Library books by Shadrack Antwi

A team of physicists in Amsterdam intercept an alien message sent 40 thousand years ago across the galaxy. Using advanced physics and information theory, they gradually decipher the message. Who are these aliens with the capability to send a message across space all these eons ago? What message do they have for humanity? Did they just want to say hi into the future? Or did they have some dire message to send? Maybe a threat? And will a scientist’s let their desire to get some recognition as the discoverer of an alien message get in the way of sharing this great news of interstellar sentient, technologically more advanced entities, with their colleagues and the world?

Eventually the scientists decipher and confirm that the aliens messages were about a dangerous gravimetric soliton headed earth’s way; but that’s getting ahead of ourselves. There’s a lot more to unpack in this story.

When the story starts we meet Lewis, a post-doc physicist working under Prof Katrien DeVries, a smart as well as beautiful famous physicist at the University of Amsterdam. DeVries has come up with an information theoretic algorithm that scans deep space signals captured by various astronomical telescopes around the world for signs of sentient information in the random noise beamed by the universe. Running DeVries algorithm over some section of space captured by an American telescope, Lewis detects something just like that. Lewis informs Katrien and together with a grad student Annika, they begin to decipher the interstellar messages. Along with the reader, the team dives into information theory, fractals, and astrophysics as they process the aliens’ messages with the best algorithms and luck that some of the brightest human physicists can come up with.

In order to acquire all the available data to fully decipher the messages, the team contacts deep space telescope teams from China to Chile to the United States. Which leads Katrien into some geopolitical intrigue, where the collaboration and competitiveness of physicists meets national security and the interests of politicians such as McConrad, a successful arm-twisting senator from a US state, who thinks the egghead physicists that Katrien works with don’t have enough appreciation for her physical beauty besides her brains, and he may want to fix that by properly attending to her. There is also the affable Chinese Science Minister who takes a strong interest when one of the scientists in his ministry side-steps the usual channels and shares some interesting radio telescope data with Dutch physicists.

With that setting, the plot of The Echo rolls along the channels of physics, guided by the fears and hopes of academic human scientists, and the fears and hopes of aliens initiating timeless bursts of messages streaking across the universe when humans were probably just starting to learn writing and symbolic communication.

The characters are explored to some depth; it leaves room for the reader to ponder quite a bit what this character may be thinking in the midst of this or that situation, which is probably a strength of the Echo. Otherwise, readers who want to understand Katrien and her boyfriend Udan a bit more would need to read one or two prequels to The Echo.

Readers ready to examine cosmic phenomena whose scale and sublimity borders on the fantastical to human minds certainly get served. I certainly enjoyed the descriptiveness the author brought to the astrophysics of the book. It sounded rooted in real scientific knowledge; checking some of the phenomena and objects described in the book in online references does not disappoint. The rich blend of physics tales and takes on individual and collective human behavior make The Echo a worthy read. In sum, I enjoyed The Echo; it felt like the physics tale that everybody should read or listen to at least once.