The Scientific American Book of the Cosmos edited by David Levy, Macmillan,
£20, ISBN 0333782933
Previous generations of scientists would have killed to know what we know.
For the first time in history, we have a pretty good idea of the material
content of the Universe, our position within it and how the whole thing came
into being.
In these times of exploding knowledge there is a definite need to take stock
and assemble what we know in a palatable form. Scientific American has
attempted to cater for this need by bringing together essays that have appeared
in the magazine.
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The essays in The Scientific American Book of the Cosmos have been
selected by David Levy, co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which in 1994
struck Jupiter with the violence of several full-scale nuclear wars. Levy is an
active astronomer and an accomplished writer, so you’d expect him to provide a
broad and accurate picture of our current understanding of the cosmos. This is
certainly a great collection of essays, but it is not, as the book promises, a
seamless synthesis of our current knowledge.
Nobody can fault the range of articles Levy has included. There are essays on
the planets, moons and assorted debris in the Solar System, and on our Galaxy,
the Milky Way. Also included are contributions on the world of subatomic
particles, the origin of life on Earth and the possibility of its existence
elsewhere.
The contributors, too, are stars in their own fields. Not many books can
boast chapters written by such giants as Erwin Schrödinger and Francis
Crick. My personal favourites are a piercingly clear essay by Albert Einstein on
general relativity and a mind-boggling, though baffling, article by Alan Guth
and Paul Steinhardt on the inflationary Universe.
So much for the book’s content. But Levy has not succeeded in providing an
accurate synthesis of our current knowledge of the cosmos, which the book jacket
promises. Gathering together previously published articles inevitably leaves
subject gaps, missing explanations and so on. To some extent, these could have
been plugged with a glossary of terms. But there isn’t one. In fact,
surprisingly for a book so densely packed with information, there is no
index.
Collecting essays in this way is clearly a good publishing wheeze. But this
approach short-changes the public, who would be better served by an account
moulded into a seamless whole. In a more positive vein, this is a wonderful
collection of essays to dip in and out of if you already have a good overview of
current cosmic understanding. However, for the next edition, please, please can
we have an index?