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

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...

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). ...

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...

Search This Blog