Skip to main content

Discoverers of the Universe – Michael Hoskin *****

This was a really refreshing book to read. We’ve been inundated lately with title after title about the latest tiny discovery in biology, or some new and complex theory in physics. Here we have a perfect scientific biography of underappreciated contributors to our understanding of the universe – William Herschel and his sister Caroline. Some of the recent scientific biographies have been overblown, but this gets the balance just right. It’s not too long because it doesn’t try to cram in every single bit of research, and it achieves a good mix of the people and the science.
Michael Hoskin leads us expertly and elegantly through the Herschels’ early life (always the hardest part because it has nothing to do with their achievements), their move to England, their musical careers and the development of astronomy from a hobby to a burning professional passion. At least for William. Just as interesting and less covered elsewhere is Caroline’s reluctant acceptance of her role as helper in William’s work on double stars and nebulae, plus discoverer of seven or eight comets in her own right. She did it, it seems, because of an intense sense of duty, but she really didn’t have William’s passion for the subject.
Everyone knows that Herschel discovered Uranus (and attempted to call it George, a name that would have caused even more giggles than the one it ended up with) – but arguably of much more importance were his systematic scans of the night sky from Slough (always the wonderful mix of exotic and down to earth here), then a tiny village on the outskirts of Windsor. And his crowning glory was his exploration of nebulae and the theories he developed that suggested they were vast collections of stars – almost island universes – and that the Milky Way was one of these, an idea that wouldn’t be accepted by the scientific community until the 20th century. It wasn’t all right – there was a lot of confusion over whether all nebulae were like this, or whether some were stars being born – but Herschel still came up with some powerful theories.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment was the book’s very summary treatment of Herschel’s son John. He really ought to have been given equal billing with his father and aunt. Not only did he repeat William’s scan of the northern skies, correcting many mistakes, he then did the same for the southern skies, making him the first and only person to singlehandedly check out the whole panorama of space. And he had many more scientific achievements – perhaps Hoskin is saving him up for a book of his own.
The other thing I disliked was the much repeated suggestion that Herschel did away with Newton’s mechanical, clockwork universe and changed the view of it to be an evolutionary one. Hoskin actually refers to it as ‘biological’. This is an analogy too far. The universe is not a biological evolutionary system. It doesn’t reproduce and select on mutations. It doesn’t rely on organic processes. In fact, Herschel’s universe was still mechanical and clockwork. It’s a mistake to suggest that mechanical clockwork structures can’t progress – ‘evolution’ is not a synonym for ‘change’. It was only with 20th century physics that we moved away from a mechanical universe to a probabilistic one. The key aspect of Newton’s clockwork was that given sufficient knowledge of the components and state of the universe you could predict what would happen step-by-step indefinitely. Herschel did nothing to take this away.
This minor irritation, though, comes through only in an admittedly much repeated, but tiny part of this book. Overall it is a hugely readable and enjoyable account of the life and work of these two remarkable individuals. William and Caroline Herschel deserve a brighter position in the stellar pantheon of astronomers, and Discoverers of the Universe puts them firmly in that place. Recommended.

Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...