Skip to main content

Astroquizzical - Jillian Scudder ****

Described as a 'curious journey through our cosmic family tree', Jillian Scudder's Astroquizzical, takes the very positive inspiration of questions asked about the universe on Scudder's blog and gives us that 'curious journey' in light, readable prose. The family tree in question has Earth as our parent, the Sun as our grandparent, then the Milky Way and finally the universe. So we work outwards in a genuinely entertaining exploration of our cosmic habitat.

 The book is pitched a beginner's level - but even though there was relatively little that was new to me as a reader, it was well-written enough to keep my interest. This was particularly helped when Scudder threw in an incentive in the form of a fascinating, quirky fact. For me, without doubt, the best was the discovery that mats of sulfur-loving bacteria (which could possibly survive in the atmosphere of Venus) that hang in caves are known as snottites or snoticles.

 The book is at its best in the earlier sections. Scudder gives us an excellent balance of enthusiasm and facts when dealing with, for example, the Moon and the planets. It get's a little thin on the Milky Way and the universe - so, for example, dark matter only gets a footnote and the reference to the cosmic microwave background is so short it's not easy to follow why it's there. It's a shame there isn't a bit more in these later sections - the book is quite short and wouldn't have become overlong by extending them a little.

 Interest is also kept by a good balance of illustrations - surprisingly good black and white in the inline photographs and two sections of colour plates to bring the whole picture to life. Although astronomy isn't all about pretty pictures, it's good to be reminded of what captures the imagination of many young astronomers, and Scudder is particularly good at explaining how the stunning colour images are multi-layered black and white images from different coloured filters, often highlighting the key wavelengths of particular elements.

 As with the relative thinness of the later sections, my only real complaint is that we could do with a bit more. Interesting asides like the snoticles really make a book like this, and there could have been considerably more of them. Detail is what stimulates the reader's imagination. So, rather than just tell us that neutron stars are 'catastrophically dense', telling us how much mass there is in a teaspoonful (100 million tonnes) or something similar really brings it home. There's also the minor irritation that the book sometimes only gives US domestic units (for example, degrees Fahrenheit) which doesn't sit well with a scientific topic.

 This is the kind of book that would be excellent to get either a teenage reader or an adult with limited exposure to astronomy interested in the field. It reads well and gives basic details without being patronising. It's a cosmic journey that I enjoyed.

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

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). ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more