808 NATURE | VOL 429 | 24 JUNE 2004 | www.nature.com/nature

Bright blue dotThe Privileged Planet: How OurPlace in the Cosmos is Designedfor DiscoveryGuillermo Gonzalez & Jay W. RichardsRegnery: 2004. 464 pp. $27.95

Douglas A. Vakoch

“Our planet is a lonely speck in the greatenveloping cosmic dark,” wrote astronomerCarl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot (RandomHouse, 1994). Reflecting on the image ofEarth sent back from the Voyager 1 space-craft in 1990, he suggested that “our postur-ings, our imagined self-importance, thedelusion that we have some privileged posi-tion in the Universe, are challenged by thispoint of pale light.”

In The Privileged Planet, astronomerGuillermo Gonzalez and the philosopherand theologian Jay W. Richards present amarkedly different view. They argue that our

Requiem for asupercolliderA Hole in Texasby Herman WoukLittle, Brown: 2004. 278 pp. $25, Can$37

Geoff Brumfiel

“Gentlemen, the Chinese have got the Higgsboson.”

So begins A Hole in Texas, HermanWouk’s latest novel, which revolves, ratherimprobably,around the world of high-energyphysics. The 88-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning author of War and Remembranceand The Winds ofWar is famous for his depic-tions of wars and the men who fight them,but his twelfth novel concerns exotic parti-cles and the men (and women) who discoverthem. The result is an amusing and at timesarcane yarn that will make a good summerread for scientists — especially those whohave had a frustrating time explaining theirwork to governments or the popular press.

Set in the not-too-distant future, thebook has as its protagonist Guy Carpenter, asilvery, fifty-something physicist who onceworked on the US Superconducting SuperCollider (SSC), which really existed. AsWouk explains in the novel’s foreword, thesupercollider was a giant US particle acceler-ator designed to find the Higgs boson, anelusive particle that many physicists believeendows other particles with mass. Afterspending billions of dollars on the project,Congress withdrew support in 1993, leavingbehind a couple of thousand unemployedphysicists and a partly dug tunnel in Waxa-hachie,Texas — the ‘hole’of Wouk’s title.

Carpenter has moved on since the SSCwas shut down,but like any good dime-novelhero, his past comes back to haunt him.When word gets out that the Chinese areabout to publish the discovery of the Higgsboson (in Nature, of course), Carpenter isasked to explain the significance of the findto a movie-star-turned-Congresswoman. Bythe time he arrives in Washington, the mediaare swarming around the story, and a secretmemo is circulating on Capitol Hill that theChinese are building a ‘boson bomb’.Word ofthe bomb gets out to the press and Carpenteris rapidly drawn into the ensuing nationalpanic. He is pursued by a “pestiferous ferret”of a reporter, who is determined to find outmore about Carpenter’s graduate-schoolliaison with the female physicist now leadingthe Chinese programme. He is wined anddined by Hollywood bigwigs, who want tomake a movie about the boson bomb. And he is called to testify by an unscrupulousCongressman who voted to kill the super-collider years ago and is now seeking a scape-goat on whom he can lay the blame.

If all this sounds a little absurd, that’s the

Billion-dollar hole: Congress pulled the plug on the real Superconducting Super Collider in 1993.

whole point. Wouk’s work is satire, and itdelivers its fair share of laughs (the movieabout the boson bomb is set to star JuliaRoberts as “the astronaut”). At its heart is an idea summed up nicely by one of thebook’s physicists: “Science today needs hugefunding, and we’re funded by a scientificallyilliterate society.”

That message would be fine if it were notfor the breathtaking arrogance of the book’sphysicist characters who deliver it.They go togreat lengths to trumpet the ignorance of themedia, Congress and the public, and oneeven goes so far as to say that the gap betweensomeone who knows quantum mechanicsand someone who does not is as wide as thatbetween man and monkey. This too could besatire, but reading page after page of the stuffyou get the uneasy feeling that Wouk mightactually mean it. By the way, I got an A minusin quantum mechanics.

This is far from being the book’s only flaw.The scientific explanations are pat and usu-ally come in the form of long e-mails that bogdown the plot. A trip to the hole in Waxa-hachie takes far longer than it should andreads like a giant I-told-you-so. The womenof the novel, whether they be hard-nosedmembers of Congress or top-notch physi-cists, fall helplessly into Carpenter’s power-ful arms. And everybody’s discussion ofthe Chinese people can, at times, verge onracism (“They’re touchingly sentimental,the Chinese, once you’re past those forbid-ding Asian features and the different eyes,”Carpenter declares).

The book’s ending also falls flat. Withoutspoiling too much,I’ll say that the furore overthe Chinese discovery forces the public tofocus on the importance of science. In the

modern world that seems unlikely. After all,the Chinese launched their first man intospace last autumn at a time when the USshuttle programme was out of commission,but no alarm bells sounded.The threat posedby low-tech extremists seems far scarier thanthe rise of Chinese science. It was that fact,along with the rather wistful view of the SSC,that left me feeling that A Hole in Texasis something of an anachronism. Still, it willmake good beach reading for researcherswho want a scientific thriller and a bit ofa chuckle. ■

Geoff Brumfiel is Nature’s Washington-basedphysical sciences correspondent.

books and arts

SUP

ER

CO

ND

UC

TIN

CO

LLID

ER

LA

B/A

P

24.6 books 807 MH 17/6/04 3:49 pm Page 808

© 2004 Nature Publishing Group

books and arts

NATURE | VOL 429 | 24 JUNE 2004 | www.nature.com/nature 809

Since 1979, the industrial city of Linz in Austriahas been the unlikely home of Ars Electronica, a centre for the development and disseminationof digital art and media. The centre has evolvedto include an annual festival, a ‘cyberarts’competition and ‘The Futurelab’, a media labwhere interdisciplinary collaborators design and engineer new installations.

To celebrate Ars Electronica’s 25thanniversary, New York City’s American Museumof the Moving Image is hosting Digital Avant-Garde, a series of exhibitions and screenings of projects that featured prominently in earliercompetitions. Linz will have its own anniversarycelebration during the first week of September.

The New York series, which runs until 18 July,includes John Gerrard’s Portrait Diptych: Nadia(formerly called Networked Portrait), aninteractive portrait that can be changed with the touch of a finger on a screen. Theinstallation, shown here, consists of two liquid-crystal-display touchscreens, eachpresenting the computer-generated image of a particular individual.

By dragging a finger across an eye or the

corner of the mouth in one of the images, theviewer can impart some emotion to theotherwise expressionless visage. When thescreens are turned toward each other, the otherface responds by subtly changing its ownexpression. The two faces then continue torespond to each other.

The portrait is seen as one of the lastbastions of permanence at a time when images can be erased or modified at will. Buteven the portrait, it seems, can be digitized andupdated continually — for example, to reflectone’s mood. Alan Packer

www.aec.at/en/index.asp

Exhibition

Eyes that follow you around the room

planet is significant, perhaps being uniquelysituated to foster both complex life andscientific discovery. Gonzalez and Richardsbelieve that intelligence may be a rare phe-nomenon in our galaxy. They make theircase, in part, by drawing on arguments oth-ers have given before, such as Peter D. Wardand Donald Brownlee in Rare Earth(Springer,2000).But they go far beyond esti-mating the prevalence of extraterrestrial life.As they summarize:“The myriad conditionsthat make a region habitable are also the onesthat make the best overall places for discover-ing the universe in its smallest and largestexpressions.This is the central argument, thecentral wonder of this book.”

Drawing on a framework for inferringdesign proposed by philosopher and mathe-matician William Dembski in The DesignInference (Cambridge University Press,1998), Gonzalez and Richards argue that thecorrelation between the conditions thatmake habitability possible and those thatmake it possible to learn about the Universeis so exquisite and improbable as to suggestintelligent design.

For example,by raising the tides the Moonhelps move nutrients from the land to theocean, fostering life in the intertidal zone. Ifthe Moon were farther from the Earth, theauthors argue,it would need to be much largerto have the same effect on the tides; if it werecloser, it might well be less spherical, causingother problems. So, Gonzalez and Richardsargue, the Moon is located at a distance fromEarth that is very conducive to life. It is also at

an optimal distance for scientific discovery(or measurability), they contend, as the diskof the Moon provides a perfect eclipse of theSun. They argue that without such perfectsolar eclipses, humans would have beendeprived of important information aboutthe Sun’s chromosphere.

A single such instance linking habitabilityand measurability might be dismissed as acoincidence, but Gonzalez and Richardsclaim that the correlation across many phe-nomena cannot be explained by chance. Byincluding astronomical and geological phe-nomena in their search for evidence of pur-pose in the cosmos, The Privileged Planetexpands the discussion of intelligent designfar beyond its usual contemporary focus onthe complexity of biological systems and thefundamental physical constants.

Ultimately, however, the authors are in apoor position to argue that Earth is optimallylocated for both habitability and measura-bility. They try to establish habitabilityrequirements by comparing Earth withother locations in the galaxy. Unfortunately,we lack the data required for a well-reasonedcomparison. If we had many examples ofplanets that do and do not bear life, and anexplanation for why the conditions on someplanets led to life while those on others didnot,we might be able to establish an accuratemetric of habitability. Until then, we areforced to extrapolate measures of habitabil-ity from a sample of one inhabited planet.

Regrettably,any judgements of optimalitymay be biased by the local conditions and

historical contingencies through which ourlife and our science have evolved, rather thanaccurately reflecting the range of possiblepreconditions for habitability and measur-ability. Potential readers of The PrivilegedPlanet would do well first to familiarizethemselves with the biases that can resultfrom this kind of selective sampling. A goodprimer is Nick Bostrom’s Anthropic Bias(Routledge,2002).

Caution seems especially in order giventhat the authors have intentionally limitedthemselves to our knowledge of the Universegained through selected observational sci-ences,such as comparative planetary geology,solar physics and astronomy, rather thanincluding more laboratory-based sciences.Similarly, although the authors attempted toavoid cherry picking instances of measur-ability that support their position by focus-ing on important observations in thesefields, the vagueness of such a criterionmakes their selection rather subjective.

So far, Earth is the only planet we knowthat has the privilege of bearing life thatsearches for signs of other intelligence —whether in the form of other technologicalbeings transmitting evidence of their exis-tence or through patterns indicating under-lying design. It may be some time, however,before we can accurately judge whether ourblue dot is — as planets go — commonplace,unique or somewhere in between. ■

Douglas A. Vakoch is at the SETI Institute,2035 Landings Drive, Mountain View,California 94043, USA.

AR

S E

LEC

TR

ON

ICA

24.6 books 807 MH 17/6/04 3:49 pm Page 809

© 2004 Nature Publishing Group