The Clockwork Universe: Brief Book Review
History, from the Beginning (Book #16)
In 2018 I realised my knowledge of history was plain bad. This series charts my re-education, starting from the big bang and working my way to present day one book at a time. (Learn more)
When I was 7 I overheard one of the older kids talking about learning this strange thing called ‘times tables’. I remember thinking: ‘Wow, I can’t wait until I get to do some woodworking too.’ To my disappointment I later discovered times tables have nothing to do with actual tables.
Yet we’re taught things like times tables and the law of gravity like they’re self evident. I can still see my jaded secondary maths teacher peering over his rimmed glasses no doubt thinking, it’s a2 + b2 = c2, obviously. However we forget that for most of human history, these ideas were not obvious at all.
In The Clockwork Universe, Dolnick documents the origins of the mathematical ideas we now take for granted. Like how in the late 17th Century Liebniz and Newton both stumbled across the concept of using axes to measure change over time, inventing what we would now recognise as a graph. While trivial today, this was a revolutionary new approach to visualising data that led to some of the most defining discoveries of the decade.
Exploring complex ideas from their inception helps peel away the cult of expectation that can inhibit their understanding. It’s comforting to know that when you next struggle with a basic maths problem, at some point in time a world-class mathematician also struggled with the same thing.
