Venus - William Sheehan and Sanjay Shridhar Limaye ***

After reading this impressively illustrated book, you will know a lot about the planet Venus - almost too much. In terms of the volume of content and colour illustrations it's hard to fault, I just felt like I was being given too much information without enough contextual narrative. This is always a balance with popular science: for me this was more like reading a very long Wikipedia entry than an effective book.

Having said that, unless you are already deeply immersed in Venus and its history, there is no doubt that you will learn plenty along the way. William Sheehan and Sanjay Shridhar Limaye start us of with pre-science. We discover how early civilisations regarded Venus (whether as one item or separate morning and evening stars) and the range of myths attached to the planet. The authors then bring in telescopes and, to a degree, the disappointment that gets a better look at Venus did not reveal more, thanks to the planet's permanent, thick cloud cover.

The remainder of the book brings in spectral analyses of the Venusian clouds, what has been discovered using radar and spacecraft, the detailed composition of the clouds, what we know of the surface, how speculation about life on Venus has changed and the different ways that Venus has been observed. And, of course, there are large amounts of material on transits of Venus which, apart from their romantic association with fiction always strike me as deeply boring, considering how much effort went into measuring them. They were important in their day, but still... There's certainly plenty of information and data on a planet that we still know relatively little about.

It's not that there is no narrative. There are a good number of interesting little snippets amongst what a friend calls the 'trainspotting' aspect of science (Rutherford's stamp collecting). For example, we hear how Percival Lowell, fresh from his notorious maps of canals on the surface of Mars, also 'found' linear structures on Venus, only to be mocked by fellow astronomers. But the storytelling is overwhelmed by the detail, describing, for instance, far too frequently the details of the telescopes being used by one individual or another.

This would be a great book if you were reading up on Venus to write an article about it, and will certainly interest dedicated amateur astronomers, but it's a shame it won't appeal to a wider audience.

Hardback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Comments

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question. Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book

The Genetic Book of the Dead: Richard Dawkins ****

When someone came up with the title for this book they were probably thinking deep cultural echoes - I suspect I'm not the only Robert Rankin fan in whom it raised a smile instead, thinking of The Suburban Book of the Dead . That aside, this is a glossy and engaging book showing how physical makeup (phenotype), behaviour and more tell us about the past, with the messenger being (inevitably, this being Richard Dawkins) the genes. Worthy of comment straight away are the illustrations - this is one of the best illustrated science books I've ever come across. Generally illustrations are either an afterthought, or the book is heavily illustrated and the text is really just an accompaniment to the pictures. Here the full colour images tie in directly to the text. They are not asides, but are 'read' with the text by placing them strategically so the picture is directly with the text that refers to it. Many are photographs, though some are effective paintings by Jana Lenzová. T

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on

Search This Blog