The Cosmic Verses – James Muirden ****

To be honest, the thought of a science book entirely in rhyme filled me with dread – it seemed like a cross breed between William McGonagall and John Gribbin, a terrifying thought. In practice the reality is much better. The Cosmic Verses is a charming read in which James Muirden manages to pack a surprisingly broad view of the history of our ideas on the universe into verse form. The style is a loose rhyming structure, though occasionally he has a little section in a different form, such as limerick. There are also short side notes where a point needs a little more explanation – where these are more than a couple of words, they too rhyme.

The book is largely chronological, only having major hiccups by ignoring the timing of the Judeo-Christian inputs to ideas on creation and slotting them in to later interpretations, and in a decidedly unbalanced portrayal of religious impact on science that conveniently forgets, for example, who was responsible for the final destruction of the library at Alexandria. Muirden is also a little harsh on medieval science, which had more ideas about (for instance) the shape and size of the universe than he represents, although he does brings out some partially forgotten names like Grosseteste.

Wisely, Muirden makes strong use of personalities along the way. There are the expected figures like Copernicus and Kepler, but it’s good to see him bringing in other, perhaps less known, individuals like Annie Jump Cannon and Henrietta Swan Leavitt, whose undoubted contribution to scaling the universe is sometimes forgotten. Amazingly, and it’s a real mark of just how good Muirden is, some of the text explains the science better than any other book I’ve come across. For instance, Muirden’s explanation of Ole Romer’s method for calculating the speed of light is the best I’ve seen.

If I have a moan it’s the gratuitous use of Stephen Hawking who only seems to be in there for the sake of mentioning him – and if you really want to be picky, Muirden is over-dismissive of Fred Hoyle and the steady state theory: “He called his scheme the Steady State… support for it was never great.” This is something of a misrepresentation: there was real uncertainty between big bang and steady state for years, and for a period of time the evidence seemed if anything to favour the latter.

This is a lovely little book – it doesn’t take too long to read, the verse is charming, and the content is surprisingly thorough. As a portrait of the universe, I have suffered many worse…

Paperback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Jo Reed

Comments

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily, Introducing Artificial Intelligence is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

Search This Blog