Skip to main content

Aliens – Jim Al-Khalili (ed.) ***

This book is a couple of years old now, but I found a heavily discounted copy in my local branch of The Works (other remaindered bookshops are available - Ed.). It’s the kind of ‘impulse-buy’ book The Works specialises in, with an eyecatching cover that’s as close to the Alien movie franchise as you can get without violating copyright, and a strapline –‘the truth is in here’ – that no X-Files fan will be able to resist. If you flip through the book (I mean literally flip through, holding it in your right hand and flicking the pages so you just see the margins whizzing past), you’re treated to a great little animation of an alien landing on Earth in a flying saucer, taking a quick selfie, and then heading off back into space.

 When they get the book home, though, will buyers who snapped the book up in The Works be pleased with their purchase? That depends on their expectations, which the packaging does its best to befuddle right from the start. The cover is clearly targeted at the UFO/sci-fi market, while the small print at the bottom – ‘edited by Jim Al-Khalili’ – suggests more serious scientific content. The fact is it’s a multi-contributor anthology, with something for readers in all camps – though I suspect none of them will be totally satisfied with the result.

 There are 19 contributions in all, with a rather quirky distribution of subject-matter. There are five on what might be called the ‘philosophy’ of alien life – theoretical speculations within the framework of mainstream science – plus two on ‘ufology’ and two on the portrayal of aliens in science fiction. Then there are five that discuss – in one way or another – the nature of life here on Earth, and two dealing with planetary science within the Solar System. That only leaves three pieces – the last three in the book – that actually talk about scientifically conducted searches for life elsewhere in the galaxy.

 I’ve given the book a 3-star rating, and it’s difficult for a work of this type to get more than that. One reason is that the pieces are so short (about ten pages each) that the contributors spend most of their allocation explaining the basics of their subject, rather than its more exciting or challenging aspects. A second reason is that while several of the pieces are 4 or 5-star material, they’re counterbalanced by an equal number of 1 or 2-star pieces. I won’t single out any of the latter, but it’s easy enough to identify the book’s highlights: those final three pieces – by Sara Seager, Giovanna Tinetti and Seth Shostak – on the practical science of searching for aliens.

 Having said that, some of the other contributors manage to find insightful things to say on the ‘woollier’ aspects of the subject, such as Martin Rees on philosophy (‘even if intelligence were widespread in the cosmos, we may only ever recognise a small and atypical fraction of it; some brains may package reality in a fashion that we can’t conceive’), Ian Stewart on sci-fi (‘science-fictional aliens are primarily driven by narrative imperative, with occasional gestures towards scientific realism’) and Chris French on UFOs (‘plausible counter-explanations, based upon well-established psychological principles, exist for the various categories of close encounter’).

 While it’s not the best book I’ve ever read on the subject, it’s thought-provoking enough – and easily worth the low price I paid for it.


Paperback:  

 Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you


Review by Andrew May
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more