Anatomy of a disaster

Early in the morning of 27 April 1986, operators at the Chernobyl nuclear-power plant set in motion a chain of events that led to the world’s worst nuclear disaster. In the immediate aftermath of the explosion (which, ironically, happened during a test of one of the plant’s safety features), much of the blame fell on the operators themselves. Later investigators probed deeper, pointing out design flaws in the plant’s reactors and deficiencies in its safety culture, but few have analysed these issues with as much care as Sonja Schmid does in her book Producing Power: the Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry. Schmid begins with a detailed explanation of how the Soviet Union chose to develop its nuclear-power industry, and how two government ministries assumed competing and sometimes conflicting responsibilities. The machinations of these rival bureaucracies are important to Schmid’s argument, but unfortunately, they do not make exciting reading. General readers may wish to skip ahead to the third chapter, which deals with how the Soviet nuclear workforce was trained. At this point, what was previously a rather dry tale comes to life, with fresh insights on almost every page. The early US nuclear-power programme, Schmid explains, experienced “recurring incidents of human error”, which were addressed by increasing the degree of automation and engineered safety features. Early Soviet efforts, in contrast, encountered problems with unreliable instrumentation, leading to a greater reliance on human intelligence and ingenuity. Neither approach is inherently wrong, and Schmid avoids making hindsight-based judgements. Gradually, however, the Soviet nuclear cadre developed “a rigid and contradictory structure of accountability that…envisioned expert judgement as the ultimate redundancy feature, while simultaneously restricting operators in their actions and undermining their preparedness to exercise their judgement”. That is a recipe for disaster in any field, and there is something compelling in the way Schmid marshals her facts to explain how this and other factors contributed to the Chernobyl disaster.

• 2015 MIT Press £26.95/$38.00hb 384pp

Back to the imagined future

The astrophysicist Jayant V Narlikar is best known among scientists for his contributions to cosmology. His long career as a writer of science-fiction stories will be less familiar to many, perhaps because these stories have, until now, been published only in Narlikar’s native India. His “new” (at least to readers living abroad) three-part collection The Return of Vaman begins with a short story, “The rare idol of Ganesha”, about an obsessive physicist called Ajit and his old university pal John. This ingenious tale, written in 1975, cleverly combines mathematics, physics, cricket and Indian mythology as Ajit repeatedly risks his life while trying to perfect his potentially game-changing research. Some of the scientific terminology could confuse non-scientists, but Narlikar captivates via his vivid descriptions of each scene and his ability to raise interesting questions about research ethics. Ethical questions are also on display in the novel that forms the book’s core (and its title). The action here revolves around a team of experts (including physicists) assigned to probe the contents of a strange container found deep underground, and several criminals, who are likewise set on obtaining the secrets held within. Narlikar creates believable characters and skilfully weaves in real-life physics and realistic scientific scenarios. While some may guess a few of the impending plot twists, the fast-paced tension keeps it an enthralling read. Certain aspects of the novel, penned in 1986, do seem rather dated; for instance, one of the criminal characters uses an offensive term for Japanese people that may grate on modern ears. But the science-fiction elements have generally aged well, and the final part of the book – an autobiographical essay encompassing details of the Hindu mythology integral to each tale, as well as Narlikar’s thoughts on science communication and science fiction – makes an interesting conclusion.

• 2015 Springer International Publishing £15.00pb 142pp

Popular cosmology

The discovery of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in the mid-1960s was a seminal event in modern cosmology. As a subject for a popular-science book, then, the CMB is an excellent choice, and The Cosmic Microwave Background: How It Changed Our Understanding of the Universe has a lot of things going for it. Author Rhodri Evans, an astronomer at Cardiff University, UK, has a pleasantly informal writing style, and the book would make an accessible guide for (say) first-year undergraduates in astrophysics. However, his stated audience is “all those people who want to learn more about where our universe comes from”, and his view of what these non-scientist readers will understand often seems optimistic. On page 73, for example, he provides a detailed explanation of the electromagnetic spectrum, complete with a nice analogy comparing the different parts of the spectrum to the keys on a piano. Bright 13 year olds or adults who have long since forgotten their school science classes could follow this passage easily; indeed, more advanced readers may wish to skip past it. However, on the next page Evans seems to think his readers will understand, without explanation, what is meant by “an electron in the ground state” and “the spin of the proton in the nucleus”. A separate concern is that the book’s coverage of the observations by the team behind the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP2 ) telescope appears to be a victim of bad timing. Although the book has a 2015 copyright, Evans completed it in April 2014, when cosmic dust had only just begun to cloud BICEP2’s purported discovery of evidence for cosmic inflation in the form of “B-mode polarization” of the CMB – a debate that has rumbled on since. The timing is hardly Evans’ fault, but it makes parts of the discussion feel weirdly out of date – a drawback in a book that otherwise has much to recommend it.

• 2015 Springer £31.99/$34.99pb