Accidental Astronomy: How Random Discoveries Shape the Science of Space by Chris Lintott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
From what Google search tells me of Chris Lintott, the author of this book, he has impressive credentials of being the professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford as well as a co-presenter of the BBC’s The Sky at Night (which I plan to look up as soon as I finish this review). From what this book tells me, he’s also excited about his field, good at enthusiastically explaining things in easily accesible terms and is quite funny — in a bit of a Dad joke kind of way, with abundance of humorous footnotes, the combination to which I’m unhealthily partial.
“I know two astronomers who use their asteroid’s number as their PIN. Or at least they do until such time as they read this footnote.”
From the title of the book – Accidental Astronomy: How Random Discoveries Shape the Science of Space – I expected the discussion of how accidents and blunders advanced astronomy, but it’s not quite that. It’s really a mishmash of fun Astronomy topics – SETI, posible life on Enceladus, looking for signs of life in the atmosphere of Venus, Oumuamua visitor from interstellar space that may or may not be the sign of alien presence, Hubble telescope, radio telescopes, cosmic microwave background radiation, asteroids – some of which may indeed have been unexpected lucky discoveries and some of which required work and dedication and questioning and failure rather than the Eureka! moment. Regardless of the concept, it’s a very fun book even for those who are a bit familiar with the ideas here already.
“Of course, WETI’s advocates point out that we can’t really know how hyperintelligent aliens, whose civilizations have millennia’s worth of an evolutionary head start on us, will choose to communicate, and suggest keeping an eye out everywhere. A notable collaboration was with a German T-shirt store that offered visitors to their website the option of purchasing a randomly chosen design; WETI monitored the output of the company’s T-shirt generator to see if aliens were trying to communicate with us by altering the apparel of the cool kids in Berlin. The results, Aleks told me, were inconclusive, but regardless of this failure I still think that WETI deserves an Ig Nobel Prize.”
———
“If they’re out there, I suspect they know that we are here. That’s probably true even if our neighbors didn’t manage to catch the most powerful message ever sent into space, which made use of the EISCAT radar in northern Sweden. The radar is one of the leading facilities in studying the Earth’s upper atmosphere, but when it faced a funding crisis a few years ago its scientists realized that they could sell the right to yell into the cosmos to the highest bidder. Quite what any recipients will make of the result, a video advertisement for Doritos, is not clear, but it’s unlikely to be a threat to our continued existence, not least because no instructions were included on how to decode the video. Unless they manage to guess exactly how modern web standards work, aliens will be unaffected by the tremendous power of advertising and spared the arrival of a quest across the galaxy with an insatiable appetite for tasty, salted, triangular snacks.”
I had a lot of fun reading this book. Lintott makes it so accessible and easily readable, and his enthusiasm is contagious. Loved it, and will certainly be on the lookout for more from him.
“Whenever we choose to go somewhere we haven’t been before, to look in new ways even at familiar objects, or carry out novel experiments or make new kinds of observations, the possibility of discovery opens up. Finding phosphine has reignited interest in understanding Venus’s atmosphere, a just reward for an observation that was taken without any real expectation of success, but simply because it could be done. Trusting in chance turns out to be a good idea, even when we turn our telescopes and imagination to the Universe beyond our Solar System and look out at the cosmos.”
4.5 stars, rounding up.
——————
Thanks to NetGalley and Basic Books for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.
books are life 