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

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...

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...

When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Steven Pinker *****

In the past I've found Steven Pinker's books hypnotic - I drift along enjoying the words and feeling I'm getting something deep from it without anything much sinking in. This one was different - it was sometimes a little harder to get your head around the underlying concept, descending as it tends to into infinite regression, but overall I did feel I'd gained a lot. Pinker's focus here is 'common knowledge' which is when not only do we both/all know something, but we know that the other(s) know as well and the implications this has for human interactions. One entertaining thing to emerge from this is the ability to get into infinite loops of the 'I know that you know that I know that...' variety. Although we aren't mentally equipped to deal with more than a handful of iterations, we are told that a simple but limited interaction like a text exchange strictly needs the full infinite set to be definitive. For example, if you and a friend are tryin...

Search This Blog