THE plot doesn’t grab me. On the other hand, I did keep turning the pages
of Barry Jones’s Dictionary of World Biography (Information Australia, pp 808,
A$39.95). Good reference books are like that. Difficult to follow any
particular thread, always taking you in different directions, but you keep on
reading. Jones wanders far and wide in his 8500 biographies. Rarely, though,
do the entries live up to the “opinionated and subjective” claim of the book’s
dustjacket. For that you have to go to the biographies and reference works
that Jones lists as further reading.
If ever there was a subject that deserved an opinion, it is Lloyd Webber
Sir Andrew (1948-). No such luck. Fortunately, the entry is short, 15 lines
with a third of them given over to a wife and brother. This is about half the
length of the entry accorded to Mandelbrot, Benoit (1924-), a laudable
imbalance that betrays Jones’s interest in the sciences. Jones was Australia’s
Minister for Science during much of the I98Os.
The scientific emphasis and understanding also shows in the quality of the
entries. Not many writers could sum up chaos theory in one sentence. It is,
says Jones, “an attempt to describe the operation of persistently unstable
systems” – much better than the circular argument that it is about “the
breakdown of ordered systems”.
There is a refreshing shortage of references to the obvious. The book is
poor on sportspersons, but good on music makers as well as scientists,
emphases that might go against the book in Australia, or is my prejudice
showing?
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As you would expect Jones is also good on Australians. I like the throwaway
reference in the entry for Oliphant, Sir Mark Laurence Elwin (1901-).
Oliphant’s work “on hydrogen-isotope interactions contributed (much to his
horror) to the hydrogen bomb”. The “straight” reference book has its work cut
out in these days of multimedia works. With luck an enterprising “publisher”
will add Jones to a CD-ROM, then we could dive around the work chasing
subjects as
well as people.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
