Skip to main content

Beware Invisible Cows – Andy Martin ***

This is a remarkable book, taking a very original approach to popular science that has the potential to be great – and an equal potential to be dire. It’s what I’d define as the first Impressionist popular science book (with the possible exception of the disastrous Everything and More by David Foster Wallace).
Just as the Impressionists in the art world moved away from a literal and accurate reflection of what was seen, instead trying to portray the impact of the visual on the senses, Andy Martin’s meandering book is much more about how the science he discovers along the way in his attempt to search for ‘the source of the universe’ impacts him, than about the science itself.
The result has mixed value. Martin visits locations like the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the LIGO gravitational wave observatory in Washington state – and there gives us a sub-Bill Bryson guided tour and interaction with some of the scientists he meets, and this can be quite interesting. It just hadn’t occurred to me that at 14,000 feet, working on the Keck Observatory means dealing with altitude problems (though most of the scientists work from remote stations without the need to undergo the rigours of high altitude). But at other times, Martin rambles on about things that really are of no interest.
Occasionally he seems not to get the point. This is most obvious when he refers to the reflection in a mirror. He goes on (and on) and about left and right being reversed. ‘This is the inescapable law of left-right reversal, built into the very process of reflection,’ he says. Well, no, it isn’t. Just a moment’s thought would show that there is nothing about reflection that inherently requires a left-right reversal (as opposed to top-bottom, for example). What in fact happens in a mirror is back-front reversal. It turns things inside out like a rubber mould. It’s just our interpretation of what is front and back, left and right, that makes us interpret the image the way we do.
There’s also some pretty ropy stuff about quantum entanglement, where we get the impression that his physicist brother is attempting to build an instantaneous communicator, only after the failure of which does he realize it’s not possible. Sadly this has been common knowledge in the field for a long time – the whole story feels like a myth. (For a more effective investigation of entanglement, see my book The God Effect.)
Overall, I found Beware Invisible Cows frustrating and often verging on the unreadable. The problem with interpreting the science through Andy Martin’s life is you have to be interested in Andy Martin – and I’m not. From my own viewpoint, I couldn’t give the book more than a two star rating, but I’ve actually rated it three as I believe that some people will enjoy the florid writing style and the endless deviations into personal history.
It’s a novel, and interesting attempt – but it’s not for me.

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

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Meteorite Hunters - Joshua Howgego *****

This is an extremely engaging read on a subject that everyone is aware of, but few of us know much detail about. Usually, if I'm honest, geology tends to be one of the least entertaining scientific subjects but here (I suppose, given that geo- refers to the Earth it ought to be astrology... but that might be a touch misleading). Here, though, there is plenty of opportunity to capture our interest. The first part of the book takes us both to see meteorites and to hear stories of meteorite hunters, whose exploits vary from erudite science trips to something more like an Indiana Jones outing. Joshua Howgego takes us back to the earliest observations and discoveries of meteorites and the initial doubt that they could have extraterrestrial sources, through to explorations of deserts and the Antarctic - both locations where it tends to be easier to find them. I, certainly, had no idea about the use of camera networks to track incoming meteors, which not only try to estimate where they wi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Against the Odds - John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin ****

The number of women working in STEM subjects has expanded dramatically, but as John and Mary Gribbin make clear, in the history of science this is a very recent occurrence. Here, they bring us the stories of 12 women, from Eunice Newton Foote, born in 1819, to Vera Rubin, born in 1928 - effectively covering nearly 200 years in that Rubin died as recently as 2016. There are some names that will already be familiar from popular science histories (and deservedly so). You will find, for instance, Dorothy Hodgkin and Rosalind Franklin represented. But there are plenty like Foote that few will have come across, including Inge Lehmann, Chien-Sung Wu and Lucy Slater. While arguably Foote is there primarily to demonstrate the difficulties she faced (her discovery of an aspect of greenhouse gas behaviour was independently bettered within weeks), the rest have all made significant discoveries or developments against the odds and often missed out the recognition the deserved. The most prominent ob...
Post a Comment
Read more