I've always loved the 'introducing X, a graphic guide' series from Icon Books, with titles such as Introducing Infinity: a graphic guide . They're quirky, pocket-sized books with typically one or two page segments each featuring an eye-catching illustration. However, the publisher also has a set of graphic guides that are full-sized books, the latest being The Universe . I was also very impressed with Jillian Scudder's illustrated Astroquizzical  - she knows her stuff and puts the science across well. The same is true here - it's hard to fault the basics of the text. But I found the book a pain to read because of the way it's laid out and illustrated. Frankly, the layout (and cover) make it look more like a self-published book than one that's professionally produced. The text and image layout is haphazard, with random switching of fonts. Headings are few and far between - there is no apparent structure to the book. In a lot of cases, the illustrations go...

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...

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 sci...

Embarrassingly, I read and reviewed this book back when it came out in 2022, but forgot I had when I wanted to read more about the simulation hypothesis and virtual reality as it's a topic that comes up when considering multiverses  - but originally I focused more on it as a piece on VR, where this time I was more focused on the simulation hypothesis. I've written a new review, but in case you want to see if my opinion has changed (it hasn't much) I've included the old review below. David Chalmers uses the idea that we might be living in a computer simulation, rather than a real universe, to explore a number of philosophical queries. Initially I was really enjoying his approach, bringing in pop cultural references (the inevitable Matrix but various others too), though the cartoon illustrations are somewhat painful. However, after a while we seemed to lose sight of the deeper philosophical applications to provide a heavy going manifesto for our digital existence. Chalme...

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...

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...

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...

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re...