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From multiverses to cities: Books in brief

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The Allure of the Multiverse

Paul Halpern Basic (2024)

The term ‘multiverse’ was coined in the 1890s by philosopher and psychologist William James, to describe a cosmos without distinction between right and wrong. Decades later, the word entered physics, owing to the 1950s many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Today, it is a source of controversy, says US physicist Paul Halpern. The multiverse, “with realms beyond direct detection”, seems “antithetical to the goal of testability”. But whether right or wrong, debating it is scientifically productive, Halpern maintains.

Unshrinking

Kate Manne Crown (2024)

Researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studied the prevalence of six forms of implicit bias, and found that, from 2007 to 2016, fatphobia was the only one to worsen. As philosopher Kate Manne notes, fatphobia regards fatter bodies as being inferior to thinner bodies, “in terms of not only our health but also our moral, sexual and intellectual status”. She spent most of her life trying to lose weight, until finally deciding to live as she wanted to. Her personal, unshrinking call to action should be widely read.

Not the End of the World

Hannah Ritchie Little Brown Spark (2024)

During her environmental-geoscience degree, data scientist Hannah Ritchie learnt about an endless series of depressing trends in global warming, ocean acidification and more. But now, as deputy editor of the online publication Our World in Data, she finds reasons for hope, as she explains in this fundamentally optimistic book on increasing sustainability. For example, global deforestation has been declining since the 1980s. She calls herself a “misfit scientist” because her team, rather than “zooming into a problem”, learns by “zooming out”.

2020

Eric Klinenberg Bodley Head (2024)

In 2020, New York City had the highest incidence of COVID-19 cases and fatalities of all cities. A “terrible misfortune”, comments sociologist Eric Klinenberg, but a “blessing” for his research. His analytical yet moving account of the pandemic centres on the city but interweaves global evidence, drawing on virology, economics, sociology and the personal stories of seven individuals from five New York City boroughs. Its conclusion is disturbing: COVID-19 did not help the United States to “rediscover its better, more collective self”.

The Weirdness of the World

Eric Schwitzgebel Princeton Univ. Press (2024)

“The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose,” remarked biologist J. B. S. Haldane. Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, paraphrasing Haldane, agrees. He opens: “The world is weird — deeply, pervasively so, weird to its core”. His entertaining book of philosophy and science considers three topics: the cosmos’s fundamental structure, the place of human consciousness in it and what humans should value. But he does not claim to offer definite answers.

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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Cities Aren’t Prepared for a Crucial Part of Sea-Level Rise: They’re Also Sinking

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Fighting off rising seas without reducing humanity’s carbon emissions is like trying to drain a bathtub without turning off the tap. But increasingly, scientists are sounding the alarm on yet another problem compounding the crisis for coastal cities: Their land is also sinking, a phenomenon known as subsidence. The metaphorical tap is still on—as rapid warming turns more and more polar ice into ocean water—and at the same time the tub is sinking into the floor.

An alarming new study in the journal Nature shows how bad the problem could get in 32 coastal cities in the United States. Previous projections have studied geocentric sea-level rise, or how much the ocean is coming up along a given coastline. This new research considers relative sea-level rise, which also includes the vertical motion of the land. That’s possible thanks to new data from satellites that can measure elevation changes on very fine scales along coastlines.

With that subsidence in mind, the study finds that those coastal areas in the US could see 500 to 700 square miles of additional land flooded by 2050, impacting an additional 176,000 to 518,000 people and causing up to $100 billion of further property damage. That’s on top of baseline estimates of the damage so far up to 2020, which has affected 530 to 790 square miles and 525,000 to 634,000 people, and cost between $100 billion and $123 billion.

Overall, the study finds that 24 of the 32 coastal cities studied are subsiding by more than 2 millimeters a year. (One millimeter equals 0.04 inches.) “The combination of both the land sinking and the sea rising leads to this compounding effect of exposure for people,” says the study’s lead author, Leonard Ohenhen, an environmental security expert at Virginia Tech. “When you combine both, you have an even greater hazard.”

The issue is that cities have been preparing for projections of geocentric sea-level rise, for instance with sea walls. Through no fault of their own—given the infancy of satellite subsidence monitoring—they’ve been missing half the problem. “All the adaptation strategies at the moment that we have in place are based on rising sea levels,” says Manoochehr Shirzaei, an environmental security expert at Virginia Tech and a coauthor of the paper. “It means that the majority—if not all—of those adaptation strategies are overestimating the time that we have for those extreme consequences of sea-level rise. Instead of having 40 years to prepare, in some cases we have only 10.”

Subsidence can happen naturally, for instance when loose sediments settle over time, or because of human activity, such as when cities extract too much groundwater and their aquifers collapse like empty water bottles. In extreme cases, this can result in dozens of feet of subsidence. The sheer weight of coastal cities like New York is also pushing down on the ground, leading to further sinking.

Courtesy of Leonard Ohenhen, Virginia Tech

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