Cosmic Impact - Andrew May ****

There's something beguilingly attractive about end-of-the-world scenarios. In Cosmic Impact, Andrew May takes on the granddaddy of them all - an asteroid or comet hitting the Earth. We're familiar with the idea that the dinosaurs were wiped out by the fallout of such an impact (with some volcanic help), but there's a much bigger picture to be had, and May puts it across well.

This short book is ideal to get a good overview of the subject without having to delve into too much technical detail - and May makes it approachable by giving the subject context from the many science fiction and popular culture scenarios (the Simpsons feature on page 1) where something hits the Earth from outer space. In fact it's arguable that the science fiction examples of attempts to predict and divert future impactors have had a direct influence on what has happened in reality in setting up early warning detection of incoming potential impactors.

As well as the science of bodies hitting the Earth - which is rather more complex than you might think, given the Earth is moving as well, and involves four different types of possible orbit with the exotic names Amor, Apollo, Atira and Aten - we also see what has been done in recent years to spot potential near misses and how, in principle, we might be able to do something to avoid a collision. Unlike Hollywood's usual approach, this is unlikely to involve blasting an asteroid to pieces (which then might all impact on us), and is more likely to involve changing the asteroid's approach speed so that it simply misses where we're going to be when it gets near.

Of course we also get plenty on the history of the discovery of what's out there, the distinction between asteroids and comets and even the unlikely thesis that the path of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was influenced by dark matter. I don't always get much out of pure astronomy books - I usually prefer physics - but there was enough context here (along with that nagging implied threat to humanity's future) to keep me engaged throughout.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

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, ...

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life. To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...

Search This Blog