Skip to main content

The Transit of Venus – Peter Adds et al ***

Not the Shirley Hazzard novel, nor any one of a range of other science books that have picked on this title, but a strange confection from the New Zealand publisher Awa Press. The publisher’s location is relevant, as will become clear.
Before I read anything about it, I was always a bit dubious about the significance of a transit. Marking when Venus crosses the face of the Sun as seen from Earth, it seemed to smack of the sort of planetary alignment that astrologers get so excited about – the sort of thing that will inevitably happen, but is very ‘so what’ish. However, the transit was to have great astronomical significance, as it enabled the first reasonably accurate measurement of the distance the Earth was from the Sun.
Although the concept originated in the north of England with two fascinating amateurs, measurements would be taken around the world, and it would be a mission to time the transit by Captain Cook that led to the European discovery of New Zealand – hence the rather odd concept of a New Zealand book about a scientific study that initially took place in Lancashire, England.
I refer to the book as a confection as it is a collection of separate essays derived from a lecture series and suffers from all the weaknesses such books tend to have. There is no consistency, no attempt to provide any flowing narrative – so we get articles about early man and Stonehenge (yes, there is a tenuous connection), measuring the transit itself, Cook’s voyages and the future of science all squeezed together cheek by jowl. It also means that there is a fair amount of repetition. Most irritating is the fact that both the introduction and one of the articles goes into very similar details about the early transit observers Crabtree and Horrocks.
The weakest of the essays is the last one, which is a bit self-indulgent, making the valid point that science still has plenty to discover, but in an overly florid and hand-waving way. I was also a little thrown by the comment in Duncan Steel’s piece ‘To the Farthest Ends of the Earth’ that William Crabtree lived ‘in Salford, a city 30 miles away [from Liverpool] in Greater Manchester’. In Crabtree’s day, Salford was neither a city nor in Greater Manchester, which didn’t exist, so this seems rather anachronistic.
However there was plenty of good stuff too. I particularly enjoyed Richard Hall’s piece ‘The Road to Stonehenge’, leading eventually not to the expected location (though it does feature) but the modern Stonehenge Aotearoa in New Zealand. Equally readable and informative was the ‘Voyages with Cook’ section. And there’s no doubt that there’s plenty to find out here about transits of Venus and New Zealand’s often ignored place in the scientific world. But it’s a shame that these pieces weren’t woven into a seamless whole, and were left to stand alone.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more