Skip to main content

The Big Questions: The Universe – Stuart Clark ***

The idea of this rather stylish series of books – hardbacks with no dustcover, but with a ‘hold it closed’ elastic band, like a pocket notebook – is to present a series of key questions about an area of philosophy or science and provide answers to them. Like its companion in the series The Big Questions: Physics, this title takes on the whole of a major topic, cosmology, providing a take on the subject that doesn’t go hugely into the people and history of science, sticking instead to the facts of the matter.
This doesn’t make for great popular science. The whole point of popular science is to put science into context, to talk about how the discoveries were made (and by whom) as well as the science itself. Otherwise, what you end up with is a textbook. In this case it is a very readable introductory textbook – a wide range of topics on the nature of the universe are well covered and presented in a non-technical manner – but it still lacks that fascination that good popular science brings to the topics. Thankfully Stuart Clark does bring a few details into the areas he covers, but this is done quite inconsistently. So, for instance, we get a nice little vignette on Frank Drake and SETI, but very little on major individuals from Newton through Hubble to Einstein who are hugely involved in the story of the discoveries listed.
Generally speaking the broad spectrum of cosmology, with a fair amount of astronomy and astrophysics (with a smattering of related physics) is well covered. What I found slightly odd, though, was the inconsistency in revealing what is and isn’t speculative. So, for instance, we are offered an alternative to dark matter to explain its impact, but the big bang theory is stated as being ‘definitively proved’ – which is just not true. It is by far and away the best supported theory, but it has its problems, and there are alternatives that fit the data. The way the book is divided into questions like ‘How old is the universe?’ and ‘How did the universe form?’ means that the information is structured rather oddly. The first of these questions comes a good way before the other (with ‘What is a black hole?’ amongst those in between) which means Clark has to explain the age of the universe, our best ideas of which are wholly dependent on the model of how the universe was formed, without covering the latter.
As with the Physics book my biggest problem here is knowing who this book is aimed at. It’s too lightweight for students of the subject, but hasn’t enough context for popular science. It’s entirely readable, but rarely captures the imagination. It’s perfectly likeable, has good information and is well presented – it is, in principle, a very useful summary – but I’m not sure who it will appeal to.

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

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting.  Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robot-Proof - Vivienne Ming ****

As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...
Post a Comment
Read more