Skip to main content

Asteroids: Clifford Cunningham ***

Why is someone going to buy a glossy, large-format book with the one-word title ‘Asteroids’? The obvious reason is that asteroids are a hot topic these days, both as the destination for several recent space probes – including high-profile sample return missions Hayabusa 2 and OSIRIS-REx – and with a multitude of ongoing searches for near-Earth objects (NEOs) that may threaten a devastating collision with our planet. If you’re anything like me, those are sufficient incentives to pick up a book like this – and, if you’re anything like me, you may be disappointed with what you find inside. It’s not that those topics are absent, but they’re deeply buried in historical material the reader is likely to find much less exciting.

Clifford Cunningham, on the other hand, quite clearly does find this material exciting. A historian of astronomy who’s specialised in asteroids for over 30 years, his discussions of, say, the discovery of Ceres and the coining of the term ‘asteroid’ draw heavily on his own research, delving down into far more depth than you’d normally see in a popular account. This is in the first of the book’s five chapters, which deals with the history of asteroids in the early 19th century – another occasion when they were a ‘hot topic’, with animated debates as to their nature and relationship to the planets.

After the initial excitement wore off, and more and more asteroids were discovered, their interest to astronomers took a nose dive. It simply became a matter of mapping and classifying them – an enterprise with a similar niche appeal to train-spotting, but one that Cunningham describes at great length in his second chapter. By the third chapter we’re finally approaching more modern territory, in the form of NEOs and impact events – but even this chapter opens with a 19th century history lesson, about the now-discredited theory that the asteroids are the remains of a former planet that orbited between Mars and Jupiter.

Then we’re back to history again in what I have to admit was my favourite chapter. During the period when asteroids were in the astronomical doldrums – the early and mid 20th century – they acquired a new centre-of-gravity in the pages of science fiction, where they made an exotic locale for pirates, space miners and strange life forms. This entertaining but entirely imaginary side to asteroids is the subject of Cunningham’s fourth chapter – before he finally comes up to date with an account of real-world space missions in the fifth and final chapter.

The book’s core audience is probably less the typical popular science reader than the dedicated history of science buff – who will find plenty of insightful stuff in it. But even if you’re only interested in state-of-the-art developments, you can always flick through the pages focusing on just those bits. To be honest, I suspect that’s what publishers of these glossy, highly illustrated books expect, anyway.

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

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

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, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more