Skip to main content

The Cosmic Mystery Tour – Nicholas Mee ****

This is another book, like last year’s Enjoy Our Universe by Alvaro de Rújula, that sets out to provide a light-hearted introduction to physics and astrophysics for the general reader. It’s from the same publisher (OUP) and packaged in the same way: as a high quality small-format hardback with 200 glossy pages, the majority of them adorned with colour pictures. But that’s where the resemblance ends. Unlike its predecessor, this new book by Nicholas Mee delivers exactly what it promises.

 It’s not that de Rújula’s book was a bad one, but he just wasn’t able to think his way into the reader’s mind. He kept saying ‘physics is fun’, but he was talking about the fun a professional physicist gets out of doing it – which is a very arcane, often highly mathematical, type of fun. The result, for a non-specialist reader, was actually quite alienating. Mee, on the other hand, understands exactly how his readers think, what they find interesting, and the details that – no matter how important they are to physicists – are so abstract they’re best skipped over.

 The book’s title, ‘The Cosmic Mystery Tour’, is a highly appropriate one. It really is a whistlestop tour, flitting at breathtaking speed from one idea to the next. There are a couple of dozen main chapters, but each of these is divided into numerous subsections, many of them a page or less in length. Unusually for a book of this type, the narrative is distinctly nonlinear – so, as with any good mystery tour, you never know what’s coming next. 

 Opening the book at random, we find Thomas Young and the Rosetta Stone, followed by the double slit experiment, followed by de Broglie’s electron waves, followed by Julian Voss-Andreae’s amazing quantum sculptures, followed by electron microscopes, followed by the Large Hadron Collider. And that all happened in just five pages (pp. 12-16). Here’s another random five-page dip (pp. 138-142): a Chinese earthquake detector from the Han dynasty, gravitational waves, neutron stars, gamma ray bursts, the periodic table and Tutankhamun’s gold mask.

 As someone with a notoriously short attention span, I really appreciated Mee’s fast-moving style. It’s a completely different take on the ‘physics is fun’ theme. While de Rújula emphasized that doing physics is fun, Mee makes communicating physics fun. He does it in an impressively eclectic way, too. The illustrations include van Gogh’s Starry Night, the cover of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures (featuring the radio signal from a pulsar) and a scene from John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic, about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project.

 This is a great book for the target audience – non-specialists looking for a pain-free introduction to the physicist’s view of the universe – but it will also appeal to readers who are already familiar with most of the material, and just want a relaxing and entertaining read for a couple of hours.
Hardback:  
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

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...
Post a Comment
Read more

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on...
Post a Comment
Read more