The Wonderful World of Relativity – Andrew M. Steane ***

This book has what is possibly the worst cover of any popular science title I’ve ever seen (even worse than the old Macmillan edition of my own Light Years, which is saying something). It’s muddy and dark – even the yellow lettering is muted. The illustration is a line drawing apparently by a ten-year-old that is just about visible on the black background. This doesn’t bode well, but of course the author isn’t responsible for the cover.

Unfortunately, the text is often equally impenetrable. The subtitle is ‘a precise guide for the general reader’ and the problem here is that there are two words in that sentence that really don’t fit well together. If you are going to be precise with a subject like special relativity, you will need to go into more maths than the general reader is comfortable with. Stephen Hawking was famously told that he would half his readership for every equation included – I reckon there are sufficient equations here to take the readership down to one.

It’s a shame, because there is the kernel of a good book here. I particularly liked the way Andrew Steane used some of the paradoxes of relativity to explore the subject. These are so good (except where he gets over-precise on us and loses most of us) that I could envisage a whole book just based on the paradoxes. Some, of course, are well worn, but I particularly liked the bug and rivet paradox (see my blog post about it here).

What this looks like is a closeted academic’s idea of what the general reader can cope with. You have to admire the author’s braveness – but ultimately it is a futile exercise because no one who isn’t about to embark on a physics degree would get anywhere with this book.

The title makes this book sounds like a Disney ride, but it’s anything but that. In the end it’s not a popular science book at all, it’s a watered down text book. And that isn’t the same thing at all, I’m afraid.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

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...

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...

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...

Search This Blog