Skip to main content

Our Universe: Jo Dunkley ****

 A book that does pretty much what it says on the tin, providing an 'astronomer's guide' to the universe. Jo Dunkley does so in an approachable, non-technical style, generally speaking not doing anything that a number of other such guides haven't done in the past (all the way back to the likes of Patrick Moore), but with good up-to-date content. And without going over the top on the physics, there's a fair amount of astrophysics as well, from the mechanics of stars to dark matter and dark energy.

If the book has a USP other than being up to date, it is in its claim to give us 'the electrifying story of the deep history, latest science and forgotten women who illuminate our understanding of the cosmos.' I don't think Dunkley's calm writing style can really be described as electrifying, but I'd certainly agree that the science and deep history is up-to-date. Dunkley is at her best when either bringing out some small detail - I love her description of the future of the star Betelgeuse, and the cover image is another good one, showing the relative size of the Sun and the Earth - or when she's delving into the expansion of space, which she handles particularly well. There's also another excellent and rarely mentioned example in the interesting observation that multiple images caused by gravitational lensing will give views of a location from different points in time.

There is a bit of a problem with the 'forgotten women' part, though. Female astronomers such as Henrietta Swann Leavitt, Cecilia Payne-Gaspschkin, Vera Rubin and Annie Jump Cannon certainly could have been described as providing 'previously-overlooked stories of pioneering astronomers' 20 years ago, but I haven't read a single good astronomy book in recent years that didn't give them their full due. Accordingly it reads slightly oddly when Dunkley only gives biographies to her female selection, but doesn't do so for, say, Hubble. There also seems a bit of a bias towards US women - Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, for example, is mentioned does not warrant a biography. This US bias (strange from a Pelican book) comes across also in the use of units, where bizarrely, when not employing astronomical units, distances are given in miles or inches (except for one example where centimetres are used).

The only real disappointment in science content was over dark matter where in a whole chapter on the topic, all of a page is given over to modified gravity, only to pretty much dismiss it by giving an example where dark matter fits but MOND doesn't (the Bullet cluster) without mentioning the various factors (galactic rotations curves, for example) where modified gravity works better than dark matter. We might have expected, after so many failures to find dark matter candidates, that a more balanced approach would be taken.

Overall, though, an excellent purchase for a beginner who wants to get a feel for modern astronomy.
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 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