Skip to main content

Saturn – William Sheehan ****

This book marks something of a milestone in my reviewing career: it’s the first time I’ve seen an excerpt from one of my reviews printed on the back cover. It comes from my review of Sheehan’s previous book, on Mercury, which I said ‘easily convinced me the Solar System’s 'least interesting' planet is still a pretty fascinating place.’ That wasn’t an easy task for the author, given Mercury’s unspectacular appearance and reputation – but Saturn is a different matter. With its iconic rings, easily visible through a small telescope, it’s the favourite planet of many amateur astronomers. For space scientists, too, it’s a prime target – given that two of its moons, Titan and Enceladus, look like the kind of places we might find alien life. So Sheehan’s challenge this time wasn’t to find enough material to fill 200 pages, but to distil a potentially huge subject down to that size.

 He meets this challenge just as successfully as the previous one – but not quite in the way I was expecting. Instead of diving straight into the latest discoveries, the first third of the book – chapters 1 and 2 – consists of a leisurely stroll through the pre-space-age history of the subject, from ancient times to the middle of the 20th century. I enjoyed this more than I expected to, because it brought out just how slowly and painstakingly our understanding has been built up. One surprising revelation comes right at the start. For thousands of years, throughout the pre-telescopic era, it was Saturn – not Mercury – that had the reputation of ‘least interesting planet’. It’s the faintest of the ones that have been known since ancient times, and the one that changes position most sluggishly relative to the background stars. In fact Saturn’s reputation as the Solar System’s most spectacular planet is a hard-earned one. Even after its rings and moons were revealed by early telescopes, it was a long and laborious process to uncover their true nature, as astronomers’ instruments – and their understanding of physical laws – slowly improved over the course of centuries.

 What I was really expecting to find in a book like this comes in the next two chapters – the middle third – with an in-depth look at the current scientific understanding of the planet and its rings. This perspective continues in the final third, with three shorter chapters on the Cassini mission, Saturn’s moons and the Saturn system as seen by amateur astronomers. The whole book is profusely illustrated – there must be at least a hundred images altogether, many in colour – and some of them are truly breathtaking.

 All in all, I can recommend this book just as heartily as the Mercury one. This time, I didn’t need convincing that the subject was an interesting one – but I was still impressed by the way Sheehan manages to lay out all the important facts in such a methodical and unrushed way.

Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Andrew May
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more