Author: Russell Stannard
Publisher: Oxford Univeristy Press 2010
Price: £14.99
Isbn: 9780199585243

This is a curious book from Russell Stannard, former head of physics and astronomy at the Open University. Superficially, it’s an overview of cosmology, high-energy physics and quantum mechanics, emphasising the limits of knowledge in these areas.

Stannard distinguishes his book from John Horgan’s The End of Science (1996), which argued that no more big discoveries remained. Rather, his argument is that while many fundamental discoveries may still come, the extent of the knowledge accessible to science is inevitably limited. Some reasons for this are pragmatic, such as the apparent impossibility of building particle accelerators large enough to achieve the energies that nuclear physicists would like. There’s also the apparent impossibility of (dis)proving string theory or the different interpretations of quantum mechanics. Some aspects of the workings of the Universe may just be beyond our comprehension.

But something more is going on. Stannard is also a committed Christian, winner of the Templeton Project Trust Award for “significant contributions to the field of spiritual values”, and author of such books as The God Experiment: Can Science Prove the Existence of God? and Science and the Renewal Of Belief. It’s this side of his interests that provides the subtext to the book, in what seems a slightly disingenuous fashion.

There’s only the odd explicit diversion into theology. Philo and St Augustine appear, by way of Kant, in a section on the inability to say what mass or electric charge is. And there’s a curious characterisation of the late Fred Hoyle as a “one-time atheist”. If Hoyle adopted any religious belief, it’s unremarked by his several biographers.

Stannard’s introduction states that his book is opposed to the claim that “science is the only route to knowledge” – “while seeking to promote an appreciation for the achievements of science, it is also intended to engender an even greater sense of awe when faced with the mystery of existence.”

The book ends with an attack on claims for a potential ‘Theory of Everything’, on the grounds that it could not account for “consciousness, free will, aesthetics, morals, the spiritual”. No one’s ever seriously claimed that any hypothetical ToE could or would address such areas of metaphysics or psychology. Stannard’s inclusion of “the spiritual” rather begs the question.

As Hoyle often remarked, Western religion commonly holds that science is incapable of explaining the Universe. (He preferred to stand alongside the ancient Greeks in believing there was an ultimate discoverable order.) Stannard’s book lands squarely in this tradition – with the novel twist that this argument for a God of the gaps is never quite made explicit. One is reminded of the lacunæ that appear when Creationists use the language of ‘Intelligent Design’.