Skip to main content

The Milky Way - Moiya McTier ****

For some reason, our home galaxy has relatively light coverage in popular science, so it was good to read Moiya McTier's book last year (less good to have forgetten about it until now - this is probably due to the aversion mentioned at the end of the review).

After an introductory chapter, we start by looking at early ideas and myths about the sky pattern referred to most often now as the Milky Way, long before it was realised that this was our galaxy. We are then taken through the Milky Way's formation (and along with that information on stars and other components that go together to make up a galaxy) and McTier goes on to do everything from pull apart Star Trek's dodgy navigational coordinates to what remain mysteries to current science. (Unusually for a simplifying popular science book, we do hear a bit about alternatives to dark matter, though McTier does dismiss MOND using arguments that are weaker than those that could be used to dismiss dark matter particles.)

So far, so good. One thing that it is essential to cover is the subtitle. The second word is not 'biography', but 'autobiography'. The book is written from the viewpoint of the Milky Way as if it were a conscious entity. I must applaud this in the sense that it's a different way of looking at astronomy/astrophysics. Any book of this sort benefits from taking a different approach, because mostly it will have been done before. But.

For me, personally, the approach was one where I really had to suppress the cringe reflex. The first chapter begins 'Take a look around you, human. What do you see?.. Everything you've ever seen or touched is part of me. Yes, even you, you vain, filthy animal.' I don't know why, but this does feel ever so slightly condescending for an adult audience. And it's a bit odd - given we are effectively part of the Milky Way in terms of our constituents, why would it call us filthy? But then, on the whole, galaxies don't call people anything.

Anthropomorphising is, of course, an age-old technique. I used to watch a TV show called Tales of the Riverbank when I was four that featured, for instance, a talking guinea pig and loved it. But while I accept the originality of the approach as popular science, I still had to fight down my aversion as an adult. Perhaps the main potential problem in non-fiction is where to draw the line between the fiction of the talking galaxy and the reality of the science. For example, McTier's galaxy is quite boastful. It comments 'I am the greatest galaxy who has ever lived.' But the Milky Way is neither the biggest galaxy nor does it contain the most stars, making this a dubious boast at best.

As long as I had this tendency under control, there was plenty to enjoy here - and that's why I'm giving the book four stars. But I can't ignore it, nor do I think that it will work for every reader. But if you won't be put off by the approach, this is an excellent book on an essential topic.

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
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 Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more