Merlin's Tour of the Universe - Neil deGrasse Tyson ***

This book is something of a reboot. It was Neil deGrasse Tyson's first title, dating back to 1997, but was reissued 'fully revised and updated for the 21st century' in 2024. It's mostly a cut and paste book from the Q&A section in a magazine, despite which (or perhaps because of which) it's one of Tyson's better books.

The idea is that the questions are answered by Merlin who is 'a visitor from the Andromeda galaxy who is as old as Earth and who has observed all major scientific events of Earth history.' Although some of the questions are from children (and the illustrations look like they were drawn by one) it's intended to appeal to all ages. The book is split into 13 sections, mostly with astronomical topics (such as Earth, Moon, Planets, Black Holes and Quasars), though with a couple of more physics-based sections including Gravity and Light and Telescopes.

The questions themselves vary from entertaining thought experiments such as 'What would happen if the Earth suddenly stopped rotating?' to straightforward astronomical queries like 'Why is Mars red?' Bearing in mind this was originally a short column, most answers are less than a page long and don't provide any depth. They are lightweight and easily digested. Unfortunately, they are sometimes either incomplete or even wrong. In the examples I give above (selected randomly) - very few of the implications of the Earth stopping are covered, and while the 'why is Mars red' question reasonably puts it down to iron, Tyson then spoils things by saying 'it's the same reason mammal blood is red' - unfortunately it's not. It's down to the structure of ring of an atoms in haemoglobin called porphyrin.

In other writing, Tyson's biggest faults tend to be a weak grasp of history of science and some impressive jingoism (I'm thinking particularly of his Space Chronicles where he says, of instance 'In the fifties, sixties, seventies, part of the eighties, every plane that landed in your city was made in America' - pure fiction.) Here, there is relatively little opportunity for either failing (though it does seem unlikely that Newton was at Woolsthorpe in 1710), which is why things seem to work reasonably well.

It's rather tedious to read this book end to end, but at risk of awarding faint praise, it would work well as a toilet companion, taking in a brief article or two at a time.

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

Comments

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically? Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life. To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...

Search This Blog