Skip to main content

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for.

That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites (The Meteorite Hunters) and ‘city-killer’ asteroids (How to Kill an Asteroid). Schilling’s book is little more than half the length of either of those, yet he still manages to include entertaining, information-packed introductions to both topics.

Another thing I have to confess is that, although I’ve often written about this subject myself, I still learned quite a few new things from this book. For example, it’s not really true to say (as I’m afraid I have done, in the past) that a meteor trail is caused by an inbound meteoroid ‘burning up’ in the atmosphere. Actually the meteoroid evaporates rather than burns, and the glowing trail is caused by excited gas molecules in the air, not the meteoroid itself. These may sound like minor points, but they get the science right – as popular science writing ought to – rather than mangling it into a more easily digestible but not-quite-correct form.

The media, or at any rate the tabloids, never tire of trying to scare us out of our wits with dire warnings about some new asteroid threat or another. But the truth is there’s almost never any serious cause for alarm – perhaps not so surprising, given that in the whole of human history the total number of confirmed fatalities caused by meteorite impact is exactly one (the victim being an Iraqi man in August 1888 – another fact I didn’t previously know). The real importance of asteroids (which is what they’re called when they’re observed in space) and meteorites (the debris that remains after falling to Earth) lies not in any supposed threat they pose, but in what they can teach us about the universe we live in. 

That’s why serious books on such topics are so important, if only as an antidote to tabloid hysteria. And if all you want is a short but fascinating and wide-ranging primer, then look no further than this book.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support our online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Review by Andrew May - See all reviews and Brian's online articles or subscribe free here
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