The answer to life, the universe and everything is as far away as ever, as Peter Mullen discovers.

I USUALLY give books with gimmicky titles like this one a very wide berth, but this is the real thing, written by a professional scientist, a PhD in quantum physics, no less. Brooks doesn’t set out to debunk his own trade. He doesn’t bang on about what science doesn’t know.

Instead he asks the much more interesting question of exactly what it is that science knows it doesn’t know?

For example, it appears that 96 per cent of the universe is missing. As Brooks says: “We can account for only four per cent of the cosmos.” What this actually means, I think, is that, when physicists apply all the methods and “known findings” of modern physics to their quest to understand the universe, they find that their calculations work for only a ridiculously small per cent of it. For gravity and the other universal forces to be at the strengths they are reckoned to be, there would have to be 25 times the amount of matter in the universe. The physicists call this missing, invisible stuff “dark matter”.

Brooks is the first scientist I’ve ever read who has the humility and sense of perspective to suggest that perhaps, after all, 96 per cent of the universe is not missing, but that there is something wrong with our calculations of, for instance, the strength of the gravitational force. So the nature of gravity – which we have reckoned to understand since the days of Isaac Newton’s apple – remains something of a mystery to us. How we have been imagining gravity to operate then is one of the 13 things that don’t make sense.

Brooks is equally candid about the mindset of scientists. Like the rest of us they can become beguiled by fashion and believe some theories to be true just because all the other scientists happen to believe them too. On this he quotes the contemporary astronomer JD Fernie: “The definitive study of the herd instincts of astronomers has yet to be written, but there are times when we resemble nothing so much as a herd of antelope, heads down in tight formation, thundering with firm determination in a particular direction across the plain. At a given signal from the leader we whirl about and, with equally firm determination, thunder off in a quite different direction.”

Here also we find discussed what Professor Stephen Hawking has called the “Theory of Everything”.

For the last 50 years, astrophysicists have been saying that their science is on the verge of discovering all that needs to be known about how the universe works. As Hawking said: “Then we shall have the solution in an equation which we can all write on our Tshirts.”

Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out like that and the answer to life, the universe and everything keeps on receding like a mirage.

Specifically, modern physics since Einstein and Bohr has held two basic theories about the nature of matter: one is to be found in the General Theory of Relativity and the other in quantum mechanics. The trouble is that these two theories are utterly incompatible.

There are chapters here on the biological origins of sex and death – thrilling for their surprising insights.

Might we, perhaps, have found a better way to reproduce ourselves than sexual coupling? And why do we have to die? Brooks’ suggested answer to this question is astonishing but – unlike the pseudo-astonishment we find in the New Age claptrap – in a way that is both ingenious and plausible.

There is much else in this highlyreadable book: a “proof” that we do not, despite our protests, have free will. The subject of homeopathy – we all know it’s silly (don’t we?), so why won’t it go away? Brooks also offers the only piece of sound evidence that I’ve ever read for the belief that we have actually been contacted by extraterrestrials – but only once.

Brooks’ theme is that, just when scientists think they are on the edge of a final explanation, something new and contrary is discovered that puts the skids under everything they thought they knew. This causes what Thomas Kuhn called a “paradigm shift”. Or, as Brooks says, quoting with approval George Bernard Shaw: “Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.”