Krishna
Another great science book. The authors these days know how to make science subjects so accessible and fascinating to the lay man. In the traditions of A Short History of Nearly Everything and The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs, this book takes off right away.
The full title is ‘Cosmological Enigmas : Pulsars, Quasars and Other Deep Space Questions‘.
Sadly, I think that the title is a little boring and I wonder how many people were put off by the title and missed reading a wonderful book.
First he addresses the common question of why governments spend so much money on abstract research when there are no many poor people whose lives you can improve with the same money. He provides a fascinating defense of how investments in what were then known as the abstract sciences have paid off in concrete inventions that improved the life of millions. He even argues that breakthrough inventions have always come through abstract research and not through pragmatic, targeted research and quotes the example of electricity, radar and others.
Other gems proliferate in this book. I did not know that in third century BC Greeks theorized that the earth was round and revolved around the sun. This theory was forgotten in favour of the flat-earth theory for about 1800 years!
There is more. Based on the dark lines on the sun, they figured out that it is caused by multiple colours cancelling each other out and turning dark. Then they realized that the colour of the stars itself can tell how bright they are and divided the stars into various classes. Combine that with luminosity and you know how big the star is. Imagine this was all discovered quite a while back now. For instance, a red star should be less bright than a blue star of the same size. So if a red star has a much larger brightness, it means that the particular star is massive!
They also estimated that some of the stars have a surface temperature of 40000 degrees compared to the sun, which has “just” 6000 degrees. The element Helium was first discovered through the colour emanating from parts of the sun by Sir Norman Lockyer before it was actually discovered on earth. , which accounts for its name, from Helios in Greek which means the sun.
Interestingly the fact that the sun uses fusion was proved indirectly by how old the earth was, as determined by the geologists! (The previous theory of sun collapsing on itself causing energy to be released cannot be supported because the sun would have disappeared long before the time determined as the age of the earth)
Also lovely is the talk about supernovae and how explosion of one causes other stars and even galaxies to form due to pressure placed on gases in space nearby.
He talks about what will happen when a star dies – describes the stages of the sun’s death – fascinating. The sun has only finished half it’s estimated lifespan so all of us are safe, no worries!
Brilliant narrations on the end of life of a large star vs a smaller one, and also a twin star. You understand the Red Giant, the White Dwarf and Black Holes in terms of under what circumstances is each formed. The book delivers brilliantly exactly what it promises in the title.
The descriptions of black holes with a massive (billions of times that of the sun – imagine!) size and how they ‘let off steam like a whale’ are all described absolutely brilliantly. The fascination never ends because the author also describes how they deduced all that from what they can see! He talks about how the original microscopes and telescopes came to be. This does make for a fascinating read.
When he goes on to ‘violent skies’ part, with description of things like blazars (silly quasars) and such, it is like reading about an exotic world that very few people know about. Mark Kidger has the ability to inform and fascinate at the same time, and this book is brilliant if you want to know more about the universe – the physical side of it, without going into Multiverse and other theories sounding like coming from the minds of science fiction writers. The specific blazar that defies all predictions and efforts to identify it turns out to be a blackhole which emits matter and energy when it becomes too much directly in the view direction from earth. Fascinating.
The military is puzzled by Gamma rays coming from space – there were not looking for it but were wondering if their cold war enemies had managed to install nuclear weapons in space which would also emit gamma rays as a part of their radiation – and panicked. Then they realized that this is a natural phenomenon from outer galaxies.
He then goes back to ancient times, when Erosthenes, using simple concepts came very close to guessing how big the earth was in 800 BC! He even knew that the earth was round. Then the world entered the dark ages and the Western countries, including Greeks who did all those amazing feats, went back to believing the flat earth and regressing to older concepts – so much so that Galileo was almost killed for saying that the earth revolves around the sun.
Then the book goes into a realistic discussion of the feasibility of interstellar travel, including warp speed, worm holes, cryogenic freezing – all from movies, and all not realistic. Also about the speed of light travel (if it was possible) and how humankind will go mad. It talks about a big ship carrying a lot of people who live there for generations it takes to reach a new planet and goes into interesting analysis of their physical state (cooped up, weightless or simulated weight, divisions that invariably arise, the desire from the huge line of descendants at the end of whom they will reach an alien planet etc. It even talks of genetic material deteriorating in space even if locked up; it talks about recording genetic information in machines which then can reassemble ‘humans and other animals’ in an alien planet with no worse off effects because they are ‘new’. Fascinating.
It gets even more interesting when he discusses how much improbable the pop culture science fiction stories are – be they Star Trek (which, incidentally, was cancelled after a short run when it first came out – before coming back as a cult classic!) or War of the Worlds. He discusses how absurd it is that a civilization that mastered intergalactic travel uses the same or similar weaponry to those that Americans use and how, in reality, they would sweep over earth with almost no sweat at all, with their superior weapons. (He does not even discuss the fact that in most serials, they speak English with an American accent!) He also argues that they may not be humanoid or even be carbon based (although carbon is the most common element that bonds well to create the complex proteins needed to form life and therefore they are likely to be carbon based organisms).
This takes the book to yet another level of interest.
He then talks about theories about the end of the universe and cycles through theories that predict that the universe is eternal (the expanding stars fade away and new stars born to fill in the spaces) to the universe being pulled back, overwhelmed by gravity (because the expanding planets never reach the escape velocity) and it violently collapses into itself in a reverse of the Big Bang, only to start the cycle all over again.
How can anyone take a simple question like ‘Why is the sky dark at night?’ and turn it into a totally absorbing cosmological discussion that astounds you with new facts? Mark Kidger demonstrates how. It is absolutely fascinating to read the theories on why the sky is not lit up all the time like a Victoria Day Fireworks night (OK, Canadian example, I realize)
You also learn that like Schrodinger, who to mock Quantum Mechanics of probability made up ‘the ridiculous example’ of the cat which became famous as Schrodinger’s cat, Fred Boyle, who could never accept that the Universe started from an pinpoint gave the derogatory name of Big Bang, thereby popularizing it with millions of ordinary folks!
Such a beautiful argument about how the Universe is likely to end, about what is beyond the universe and why we think what we think. Amazing description about why totally logical scientists believe in the possibility of Multiverse or Parallel Universes, which sounds more crazy than most science fiction voodoos.
This is without a doubt one of the most fascinating books about the cosmos. The author, Mark Kidger, knows how to talk to laymen without using any maths. You feel like you are sitting by the fireside listening to wonderful stories that seem like from fairy land but they are all true and you realize that our universe is full of never ending wonders.
Brilliant job! If you are at all in any way interested in this subject, do not miss this book.
9/10
– – Krishna