Violent Universe by Nigel Calder

by Nigel Calder

Unimaginable violence in the far reaches of space, solar storms, the bonbardment of earth by neutrinas, the strange whispers picked up by radio telescopes, the Big-Bang and Steady-State theories of cosmology, the birthdays and possible doomsdays of the earth and the sun and other stars, of the galaxy and the mighty universe itself these are the elements as astronomy today.

Genres: Science

Hardcover

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Noticing that I am fond of this genre, people sometimes ask me whether they should believe what they read in pop science books. There is a straightforward answer to the question: pick up any old pop science book, leaf through it for half an hour, and you'll soon realize that you need to be rather skeptical.

Violent Universe is another fine example. A tie-in to what was apparently a successful BBC science mini-series screened in 1969 (Damn! Why did I miss it?), it promises to fill you in on all the exciting developments that were then happening in astronomy. They have done a good job, engaging a quality science writer to coordinate things; he's travelled all over the world to talk to top astronomers and look at their experiments. The book is nicely produced, with many striking pictures.

The problem is that what they've set out to do is impossible. Cutting-edge science is by definition science that people aren't really sure about yet, so they're going to get it wrong a fair amount of the time. It is consequently rather surprising to see Calder state near the end of the book that "... to say that we can see 'everything' can no longer be much of an exaggeration. Barring the discovery of completely new forms of energy and matter, our children and even our great-great-grandchildren will have few new windows to open."

Let's use our modern knowledge - only an additional 45 years! - to check his score-card. Over a quarter of the book is about quasars and active galaxies. Clearly something is causing these immense explosions and outpourings of radiation. Calder very briefly considers the hypothesis that it could be black holes, but quotes Fred Hoyle, still a respectable figure in the public eye, who thought that a black hole, if it could exist at all, would extinguish itself within a year; Hoyle speculates that quasars are driven by 'some new kind of physics'. Only a few years later, everyone knew this was wrong, and that matter falling into a black hole would create exactly the kind of violent events that were being observed. At the time, however, only a handful of general relativity experts had realized this.

There is no speculation at all about what caused the Big Bang. Ten years later, Guth, Linde and Vilenkin launched the theory of inflation, which tied together a bunch of hitherto unexplained facts and opened the door to the possibility that the Big Bang had occurred many times. Twenty years after that, dark energy was discovered, and in fact shown to account for 70% of the universe's mass. Here, it is not even mentioned as a possibility. Neither is dark matter, which was starting to look quite likely - Peebles presents interesting data in his 1969 Princeton lectures, which were being given as the BBC program aired. Maybe Calder knew about it and didn't want to include material which looked too much like science-fiction; his most exotic candidate for the 'missing matter' is high-temperature intergalactic hydrogen, quickly ruled out by Peebles on the basis of a simple calculation.

Don't get the idea that this is a bad book. It isn't: it's pleasantly written, and I learned all sorts of interesting things, including details of how long baseline interferometry works and how you collect data from a neutrino telescope. I doubt that other pop science writers would have done better. The problem is, simply, that we never know as much as we think we do.

[Blaine Snow]

Written in the late 1960s, this was a popular presentation of the then current state of astronomical knowledge. I read this and a few other astronomy books as a teenager and, along with Carl Sagan, the Apollo missions, Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey, and other NASA missions, I became hooked for life.

This book is now only of historical interest. It's knowledge is completely out of date and has been superseded by mountains of new knowledge and astronomical research. Back then we didn't even know exoplanets existed, nor had we confirmed the existence of black holes. The journey from then to now has been exhilarating, astonishing, and wondrous - and it still continues with unbelievable discoveries coming in every week!

Pay attention folks - wonderous new knowledge of the planets, the galaxy, and the universe accumulate almost daily!

[Neville Tirimba Ogoti · Rating 3 out of 5]

Astronomy seems like a topic for experts. Nigel Calder breaks it down into simple language for the lay person. Galaxies, quarks and neutrons and other tiny particles are described in a language that is so plain yet so beguiling.