Skip to main content

The Planet Factory - Elizabeth Tasker ***

The way this book opens has the feel of an author trying too hard to get her personality across, as popular science books sometimes do. Elizabeth Tasker opens by asking an astrophysicist 'What would make you throw my book out of the window?' and as a reader, I hardly take in the next page and a half wondering why anyone would ask such a question. Then, just as I regain the ability to process what I'm reading, I get 'In 1968, Michael Mayor fell down an ice crevice and almost missed discovering the first planet orbiting another sun'. And I'm thinking 'But no one made such a discovery in 1968', not realising that this statement had nothing to do with his much later work on exoplanets (planets that orbit other stars) but was just a way to try to make the character more interesting.

 Thankfully, once we get past the introductory section, Elizabeth Tasker's style settles down in a big way - if anything it goes to the other extreme and becomes distinctly dry, delivering more of a collection of facts than a narrative. However, in terms of content, The Planet Factory can't be faulted. It is excellent, for example, on planetary system formation. We're used to hand waving explanations of planetary formation from a disc of dust and gas, but Tasker shows how there's not long (in planetary timescales) for this to happen, and why it's really distinctly difficult for a cloud of dust grains to do anything more than bounce off each other, rather than clump together to form a planet.

 Even in the heavy fact sections there is a tendency to use odd analogies, for example: 'this uncertainty leaves us as much in the dark about the planet's type as would the sex of a foetus with its legs crossed in the womb,' but these become less frequent after a while. Tasker gives us oodles of detail, emphasising how complex the planet formation process is, as new discoveries often make old theories wrong, or at least throw oddities into the mix. As readers, we soon realise that an awful lot is being deduced from a relatively tiny amount of data, so there is a strong whiff of speculation in the air much of the time. This is emphasised when Tasker describes the way that three planets found orbiting Gliese 581 were later thought not to exist - in the case of two of them, it was enough that the star had the equivalent of a strong sunspot to produce the misleading data.

 This is the first popular book I've read about the formation of both our solar system and exoplanets that gives a real, gritty, coal-face feel for the complexity of the process involved, how much we know... and how much we don't. To be honest, it's not the most engaging book - I don't think that's Tasker's fault - it's just that as a topic it's rather like geology - probably the hardest of all scientific topics to make interesting to the general reader. It's notable that in the final section, where Tasker takes on whether or not planets (and moons) are correctly placed to be able to provide the essentials for life as we know it, things get more interesting. But if you have an interest in the solar system or planetary formation on a wider scale, and are hazy on the details, it's a must-read.

 Hardback:  

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 Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more