Rebel Star - Colin Stuart ****

It would only be fair to expect that we knew everything there is to know about our friendly neighbourhood star, the Sun. After all, without it we certainly wouldn't be here, it's extremely close in astronomical turns and it has been studied for millennia. Yet, as Colin Stuart reveals, there's plenty we still don't know - and of the bits we do apparently know, I was amazed how much was new to me.

I suspect that solar missions and research just don't get the same level of media coverage as, say, missions to Mars with the potential for long-term manned exploration. We are, after all, never going to send people to the Sun. But there are some great stories about attempts to find out more about what is, inevitably, an inhospitable environment. So, for example, Stuart tells the fascinating tale of the Solor and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) mission. Launched at the end of 1995, a human error turned the satellite into a $1 billion piece of space junk... or so it seemed. The efforts to get it back going and the final outcome make great reading.

The first part of the book fills in the history of our understanding of the Sun and how it works, while more of the rest covers areas where research is still current and our understanding still remains partial. A lot of this part concentrates on what's going on in the Sun's outer layers and the solar wind and coronal mass ejections that are propelled out from it, sometimes in our direction, which has can have a potentially dire impact on a world dependent on electronics and satellites.

I learned a lot here, and Stuart's enthusiasm is clear. If I have a negative it's that this enthusiasm perhaps carries him away sometimes to give us rather more detail on some of the more abstruse aspects of the complex electromagnetic phenomena that shape sunspots, produce solar flares and more. Similarly, although the likes of Alfven waves and magnetohydrodynamics are essential in getting an understanding what's going on we get, perhaps, a little too much detail for a book aimed at a general audience.

However, if things do get a little over-detailed sometimes, we're soon back to finding out about new and interesting discoveries. Stuart starts most chapters with a scene-setting narrative and throughout the book is packed with information and delights.

Hardback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

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...

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...

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...

Search This Blog