Skip to main content

Crush - James Riordon ***

Sometimes when reading a book, just like being in any other relationship, you have to say ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’ Unfortunately, I really struggled to get on with James Riordon's eccentric take on gravity.

It's not that the main areas of the topic aren't covered. You'll find Newton and general relativity; black holes, white holes (and your kitchen sink), gravitational waves and dark matter/energy. But the approach to covering this includes surprisingly little science. Instead, Riordon skips around the topics, lacing the facts with personal observations (and even family details) touching on aspects of gravity without ever really telling us much of the scientific detail (I'm not sure if this should even be considered popular science.)

This is where the 'it's me' bit really kicks in. I like good narrative in a popular science book, though I feel there's far too much 'me' from the author in many such books of late. I read them to explore the science, not to discover family anecdotes and flit around the outskirts of the subject like intellectual moths around a streetlamp. 

I'm sure there will be a big audience for whom Riordon's approach comes across as an entertaining, stimulating, informative read. But I don't know how many of them will be popular science readers. Each time a topic was introduced I thought 'now we'll get some meat', only to be disappointed. It's a bit like having a haut cuisine meal where you expect to find a lovely piece of venison under the delicious foam - only to discover that the foam is all there is to it.

Again, I'm sure it's me, but I find Riordon's jokey storytelling approach (like throwing in the kitchen sink mentioned above) just a bit too much. I can't deny there were parts I genuinely enjoyed - but often they were in little entertaining asides, which would be great if there was anything substantial for them to be aside to. So, for instance, I loved the fact that physicist William Press in 1980 calculated that humans should be no more than 2.6 centimetres tall. Or that in 2011, physicist Germain Rousseau and colleagues 'realized that there are cosmic insights to be gleaned from a kitchen sink.'

The fact is, this book and I were never going to get on. But don't let my view put you off - your relationship with it may be totally different.

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 my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
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

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of  The Universal Machine  and featured in a recent  Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper,  On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single  Universal Machine  that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then,  computers  were peop...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a  bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...
Post a Comment
Read more