Katie Melua's bad science
Katie Melua's latest single, Nine Million Bicycles, entered the charts this week at No 5. In the past, I have found her ballads to be enchanting, but Katie's latest little ditty is deeply annoying, because she demonstrates a deep ignorance of cosmology and no understanding of the scientific method. According to the opening lyrics:
There are nine million bicycles
in Beijing,
That's a fact,
It's a thing we can't deny,
Like the fact that I will love you
till I die.
in Beijing,
That's a fact,
It's a thing we can't deny,
Like the fact that I will love you
till I die.
We are 12 billion light-years from
the edge,
That's a guess,
No one can ever say it's true,
But I know that I will always be
with you.
the edge,
That's a guess,
No one can ever say it's true,
But I know that I will always be
with you.
When Katie sings "We are 12 billion light-years from the edge", she is suggesting that this is the distance to the edge of the observable universe, which in turn implies that the universe is only 12 billion years old. This is incredibly frustrating, because there are thousands of astronomers working day and (of course) night to measure the age of the universe, and the latest observations imply a universe that is almost 14 billion years old, not 12 billion.
I suspect that Katie took some poetic licence in order to make her lyrics scan. She replaced the bisyllabic number "14" with the nearest monosyllabic number, namely 12". This alteration is just about acceptable, but the next line in the song is unforgivable. To say that the age of the universe is "a guess" is an insult to a century of astronomical progress. The age of the universe is not just "a guess", but rather it is a carefully measured number that is now known to a high degree of accuracy.
As soon as the idea of the Big Bang was proposed in the 1920s, astronomers set about trying to work out when the bang happened. Initial estimates were, not surprisingly, wildly inaccurate, but by the 1980s it was known that the universe was 15 billion years old, give or take 5 billion years. Today, the very latest data implies that the age of the universe is precisely 13.7 billion years. This is an astonishing result, because astronomers are giving the first decimal place in their estimate of the age of the universe, implying a hitherto unheard-of level of confidence in their measurements. We are entering a new era of so-called precision cosmology.
In short, Katie Melua has no right to call the age of the universe "a guess" or quote it as 12 billion years when we now know it to be 13.7 billion years old. You might think that I am being rather uptight, but the role of the scientist is slowly being undermined with a growing belief that scientific results are merely subjective guesses that go in and out of fashion. In fact, scientific results are a careful attempt to objectively measure reality, and although they may be refined over time, they are always our best hope of getting at the truth. In light of this, I propose that Miss Melua rewrite her opening verse so that it reads:
We are 13.7 billion light-years from
the edge of the observable universe,
That's a good estimate with
well-defined error bars,
Scientists say it's true, but
acknowledge that it may be refined,
And with the available information, I predict that I will always be
with you
the edge of the observable universe,
That's a good estimate with
well-defined error bars,
Scientists say it's true, but
acknowledge that it may be refined,
And with the available information, I predict that I will always be
with you
· Simon Singh's latest book is Big Bang, a history of cosmology.
Simon was subsequently contacted by Katie who was also interested in cosmology and agreed to re-record the song with Simon's new lyrics
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