Skip to main content

From Cosmos to Chaos – Peter Coles ***

There are times when I think there’s a ‘Shoot Ourselves in the Foot’ department at Oxford University Press. It might seem the only explanation for the frequency with which they produce popular science books that are brilliant concepts but terribly executed. In fact, I think the reason is down to their choice of authors. They seem to choose authors on their academic background, rather than their ability to communicate. So what the reader often ends up with is a book that is replete with promise, but that fails to deliver in catastrophic fashion.
This book is perhaps the most dramatic example of this I have ever seen. The subject is fascinating, both in its intellectually engaging nature and its applicability. Yet the contents are a disaster for the popular science reader. Anyone attempting to read it who isn’t at least a student on a maths or physics degree course is doomed to frustration. It simply doesn’t explain enough, and what it does put across makes much too heavy use of maths.
This is hair-tearingly frustrating because the topic is wonderful. In a slim volume of 211 smallish pages, Peter Coles introduces probability theory, the importance of statistics to science and everyday life, the difference between a Bayesian and frequentist approach to statistics and observes how Bayesian statistics could be of great value in getting a better understanding of many areas. And he throws in quite a lot of cosmology, explaining the importance of statistics in the field. Any one of these would make engaging reading in its own right – together it’s a tour-de-force. In content terms this is easily a five star book.
Yet time after time the reader struggles to understand just what is going on. This isn’t helped by an unusually high number of misprints (often missing words rendering a sentence meaningless), but primarily it’s because the language is impenetrable and Coles does not shy away from scattering the page with integral calculus, instantly turning off 90% of the audience. I’ve always felt the famous advice given to Stephen Hawking that each use of an equation halves the audience was exaggerated – and it very much depends how you use those equations – but here they are much too frequent and too complex. Coles also sticks to the representations used in the ‘real’ equations where often these could be simplified by using terms that are more meaningful.
Altogether the resultant effect is huge frustration. For those who can get the point of this book – pretty well any working scientist with a reasonable grasp of maths, for example – it’s highly recommended. And I know scientists are a significant part of the audience for popular science. But a wider audience deserves to access what’s in this book.
I’d like to make a proposition to OUP. How about doing two versions of books like this, the original and one re-written for the general reader by someone who knows how to communicate science outside the scientific community. (I’d even volunteer to write the general reader versions!) Now that really would be something to celebrate. But for the moment there’s more chaos than cosmos in this book.
Hardback:  
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

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more