Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Universe

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Universe - Andrew Newsam ****

Nowadays, TV science presenters tend to be young, attractive and matey, but there was a time when they were more like erudite but twinkly old uncles, imparting their wisdom to the next generation. Andrew Newsam's writing style is very much in this wise old uncle vein.

I don't see this as a bad thing - quite the reverse. In my youth, the doyen of such eccentric TV uncles was Patrick Moore, who got me interested in astronomy to the extent of being out on dark nights with a 6 inch reflector. Moore wrote clear, readable books - and Newsam gives us a straightforward, accessible tour of the astronomical universe in solid Moore style.

The title is a bit of an exaggeration - it's not so much everything you might want to know about the universe, but rather about astronomy. However, within that field Newsam gives us well-constructed tours of the view from Earth, the Sun as a star, the solar system, stars in general, galaxies and the Big Bang. Although there is a touch of astrophysics required in some of these sections, the approach sticks primarily to the astronomical view, which has the advantage of making it more timeless. We do get passing mentions, for example, of black holes, dark matter and dark energy, but topics like these aren't emphasised.

There is one oddity here. Manuscripts are often provided double spaced to the publisher to aid with editing, but it does feel strange to read a published book with such wide spacing between lines of text. Either they forgot to change the spacing, or the final book was shorter than expected.

Don't come to this book expecting to explore hot new theories and weird quantum effects. That's not what it's for. And it is has entered a relatively crowded market as an overview of astronomy. However, Newsam does what he does well - I'd recommend it for anyone dipping a first toe in astronomical waters.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

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...

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...

Search This Blog