Stepping Stones to the Stars – Terry C. Treadwell ***

This is the kind of book I would have loved as a ten-year-old. I’m not saying it’s aimed at children, but at the time the whole manned space travel thing was big news, I was happily building plastic models of spacecraft, and I absolutely hoovered up collections of facts about space and space travel.

The book is subtitled ‘a history of manned spaceflight’, but I would make a subtle alteration – I would say it’s a chronicle of manned spaceflight. In a history, I would expect interpretation, comments on the politics, more about the key individuals involved. But what we get here is a bit of historical background, then for many of the US and Soviet manned spaceflight we get details of who went, what experiments they did, what went wrong (something almost always seemed to go wrong), and one or two nice little details picked up from the flight log, or some such source.

The exception is the Shuttle flights, where a whole chunk of them get run through in a few lines, presumably because they were so routine. And that’s the problem, really. This is a book about routine. Of course it covers the big stuff in more detail – Apollo 11, for example, Apollo 13 and the two Shuttle disasters. But the whole exercise gets rather tedious, unless you are a fan of exhaustive detail.

In the end, there are too many basic facts and not enough interpretation. We get little feel for the politics behind the Moon race, or the science of space flight, or the pros and cons of manned spaceflight versus unmanned. Although there a couple of points where Terry Treadwell emphasizes the benefits of having humans on board when something goes wrong, he doesn’t go into the way the Russians had unmanned vehicles ferrying material back from the Moon – or look at the real disadvantages of manned flight in terms of huge extra cost and risk to life.

You might think from the title that there’d be a big section on ‘where do we go from here’, but there’s actually just a page or so. Overall, unless you want a fact book about manned spaceflights, this isn’t a title that is likely to appeal.

ADDED March 2015:

I had totally forgotten this title when I wrote my own book on this topic, Final Frontier, but that is very much aimed at the problem areas described above, with much more interpretation and commentary, and a lot on the future - in essence, what this book should have been for a modern audience.

Paperback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Genetic Book of the Dead: Richard Dawkins ****

When someone came up with the title for this book they were probably thinking deep cultural echoes - I suspect I'm not the only Robert Rankin fan in whom it raised a smile instead, thinking of The Suburban Book of the Dead . That aside, this is a glossy and engaging book showing how physical makeup (phenotype), behaviour and more tell us about the past, with the messenger being (inevitably, this being Richard Dawkins) the genes. Worthy of comment straight away are the illustrations - this is one of the best illustrated science books I've ever come across. Generally illustrations are either an afterthought, or the book is heavily illustrated and the text is really just an accompaniment to the pictures. Here the full colour images tie in directly to the text. They are not asides, but are 'read' with the text by placing them strategically so the picture is directly with the text that refers to it. Many are photographs, though some are effective paintings by Jana Lenzová. T

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question. Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on

Search This Blog