Eyes in the Sky - Andrew May ****

If you ask someone to describe a telescope, they will probably come up with a big tube in a dome, perhaps located somewhere remote on top of a mountain. But, in reality, many of our most important telescopes are now located in space - not only does this relieve them of the distorting effects of weather and atmosphere, they can be used 24/7. Despite their importance, and plenty of books showing of the images they produce, space telescopes don't get the coverage they deserve as objects of interest in their own right, so this book is welcome.

In giving it four stars, I am primarily thinking of an audience with more than a passing interest in astronomy, though Andrew May's text is generally approachable. We start with an introduction to space and telescopes, move on to the big name most have heard of - the Hubble space telescope and then look at some specific topics where such telescopes have had a big impact, such as looking back in time to near the Big Bang, searching for exoplanets and mapping the galaxy. From here we get to see what has already been achieved with NASA's latest big offering, the James Webb space telescope, before diving into high energy astronomy (in the X-ray and gamma ray bands) and finishing with a brief look at future possibilities. (As with all space ventures, many of these are likely to be cancelled or postponed.)

There is always a danger with a book like this that it will turn into a catalogue of the telescopes and their technical details, ideal for those who enjoy the telescopic equivalent of train spotting, but not really getting to grips with their purpose and achievements. This is a more contextual overview, slim enough to never get into too much detail, and with enough stories of events along the way (from the well-known problem with Hubble's mirror to non-astronomer Bill Borucki's contribution to planet hunting) to keep the reader's interest.

I am embarrassingly listed on Amazon and Bookshop as editor: in reality I'm just series editor, and this is all Andrew's book, but I need to make this clear in case it's seen as a conflict of interest.

Paperback:

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

Vector - Robyn Arianrhod ****

This is a remarkable book for the right audience (more on that in a moment), but one that's hard to classify. It's part history of science/maths, part popular maths and even has a smidgen of textbook about it, as it has more full-on mathematical content that a typical title for the general public usually has. What Robyn Arianrhod does in painstaking detail is to record the development of the concept of vectors, vector calculus and their big cousin tensors. These are mathematical tools that would become crucial for physics, not to mention more recently, for example, in the more exotic aspects of computing. Let's get the audience thing out of the way. Early on in the book we get a sentence beginning ‘You likely first learned integral calculus by…’ The assumption is very much that the reader already knows the basics of maths at least to A-level (level to start an undergraduate degree in a 'hard' science or maths) and has no problem with practical use of calculus. Altho

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