Sky & Telescope April 2001 [antikvár]

Move Over, Harry!Unless you've been living on another planet, youVe heard of Harry Potter, the bespectacled adolescent wizard at the center of four (going on five) best-selling children's books and an eagerly anticipated Hollywood movie (the first, no doubt, of several). My kids, like so many others, drop their video-game controllers and pick up each new volume in the series as soon as it's published. My wife and I, like so many other parents of Potter-crazed progeny,have read the books too and enjoyed them immensely. But there's one thing about the continuing adventures of J. K. Rowling's wonder boy that I find unfortunate: they have upstaged the adventures of another adolescent penned by another British author. Oxford writer Philip Pullmans latest trilogy. His Dark Materials, is especially deserving of attention by astronomy enthusiasts, both those with kids and those who are, in modern parlance, "child fi-ee."The first installment, The Golden Compass, appeared in 1996, followed by The Subtle Knife in 1997 and The Amber Spyglass last year. At the center of the action is 12-year-old Lyra, whose name is the first of many clues that her story will be shaped, at least in part, by astronomical ideas. Rare among modern fictional works, the trilogy uses astronomy for something other than naming an alien planet or preparing Earth for imminent destruction by a wayward asteroid. Pullman employs modern cosmology to explore the implications of a world ruled by the bizarre laws of quantum mechanics, dominated by the gravity of invisible dark matter, and existing for no apparent purpose. As he weaves a tale involving multiple universes, the aurora borealis, and the wandering of Earth's magnetic poles, Pullman gets the science basically right another rarity among modern storytellers.Integral to Lyra's adventure is the quest to identify dark matter. Pullman offers a fanciful explanation: it is particles of consciousness. (I'm not giving away too much here; this revelation comes early in Book Two.) This may sound crazy at first, but to me it's no crazier than "weakly interacting massive particles," "superstrings," and other contemporary fictions. Actually it's more satisfying than physicists' theories, because it does the opposite of what many ideas in modern science do: it gives us a starring role in cosmic evolution. It also gives my kids something deep to talk about with Dad the Astronomer.The Amber Spyglass was published two years after researchers announced that the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating. Surprisingly, Pullman makes no reference to this landmark discovery, which adds "dark energy" to cosmologists' lexicon. I'd bet Pullman could dream up some pretty wild ideas about where this cosmic acceleration comes from. I hope he'll revisit Lyra's enchanting world and try, because my family needs something good to read between Harry Potter books.