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

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily, Introducing Artificial Intelligence is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

Search This Blog