Robyn Arianrhod

William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road: How ancient India transformed the world (Bloomsbury, reviewed in ABR, 10/24) explores the ways in which India shaped the ancient (and by extension modern) world. This expansive work is brilliantly readable. I enjoyed it so much that I downloaded the recorded version, which Dalrymple himself narrates. This I have listened to twice. Dalrymple challenges the Western-centric view of history and highlights India’s under-appreciated impact on Asian and Western cultural and economic developments. My second selection is almost a diametrical opposite: a slim book written in incredible haste. Gideon Haigh’s My Brother Jaz (MUP) is an exploration of grief, guilt, remorse, and survival. In January 2024, Haigh impulsively and, one imagines, frenetically began writing about the night his seventeen-year-old brother Jasper was killed. He finished seventy-two hours later. My Brother Jaz is unflinching, painful, and anguished. It is also a remarkable exploration of what it means to go on, to live, to reconcile and remember. ... (read more)

A book connecting Artificial Intelligence with storytelling around a Stone Age campfire certainly piqued my interest, especially given the stratospheric success of its author’s earlier works. Indeed, historian Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2011) was so successful that in 2019 he and his husband, Itzik Yahav, cofounded ‘Sapienship’, an initiative advocating on global challenges through focused conversations and global responsibility. In this spirit, Harari’s latest book, Nexus, focuses on the AI revolution. His Homo Deus (2015) also tackled this theme, but here Harari recapitulates ideas from both these earlier books and then develops them using an innovative framework that reviews history in terms of the impact of information networks. It is the relaying of information, says Harari, that connects Stone Age storytellers and AI.

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If you ever came across a vector in a high-school science class, it probably looked quite simple: a little arrow you might draw on a diagram to show the motion of a train or the forces on a swinging pendulum. An arrow pointing right would cancel an arrow pointing left, or → + ← = 0. Add together two arrows pointing in the same direction, you get one twice as long: →. A rightward arrow plus an upward one? You’ve got yourself a diagonal: → + ↑ =  ↗.

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Robyn Arianrhod is a science writer, and an affiliate of Monash’s School of Mathematics. Her reviews have appeared in Australian Book Review, The Age, Times Higher Education, The Mathematical Intelligencer, Cosmos, and Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Her latest book is Vector: A surprising story of space, time, and mathematical transformation (UNSW Press, 2024).

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Beginning this week on the ABR Podcast, we celebrate the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize shortlist over three episodes. In each episode, one of the three shortlisted authors will read their story – also published in the August issue of ABR. The overall winner of the Jolley Prize will be announced at an event at Gleebooks in Sydney on August 15. Proceeding in alphabetical order, Episode One features Kerry Greer’s ‘First Snow’.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Robyn Arianrhod considers the state of popular science writing in the Australian literary landscape. She argues that in-depth science writing with popular appeal and literary value is increasingly hard to find in Australia. And where exemplary works of this kind are published, they are rarely recognised with reviews or literary prizes. Robyn Arianrhod is an Affiliate in Monash’s School of Mathematics and her new book is Vector: A surprising story of space, time, and mathematical transformation, published by NewSouth Books. Listen to Robyn Arianrhod with ‘Beyond the mundane: Popular science writing in our literary landscape’.

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After Netflix’s intriguing sci-fi thriller 3 Body Problem streamed into Australia earlier this year, readers rushed out in droves to buy the book on which the series is based: Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (2008), which was first translated into English in 2014. Most reviews have focused on the philosophical, literary, and cultural aspects of the book – and they are, indeed, fascinating. But the thing that interests me here is the accurate scientific detail that Liu uses to drive the story. Of course, this is sci-fi, so ultimately he presses real concepts into unreal (but imaginative) service. Still, much more physics and maths appear in his book than in the Netflix series, which, according to Tara Kenny’s review in The Monthly (April 2024), ‘offers a welcome workaround’ the science through visual effects. In the book, by contrast, ‘Lengthy passages are spent dutifully explaining physics theories and technological functionality, which is likely to deter readers who haven’t thought about science since they dissected a rat in high-school biology.’

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Let’s face it, quantum mechanics mystifies most of us. But as Quantum Drama shows, it baffled its creators, too – so much so that some of them turned to suicide, drink, or psychiatry (Carl Jung was a favourite). Who wouldn’t go crazy, trying to get their head around such bizarre happenings as subatomic particles sometimes being wave-like, and a theory that cannot tell you the particle’s definite state – its position and velocity, say – before you measure it? In ordinary ‘classical’ physics, by contrast, you can predict in advance every point on the trajectory of an ordinary object, such as a ball or a spacecraft, launched from any given place with any particular velocity. But quantum theory does not play by these long-established rules: until you observe the particle, all the theory can tell you are the chances it will show up at various places. As Einstein asked, ‘Do you really believe the Moon is only there when you look at it?’

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During a recent lunar eclipse, I marvelled as Earth’s shadow nibbled away the Moon’s light. This creeping shadow testified to the awesome movement of the celestial spheres, Earth inching along its trajectory around the Sun while the Moon fell around Earth until, on this special night, all three bodies were closely aligned in the same plane: Sun, Earth, Moon. A related alignment occurs each month, when the Sun’s light is reflected from the full, uninterrupted Moon. We can see it because the Moon orbits Earth in a slightly different plane from that of Earth’s motion around the Sun. But on this night, the Moon was passing through a point where these two planes intersected, so that Earth directly blocked the light from Sun to Moon.

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The Best Australian Science Writing (BASW) anthology is here again, and readers are in for a treat: a wide-ranging selection of easy-to-read articles describing some of the amazing science that is happening right now.

Of course, it is an impossible task, choosing the ‘best’ writing, and in her introduction editor Donna Lu acknowledges her subjectivity. It is the same for a reviewer, and since I don’t have room to name everyone, I won’t single out my own favourites.

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