Beyond UFOs – Jeffrey Bennett ***

Jeffrey Bennett does a lot of public talks, and admits that he often has to let people down gently that he isn’t talking about UFOs and little green men. The important point here is the word ‘Beyond’. The book is about whether extra-terrestrial life exists, and where it’s like to be found, not about visiting aliens. (He also tells a sad but smile-raising story of giving a public talk where he expected a few tens of people to turn up and in fact the hall was packed out. It seems the advertisements had promised a talk on astrology rather than astronomy – but Bennett kept the audience anyway, and gave them something to interest them.)

It’s entirely understandable that he kept that audience. Bennett is clearly a good, engaging speaker, because a lot of his text comes across just like that, and it’s not a bad thing. It feels personal, warm and interesting. The book spends quite a while on how the Earth came into being and how life was formed, so we can extrapolate to the rest of the universe. It then gives us a tour first of the solar system and possible homes for life there, and then considers what we know or can speculate about planets and moons around other stars. This is well done, although to be honest, when you’ve heard about one moon of a gas giant, they all get rather the same – it’s a bit like being taken on an architectural tour of a modern housing estate.

Leaving aside that things do get a little dull in those middle chapters, the other problem is that however excited Bennett can get about bacterial life, it’s not so thrilling for many of us, and I have a bit of sympathy for those who do hope for something a bit more Star Trek. He does spend some time on why any aliens advanced enough to have interstellar travel wouldn’t need to do the sort of things UFO owners are supposed to do – and this is good – but there’s still a slight feeling of over promising. This also comes through in his arguments for why we should be establishing a base on the moon and sending manned expeditions to Mars, which are unconvincing when you consider what other things science could do with that kind of money.

The subtitle here is The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Its Astonishing Implications for Our Future. In the end, this emphasizes why the book was a bit of a let-down despite being well written. I just didn’t get the feel of any astonishing implications for our future. Bennett’s enthusiasm is obvious and delightful – saying anything negative about this book feels a bit like kicking a puppy. The topic is covered reasonably well. But I didn’t feel this added anything to the other ‘search for alien life’ type books that have been around for a while.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Jo Reed

Comments

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

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

Vector - Robyn Arianrhod ****

This is a remarkable book for the right audience (more on that in a moment), but one that's hard to classify. It's part history of science/maths, part popular maths and even has a smidgen of textbook about it, as it has more full-on mathematical content that a typical title for the general public usually has. What Robyn Arianrhod does in painstaking detail is to record the development of the concept of vectors, vector calculus and their big cousin tensors. These are mathematical tools that would become crucial for physics, not to mention more recently, for example, in the more exotic aspects of computing. Let's get the audience thing out of the way. Early on in the book we get a sentence beginning ‘You likely first learned integral calculus by…’ The assumption is very much that the reader already knows the basics of maths at least to A-level (level to start an undergraduate degree in a 'hard' science or maths) and has no problem with practical use of calculus. Altho

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on

Search This Blog