Goethe’s Faust’s question about “what holds the world together at its core” was certainly the inspiration for the choice of title. It’s the laws of nature, that’s the answer of the British writer Brian Clegg, and he describes them in the main parts of his book. The English title “Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe” focuses on the term “pattern”, in the German edition it appears in the subtitle as “patterns in nature”. This term is a guiding principle for the author that runs through the entire book. In the introduction he writes: »We understand the world around us in terms of patterns. This does not necessarily mean patterns in the visual sense, but rather processes and phenomena that occur regularly.« You have to take this into account if the use of the term pattern seems a bit strange in some places.
From space-time to the jet stream to knot theory
The first chapters are devoted to the physics of the macro and microcosm. The cosmic background radiation, which some theoretical physicists had already predicted in the 1950s, could actually be detected about 20 years later. Photographed by increasingly precise space telescopes, it now represents a pattern that “continually tells us more about the beginnings of the universe.”
The author then explains the mathematical form of representation of the Minkowski diagram as a “pattern of space-time”. With the help of these two-dimensional diagrams (one dimension for space, the other for time), the phenomena of Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which are very surprising for laypeople, can be clearly presented – without mathematical formulas. Clegg demonstrates this clearly.
As an example of patterns in the microcosm, he chooses a table that reflects the Standard Model of particle physics. This describes the importance of the elementary particles and the relationships between them. Patterns can be seen when subatomic particles collide at nearly the speed of light in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, creating new particles. This is how the Higgs particle could be detected a few years ago. Following his main idea, the author presents a theoretical model, so-called Feynman diagrams, with which the interactions between particles can be illustrated without any formulas.