Expand your knowledge

With Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt sharing this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, you may well want to speed up the rate of increase of your own knowledge about the cosmos. If so, you could do worse than to check out The Manga Guide to the Universe by science journalist Kenji Ishikawa and physicist Kiyoshi Kawabata from the Tokyo University of Science. Translated from the original Japanese, the book contains a neat mix of comic strips (“manga” being the Japanese word for “comics”) and bona fide scientific discussion. Actually, the “proper bits” will be much more worthwhile for physicists than the cartoons, although the latter are still fun even if not that illuminating. One segment on our galaxy includes corny lines such as “The Milky Way, huh? Sounds yummy,” while it takes 10 pages to draw out some fairly weak parallels between football and the Big Bang (players congregate at certain spots on the pitch just as galaxies cluster together). Still, with many popular-science books being criticized for racing through complex ideas far too fast, the gentle pace will ensure that readers are not lost – although their rate of expansion of new knowledge is likely to be fairly small.

• 2011 No Starch Press £15.99/$19.95pb 256pp

Super-sizing the universe

Talking of things getting bigger, back in 1999 Martin Rees published a book called Just Six Numbers, in which the Cambridge University cosmologist tried to explain how the shape and size of our universe depend on just six key fundamental constants. Shortly afterwards astrophysicist Michael Rowan-Robinson from Imperial College London came out with a similar book called The Nine Numbers of the Cosmos. Now James Stein from California State University has written Cosmic Numbers, in which he argues that 13 numbers are needed for a full understanding of the universe. Three of the numbers, namely Ω (the ratio of the actual density of the universe to the critical density), ε (the efficiency of hydrogen fusion) and the relative strengths of the electrical and gravitational forces, also appeared in Rees’s book, but newbies include things such as the speed of light, the gravitational constant and the Avogadro constant. Stein’s book is much more chatty than either that of Rees or Rowan-Robinson and if “physical constants per dollar” is your criterion for buying a book, then obviously this is the one for you.

• Basic Books £17/99/£25.99hb 228pp

Wonder vs certainty

Science is all about certainty, precision and objectivity. But it is also about wonder, mystery and creativity. In his book The Blind Spot, mathematician William Byers explores these two competing views of science, and offers strong philosophical and practical arguments in favour of the latter. According to Byers, the “science of wonder” is “characterized by a limitless openness and creativity”. On the other side is the “science of certainty”, from which stems such concepts as immutable “laws” of nature (not just “patterns” or “regularities”). Byers cautions against identifying all science with this “certain” variety, arguing that doing so contributes to a “mythology of science” that can be misused and misinterpreted. He also suggests that because “wonder” science is at home with complexity and ambiguity, it may be better at solving the complex and ambiguous problems of the modern world. Byers writes with the zeal of a convert, so it comes as no surprise when, in the book’s final chapter, he confesses that he used to be “entranced” by the “certain” view of science. Whether his readers will be similarly converted is a moot point, especially as the book is somewhat repetitive in its early chapters. But converted or no, all should appreciate the depth of thinking that Byers has brought to bear on an intriguing and important topic.

• 2011 Princeton University Press £16.95/$24.95hb 224pp