Skip to main content

How it Ends – Chris Impey ***

There’s a feeling in the publishing business that books on subjects that are a bit of a downer (with the exception of misery memoirs) rarely do well. The subject of this title is about as miserable as they come – how everything from people to the universe ends. Your death. The Earth’s extinction. The end of the universe. Cheerful? Not exactly.
To be fair to Chris Impey, he weaves in a lot of interesting stuff along the way. Despite the title, a lot of it isn’t about endings. Yes, he covers death, but also the nature of life and the Earth’s biosphere. You’ll learn about evolution, what stars are and how they come into being, the big bang and more along the way to the eventual demise of each and every subject. He covers the science with a light touch, but manages to pack in a good amount of information. It’s never difficult to absorb, which with such a big canvas is impressive. And yet it’s hard not to be depressed, especially when he starts off with personal death. It might be inevitable, but this is one subject I’m prepared to have my head in the sand about.
Apart from the subject, the other problem I have with the book is its style. It will appeal to some readers, so I can’t say this is a universal issue, but it doesn’t always work for me. There is an irritating attempt at trendiness that comes through sometimes. It’s interesting that the author is pictured on the back flap in a Hawaiian shirt. This is just the sort of stuff that would appear in the script of a TV show, presented by someone in a Hawaiian shirt to show he’s a ‘man of the people’ not a distant intellectual.
A good example of this is the way the author attributes the saying ‘Predictions can be very difficult – especially about the future,’ to ‘cartoonist Storm P.’ This sounds like someone very trendy, a sort of gangsta rapper of cartoonists. Unfortunately the image (and the attribution) is wrong. Many of us would think it was physicist Neils Bohr who first said this (I certainly did until I looked into it). A few might think it was baseball player Yogi Berra, though that has long been discredited. In fact Bohr did claim the quote was from the artist and writer Robert Storm Petersen (doesn’t sound quite so trendy when put like that, does he?) – but Bohr was wrong. The best information suggests it was first used in the Danish Parliament some time between 1935 and 1939. Even less trendy.
Here’s another example of this over-looseness: ‘[Fred Adams] has a counterculture vibe, like a surfer or a savvy drug user, and he doesn’t seem to take the serious business of the universe too seriously.’ Whoa, dude! Like, no way. Not my kind of popular science.
This isn’t a bad book. There’s lots of good information in it, and when Impey doesn’t get too carried away with being a man of the people it reads well. But the subject is one that doesn’t immediately make you want to read it, and I didn’t come across anything inside that made this feeling entirely go away.

Paperback:  

Kindle:   
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