The Ascent of Gravity by Marcus Chown review – the fascinating story of a fundamental force
The Cambridge polymath William Whewell wrote in 1837 that Isaac Newton's introduction of a universal law of gravity a century and a half earlier was "indisputably and incomparably the greatest scientific discovery ever made". The judgment still looks sound. Gravity continues to make headlines, as we saw last year when astronomers first directly observed gravity waves, predicted a century before by Albert Einstein using his theory of gravity. This was not revolutionary theory, he often said, but simply a rational development of the Newtonian framework it superseded.
In The Ascent of Gravity, the science writer and former astrophysicist Marcus Chown traces our understanding of gravity from Newton's pioneering ideas to the present state of well-informed perplexity. Einstein's theory of gravity has passed every observational test with flying colours but no one has succeeded in making it consistent with the other great theory of modern physics, quantum mechanics, which accurately describes the world on the smallest scale. Although physicists have made impressive progress towards a quantum theory of gravity, the subject is in a bit of a mess.
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