The significance of stars

The significance of stars - Feature

Personally, I think stars are underrated. Not the ones in the sky – if it weren’t for one of them, the Sun, the Earth wouldn’t exist (and even if there was an Earth, there would be no life on it because it would be far too cold). For that matter, if it weren’t for stars in general there would be no atoms other than hydrogen, helium and a touch of lithium – making the whole concept of a planet (or a person) inconceivable. So the stars of the cosmos are seriously rated.

Nor am I talking about the stars of stage and screen. Because, let’s face it, most of them are seriously overrated. I refer instead to stars in reviews.

A good while ago I wrote to the journal Nature, complaining about some of the book reviews they carried. I pointed out that the (long) reviews said nothing about whether the book was any good – they merely gave the reviewer a chance to do his or her potted version of the theme of the book. They said what the book was about, but not if it was any good or whether you should read it. I got what was, frankly, a rather snotty email back from someone at Nature saying something to the effect of ‘ours aren’t the sort of trivial reviews like yours on www.popularscience.co.uk are. We aren’t going to start giving a book stars.’

Personally, I think this is a mistake. Life is too short to read every review – it’s very handy to be able to check out the star rating and then decide which reviews to read. I’m not suggesting we only take notice of the star rating, but it’s a good indicator of whether the reviewer considers a book (or film or whatever) really bad or excellent – in both cases suggesting the review is worth getting into in more depth.

However a star rating means different things to different people, so I thought it would be useful to finish by giving a quick guide to the way we use the star rating system on www.popularscience.co.uk:

* – Just doesn’t work for us
** – Has some interesting points, but not for everyone – check the provisos in the review
*** – Good solid book, well worth reading if you are interested in the topic
**** – Excellent book that any popular science fan would want to read
***** – One of the best popular science books of the year

ImageCredit: NASA, ESA, and J. Maiz Apellaniz (Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia, Spain)

Comments

Beyond Belief - Helen Pearson *****

Apparently it comes as a surprise to many that medicine was not particularly scientific until the end of the twentieth century (to be honest, it's no surprise to me - we had a GP who used homeopathy in the 90s). Instead it was based on anecdotal guidance - the kind of thing that appeared to work. Evidence-based medicine has since improved the field, trying where possible to base decisions on evidence, ideally based on randomised controlled trials. The first part of Helen Pearson's book covers this well - though I think it's by far the least interesting part of what we discover. Instead what's truly fascinating is the rest of it, looking at a wide range of other fields where evidence was rarely properly used and that are only now starting to dip a toe in the water. These include social policy, policing, conservation, business and education. The main part of the book gives us examples of how bad these areas have been in terms of basing decisions on what's always been ...

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...

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...

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