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

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

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more