Skip to main content

Chasing the Sun – Richard Cohen ****

The tagline to this book is ‘the epic story that gives us life’ and that word epic gives pause for thought. It has good connotations (‘an epic adventure’ or just the modern adjective ‘epic!’) – but equally it can suggest a monster tome that is going to be a bit of a drag. Time will tell.
What Richard Cohen sets out to do is give a comprehensive if personal exploration of humanity’s relationship with the sun, from science to religion, sunlight to gravity. It surely is a subject that deserves this kind of treatment, and parts of this book are wonderful in the way they provide so many factoids and quite interesting (in the QI sense) deviations into all sorts of very slightly sun-related areas. I could pick out so many, but one little part that caught my fancy was a collection of early 20th century beliefs about strong sunlight, including the need to wear flannel spine pads, as the sun was thought to damage the backbone, and the requirement to wear hats indoors in buildings with metal roofs as the sun was thought to be able to penetrate iron.
From all the source books listed, this clearly is a tome that has been researched in great depth, but for me the book was too long. At 610 fairly large pages before you reach the source notes, it goes on and on. Sometimes this comes through in the examples, which can stretch out into rather long lists. Also it worries me that we get far more on the description of the other people who went to watch a solar eclipse from the Antarctic with the author, than we do about the work of Bequerel and the Curies combined, which just doesn’t seem right.
The other slight concern is that the author can be a little hand-waving about the science. There is sometimes the feeling that you are reading something written by someone who is fluent in a foreign language. He gets most of it right, but it doesn’t always feel natural. Just to pick out a couple of examples:
We hear that nuclear reactor ‘cones’ purposely imitate the lingam shape of Hindu temple domes. What cones? How do they imitate lingams? For that matter why does he say these cones are the latest tribute the Sun’s potency? What’s the connection?
He says the division of degrees (of angle) into 60 minutes and those into 60 seconds is a method ‘curiously close to that of a modern computer.’ In what way?
He tells us the neutron is ‘the most common form of particle lurking inside virtually all nuclei’ – most common how? What about neutrinos? Or all those hydrogen nuclei? What about quarks, for that matter?
Don’t take my concerns too negatively. There is plenty to enjoy in this book, both in quirky exploration of humanity’s attitude to the sun and in the author’s obvious enthusiasm. The contents are often fascinating, and I think will particularly appeal to arty types who may have previously been scared by science, but to have made a five star popular science book it would have been better at half the length with a touch more certainty about the science.

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 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

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

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more