Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a biophysicist, a writer, a theologian walk into a bar. OK, so that’s not actually how Dawn was written, but the diverse backgrounds of the three co-writers–Cees Dekker, Corien Oranje, and Gijsbert van den Brink respectively–do sound more like résumés for the cast of a niche joke than for collaborators on a novel. And not just any novel, but one that spans 14 billion years–from the instants after the Big Bang until the moment the manuscript was sent to the printers (or so it seems, given the current events mentioned in Chapter 23, “Space”). As the subtitle “A Proton’s Tale of All that Came to Be” suggests, the protagonist of this novel is also unique; I’ve never read a book from the point of view of a subatomic particle before. (Talk about your unreliable narrators; subatomic particles make up everything!) So what does a proton have to say?
[Read more…] about Science Corner: Dawn – A Proton’s Tale of All that Came to Be