After a journey into a black hole described (with the observer's inevitable destruction), we jump back to Michell's dark stars, then start to get the theoretical basis from Einstein and Schwarzschild alongside observational work. This starts, interestingly, with supermassive black holes before getting onto the common or garden variety. Enander's writing style is light and conversational - no danger here of being overwhelmed with technicalities. It's good, readable stuff.
In some ways the most interesting part of the book is the final section that addresses the subtitle 'black holes and our place on Earth'. This (admittedly sometimes at quite a stretch) tries to link the study of black holes to something relevant, rather than just interesting. The first part, Pōwehi and the Right to Land would amuse anyone who had to read UK undergraduate essays as it manages to squeeze in that perennial topic found there, colonialism. In a way I wish it didn't use colonialism as the hook, as there's a reasonable discussion to be had here about the siting of big telescopes and such - not that it's much to do with black holes, but I think it would work better without deploying the C word.
Enander then jumps on another bridge between political culture and science in Black Holes and Climate Change. (I'm not denying the importance of climate change, but it's a bit peripheral here.) What the section is really about is how quasar measurements can be used to detect changes in the Earth's rotation and the exact positioning of observatories, reflecting, for instance, continental drift. This is both surprising and fascinating. The final sections are perhaps less impressive, but still manage to bring in other oddities around the periphery of black holes (notably the role of black hole jets in spreading star stuff), Hawking and 'could we be living in a black hole' speculative stuff.
I only have two small moans. Occasionally the historical content is too summary so it slightly mangles things. When dealing with Michell, as an example, we are told that 'rector' is 'the formal title of a parish priest in the Church of England' - it's really isn't, its more complicated than that - and we are also told 'at the University of Cambridge he had conducted research into artificial magnets, the movement of earthquakes through the Earth's crust...' - this feels misleadingly as if Cambridge had experimental science as part of the day job in Michell's day. Instead what happened was that while at the University of Cambridge people like Michell (or Newton) did their own thing as well as what they were paid to do - there's a big difference between 'at Cambridge' and 'while at Cambridge'.
My other small issue is that there is too much narrative tourism for me - bits of the book where we get the author travelling, say, to a telescope to talk to someone without this travel (adding to climate change, incidentally) doing anything for the scientific content. It's rather reminiscent of TV science shows where the presenter is flown to a mountain to stare into space and make a deep comment. I really don't care about Enander's various visits, though I appreciate that others may enjoy them.
All in all, a genuinely interesting take on this perennially fascinating topic.
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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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