Here's an analogy. Imagine buying a large-format, nicely illustrated book called, say, The Himalayas. You’d expect it to cover the geography and culture of the region and the history of its exploration, but you’d be surprised if it had more than a sentence or two about its geological origins, let alone the broader context of plate tectonics and orogeny in general. Most people who are interested in mountains aren’t interested in science, and they don’t want it rammed down their throats. I don’t think the exact same thing holds for planets, but it’s certainly true of some readers, and they’re the ones that Reaktion Books have aimed their Kosmos series at. In the earlier titles this approach seemed to work well enough, but I’m not so sure about this latest one.
To some extent this is down to personal bias, because the first scientific work I ever did was on the orbital dynamics of gravitationally bound systems, of which the Solar System is the original archetype. Applied physics has been essential in telling us how the Solar System works – and vice versa, too. It was the curiosity of people like Newton, Laplace and Poincare about the stability and dynamics of the Solar System that put us on track to modern-day disciplines such as astronautics and chaos theory. The great thing about science is that it gives us insight as well as knowledge – so we know, for example, not just where the rocky planets and gas giants and ice worlds are within the Solar System, but why they’re in those particular locations and how they got there. In turn, this insight helps us understand what we see in planetary systems around other stars. I don’t expect a popular-level book to go into any depth of detail on this, but I would have preferred at least some sense of how important and exciting this sort of insight is, rather than simply presenting us with a long catalogue of isolated facts and snippets of information.
Actually, the thing that’s bothering me isn’t just to do with science. To switch away from the Himalayan analogy, let’s think about trainspotting for a moment, which treats the subject of rail travel in much the same way the Kosmos authors approach astronomy. If a book is about one particular class of locomotive, then it’s reasonable that it should focus exclusively on the appearance, construction and operational history of that vehicle. But what about a book called, say, The British Railway System? Maybe a diehard spotter would be happy if it was just a catalogue of all the different locomotives, but most people would want a more system-level perspective, covering things like infrastructure, management, politics and economics. In essence, that’s my view of this book, too – it has the word ‘system’ in the title but falls woefully short of providing a genuinely system-level view.
You can get a sense of this just from the layout of the book’s chapters. Before I opened it, I was expecting that a large chunk would be devoted to the Solar System as a whole, and its relation to observations and computer modelling of exoplanetary systems. Then sizeable chapters on the single most important object in the system, the Sun, followed by the largest planet, Jupiter, and the largest, densest and most geologically diverse of the rocky planets – the Earth. Beyond that, I’d expected roughly equal-sized treatments of smaller rocky bodies, in the form of asteroids and moons, the icy outer fringes of the Solar System – including the Kuiper Belt, Oort Cloud and comets – and, finally, a few pages about each of the other planets. This would have given me the ‘system-wide’ perspective I wanted, as well as avoiding too much overlap with the previous books in the series.
Unfortunately, that isn’t what you get at all. Only 20 of the book’s 360-odd pages of text are devoted to a system-level view, and a mere 12 to the Sun. There’s nothing at all about the Earth, suggesting that what we have here is very much a book for backyard skywatchers rather than budding astrophysicists. To further cement that view, we’re given a full chapter of almost 50 pages on the Moon, as well as individual chapters of 30 to 40 pages each on Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – all reading like condensed versions of the earlier books in the series. According to the book’s preface, all the chapters I’ve just referred to were written by the primary author, William Sheehan.
On the other hand, Clifford Cuningham’s two contributions, on the asteroids and the outer Solar System, are much closer to what I was hoping for. I was particularly impressed with the first of these, which I felt to be far superior to Cunningham’s earlier book Asteroids in this series. In my review of that book I criticised it for being too focused on historical development and too little on current research and space missions – but this new treatment has a much better balance. With this one exception, however, I thought the previous, single-focus Kosmos books worked much better than this one. If, like me, you expect a book about the Solar System to deal with the system as a whole, and not just its component parts, then give it a miss. Similarly, if you’re lucky enough to be able to afford all the individual Kosmos books, then you really don’t need this one. Even so, the fact remains that it’s a nice book, so if you’re on a limited budget and you’re more interested in facts and history than scientific explanations, then you might want to check it out.
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Review by Andrew May - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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