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

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