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

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...

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...

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier. It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...

Search This Blog