Cosmology: a very short introduction

Cosmology: a very short introduction – Peter Coles ****

The OUP ‘very short introduction’ series provide a quick overview of many, many topics. Sometimes the approach can be so summary that it really doesn’t do the subject justice, but other times it is pitched just right to give the reader all the basics, so they can go on to read more if needed, but have all the essentials to hand.

Peter Coles’ addition to the series on cosmology very much fits into the second camp. It fits in a surprising amount of detail into a compact pocket book of around 130 pages. There is no attempt here to dumb down – Coles gives us an erudite but largely approachable introduction to the universe and its origins. Although we start with a touch of mythology, this isn’t a history of the subject in chronological order. We jump straight, for instance, from Hubble and his diagram to the Hubble telescope. But that makes sense in the way that Coles is building the subject.

It’s fair to say that if you read this little book, you really will be well prepared to take on discussions about the origin of the universe, will have a good grasp of what is and isn’t known about it, and will be able to knowledgably raise an eyebrow at some of Stephen Hawking’s more outrageous pronouncements.

If I’m being picky, the language can be a little dry. Sentences like ‘In mathematics, a singularity is a pathological property wherein the numerical value of a particular quantity becomes infinite during the course of a calculation,’ don’t do a lot for the general reader to illuminate the nature of the singularities at the heart of the big bang or black holes. But the whole book doesn’t read like this, and the majority of readers who want to pick up a quick background in the technical side of cosmology shouldn’t have a problem.

The other slight issue is that the book was published in 2001. A remarkable amount of the content is still fine, but inevitably in such a fast moving subject there are some aspects that have dated a little. (The best guess for the age of the universe is given as 15 billion years, for instance.) Maybe it’s time for a new edition.

With that proviso, an excellent source to get the basics of the technical aspects of cosmology in a small but beautifully formed package.

Paperback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life. To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...

The Giant Leap - Caleb Scharf ****

This is surely Caleb Scharf's most personal work - and certainly quite different from some of his earlier output, such as his excellent Gravity's Engines. In part this is a technological exploration of space travel, not unlike Final Frontier , but it is also about the future of humanity, more reminiscent of The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire , but with a more positive outlook. Overall, it was fascinating reading. Let's take those two aspects separately. As always, Scharf gives us plenty of meat in an approachable fashion, whether it's delving into the rocket equation, considering the pros and considerable limitations of Mars as a destination for humans (the chapter is pointedly called The Red Siren), or taking on the possibilities of asteroids. And even in the semi-technical aspect of the first Moon landing we get some more personal detail - I hadn't realised until reading this that Scharf was English by birth (being bathed in a sink at a key moment). Althou...

Search This Blog