There have been plenty of good books on black holes, such as Marcus Chown's A Crack in Everything but it's a subject that will always benefit from a different take, and Jonas Enander manages to bring in some new viewpoints as well as exploring the basics of the concept well. 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 bla...

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 ...

Jim Baggott is one of the most reliable hands in the business when it comes to exploring complex physics and cosmology issues in an approachable but never over-simplified fashion, so a new Baggott on the shelves is always a treat. For reasons I'll go into in a moment, while the explanation here is as lucid and interesting as possible, I found the topic a little underwhelming. The topic Discordance covers is the Hubble tension - the reality that there are two ways of measuring the Hubble constant that describes the rate of expansion of the universe, both of which are based on solid science, but which don't agree. Admittedly, the distinction is only seven per cent, but in theory they should converge, and as Baggott makes clear, although both of the measurement methods have potential issues, if the tension proves genuine, it puts the most widely accepted version of the Big Bang theory in jeopardy.  The book starts with historical material on how we measure distances in space, the...

‘When One Universe Isn’t Enough’, it says on the undeniably eye-catching cover of this book. But why should anyone feel short-changed by the universe we happen to live in? The most obvious answer is if they’re fans or creators of science fiction, who may be distinctly unimpressed by the un-SF-like reality we’re lumbered with. As Brian Clegg points out early in the book, even now  – almost 70 years after the invention of the space rocket – only a tiny fraction of astronauts have ever travelled more than 300 miles from the Earth’s surface. If we’re looking for all those ‘strange new worlds’ that Star Trek promised us, we’re not going to find them that way. What we need is a portal to a parallel universe – or, preferably, a whole collection of them. Since this is a non-fiction book, I hope I’m not spoiling any surprises by saying that we never actually get to this point, or anywhere near it. Like so many other science-fictional ideas that are claimed to have parallels in modern physic...

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

This is a book about black holes - and there are two ways to look at these amazing phenomena. One is to meander about in endless speculation concerning firewalls and holographic universes and the like, where there is no basis in observation, only mathematical magic. This, for me, is often closer to science fiction than science fact. The alternative, which is what Marcus Chown does so well here (apart from a single chapter), is to explore the aspects of theory that have observational evidence to back them up - and he does it wonderfully. I'm reminded in a way of the play The Audience which was the predecessor to The Crown . In the play, we see a series of moments in history when Queen Elizabeth II is meeting with her prime ministers, giving a view of what was happening in life and politics at that point in time. Here, Chown takes us to visit various breakthroughs over the last 100 or so years when a step was made in the understanding of black holes.  The first few are around the ba...

For some reason, our home galaxy has relatively light coverage in popular science, so it was good to read Moiya McTier's book last year (less good to have forgetten about it until now - this is probably due to the aversion mentioned at the end of the review). After an introductory chapter, we start by looking at early ideas and myths about the sky pattern referred to most often now as the Milky Way, long before it was realised that this was our galaxy. We are then taken through the Milky Way's formation (and along with that information on stars and other components that go together to make up a galaxy) and McTier goes on to do everything from pull apart Star Trek's dodgy navigational coordinates to what remain mysteries to current science. (Unusually for a simplifying popular science book, we do hear a bit about alternatives to dark matter, though McTier does dismiss MOND using arguments that are weaker than those that could be used to dismiss dark matter particles.) So far...

There are a good number of books out now celebrating female scientists - in Her Space, Her Time , Shohini Ghose, a physics professor at Wilfred Laurier University in Ontario, takes in a range of astronomy and astrophysics-related areas covering major contributions made by women since Victorian times. Once upon a time, the only name in here that would probably have rung a bell is Marie Curie. To be honest, this is probably still true for most of the public (though, to be fair, they would equally be hard pressed to name male physicists other than Newton and Einstein). However, thanks to the seismic shift in recent years, if you read popular science, you will also be familiar with the likes of Annie Jump Cannon, Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin, Henrietta Leavitt and Lise Meitner at the very least. What's good about Ghose's book is that it also brings in a range of others who are less well known from Anna Draper to Wu Chien-Shiung. Each of those mentioned has made a significant contributi...

One of the comments on the cover of this book is from fantasy author Alan Garner, who calls Carlo Rovelli 'the poet of physics'. White Holes is probably the most appropriate of Rovelli's books for this accolade, which also makes it one of the most frustrating. There is some really interesting (if totally speculative) cosmology/astrophysics here in the suggestion that as black holes come to their end they (quantum) tunnel into tiny white holes - but there is an awful lot of poetic waffle surrounding it. Is this really science? Bearing in mind it's highly unlikely there will ever be good, real world evidence to support the theory, I'd suggest it is ascientific (to use Sabine Hossenfelder's term). Not unscientific, but not supported by evidence. Another way of looking at it is hard science fiction - it's based on good current science, but as Rovelli says himself 'I do not know if it is correct. I do not even know if white holes exist.'  If we are to us...

Black holes are a perennially interesting topic, so anyone writing a book about them needs to provide a new angle - a USP, if you like. For this mostly interesting book, Becky Smethurst has gone for 'why everything you know about them is wrong.' This reflects the several common misconceptions about black holes, even though some of these have been so thoroughly debunked already that it's hard to believe there are too many left who hold them. We start with an introduction to the nature of stars, bring in gravitational wells and neutron stars and get on to black holes themselves - though we soon discover they are not black, one of those misapprehensions alongside the idea that they are super gravitational vacuum cleaners, inevitably destroying everything nearby. We're told that black holes don't suck, which is sort of true as we explore the warping of space and time - though the distinction between gravitational attraction and sucking is perhaps fairly trivial if you g...