Skip to main content

Hubble, Humason and the Big Bang - Ron Voller ***

Edwin Hubble is a controversial figure in the history of astronomy, and it has become fashionable to downplay his contribution to our understanding of the universe, particularly of his understanding of the significance of the redshift of galaxies in suggesting an expanding universe. In this detailed analysis of Hubble's work alongside observer Milton Humason, Ron Voller does an excellent job of giving appropriate weight to the pair's findings, while not glossing over Hubble's aggressive defence of his position and love of publicity that did not endear him to his peers.

The book is a very helpful source for someone attempting to dig into Hubble and Humason's work in some depth. Without every becoming too technical, it takes the reader through the detail of their discoveries and fits them into the timescale of the period. What it's less successful at, however, is what the author seems to be trying to make it, which is being an account that will be enjoyed by a general readership.

Voller has taken to heart the importance of context to popular science - but goes over the top with it to such an extent that backgrounditis can overwhelm useful content. There is, for example, a 64 page chapter covering 'two centuries of astronomical discovery' that simply gives far too much detail, including not only the astronomical developments of the period but most of the steps forward in basic physics too. There is then a whole chapter simply providing a fictional account of the first meeting of Hubble and Humason. While careful use of fictional depiction can be useful in TV, it has to be handled incredibly well in written non-fiction to avoid appearing cheesy, and here it feels distinctly uncomfortable - it's hard to see what the reader gains from it. Of course the two must have had a first meeting, but we know nothing about it, and it doesn't contribute to understanding their work to have something made up.

We then jump back in time (there is far too much jumping around in time) to get lengthy descriptions of both Hubble and Humason's family background. A couple of lines would be fine, but I really don't care too much about their families, I want to know about their input to the Big Bang theory - which we don't get onto until around page 289.

My other slight concern is that Voller misses some easily checked facts (particularly about the UK). For example, he puts Slough '60 miles west of London' (it isn't) and misses the whole point of Herschel ending up there because it was near Windsor. He calls William of Ockham 'Bavarian', which the inhabitants of Ockham (in Surrey) would be surprised to learn, and he calls Oxford's colleges 'schools', where Oxford's schools are its departments not its colleges, e.g. the school of medicine. I am hoping that the astronomical history parts - obviously far more significant to the value of the book - are more accurate.

Despite the issues, anyone investigating Hubble or the development of the understanding of the expanding universe would find this book both interesting and useful.

Paperback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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