The Hubble was the space telescope that launched a thousand picture books destined for the coffee table, such as Hubble Legacy . Inevitably, its new, more capable brother, the Webb is following suit. Thankfully, though, this is more than just a picture book as you can only marvel so much over pretty pictures from space. The book is structured into three sections - the first is about the telescope itself, beginning with its predecessors, including, for instance, some interesting material on the pros and cons of using a Lagrange point for a telescope. The second looks at Webb's mission - what it's intended to capture and how it will do that. And the final section, around twice as big as the other two added together, takes us through the already impressive range of Webb imagery. That final section is where many such books descend into pure picture book territory, but Maggie Aderin-Pocock continues to include pages of informative text with diagrams showing, for example, how the sol
Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question. Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book