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

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...

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...

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...

Search This Blog