Hubble Legacy – Jim Bell ***

This month sees the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble space telescope, so this is a timely book. I was really looking forward to reading it, but I was disappointed when I did. Not everyone will share that disappointment – someone who primarily associates Hubble with ‘pretty pictures’, and has little interest in the science and technology behind them, may well love what Jim Bell has done. It’s the archetypal coffee-table book – lavishly illustrated, with stunning colour photographs filling every other page, alongside text that is high on poetic adjectives and low on technical facts and figures.

I’m sure Bell has done a good job of producing the kind of book that he (and/or his publishers) wanted, but from the popular science point of view – which is what this review site is about – it doesn’t do justice to the Hubble telescope or the scientists who work on it. By adopting a picture-driven format, there’s an in-built bias towards photogenic sights like nebulae and galaxies – at the expense of the more cutting-edge science Hubble has been involved with, such as the deep-field images, the discovery of dark energy or the spectroscopic probing of exoplanet atmospheres. Arguably it’s things like these that constitute Hubble’s real ‘legacy’ – yet Bell doesn’t discuss them in enough detail to give the reader an understanding of their scientific importance and consequences.

There are other aspects of ‘Hubble’s legacy’ the book barely even touches on, such as the way it’s raised the profile of astrophysics within the scientific community, and of astronomy – and science in general – among the public at large. A whole generation of scientists has grown up with Hubble as one of their major inspirations. And of course this book will play its part in that process of inspiration – but it won’t give you any profound insights.

Hardback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Andrew May

Comments

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 ...

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...

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...

Search This Blog