenious series of experiments to prove that white light is composed of a spectrum of colours using multiple prisms, a lens and a very thin slit. Am I the only person who still uses ROYGBIV to remember the order of the colours?
He also talks about evolution and the definition of species in a way I do now recall (to be part of the same species you must be able to breed and produce fertile offspring; a horse and donkey can produce offspring but the resultant mule/hinnie is infertile, whereas poodles and spaniels successfully interbreed all the time - poor spaniels!). He explains the sun, the seasons and what things are made of… earthquakes and aliens… and there really is a chapter called "Why do bad things happen?" That's a bit existential for science book, isn't it? Coming back to the possibility of life on other planets, the man makes a very good case for why - if they're there - they may well look familiar, and it's not just a lack of imagination on our part.
Perhaps most fascinating for me was the introduction in which Dawkins talks about telescopes and time and three definitions of magic: 'supernatural magic', 'stage magic' and 'poetic magic'. He's delightfully blunt about charlatans. Above all, although the two creators here have made the book thoroughly entertaining and accessible to those a third of my age, do not expect as an adult to be given a free pass. Concentration will be required by you all! It's pretty complex stuff, reality.
