Back in the day
Jun. 6th, 2019 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: Exploring the Earth and the Cosmos, by Isaac Asimov
I first read this book as a teenager in the 1980s, and I was prompted to put it back onto the to-read list a few years ago when I visited Lisbon, triggered by the mention of Henry the Navigator. It turns out my memory was not quite right - it was the Phoenicians who first noted the appearance of the Sun in the north of the sky, thus demonstrating they had reached the southern hemisphere (because no-one would have imagined such a possibility); and Henry himself in fact never left Portugal.
The account of various stages of exploration of the Earth's surface is reasonably comprehensive; perhaps some more detail could now be added about deep ocean trenches. But in its exploration of other horizons, the book has not dated so well. It was first published in 1982, and so rides on the same wave as such broadcasting epics as The Ascent of Man or Cosmos; it just about covers the Voyager encounters with Saturn, but of course there is no mention of their later flybys of Uranus or Neptune, nor the various rovers that have landed on Mars, the Cassini mission to Titan, or the New Horizons encounter with Pluto. It's a reminder how much planetary science has achieved in the last 40 years. The sections on time and energy may not require much updating; the section on matter halts at neutrinos, and inevitably doesn't cover any of the more recent achievements in particle physics, such as the discovery of the Higgs boson.
Also irritating, for me, is the constant explanation of metric units; clearly it's written for an American audience. But not only that, the metric units used are a mix of CGS and SI units; while this is easier to handle, it still grates a bit. All told, this book was a bit of a disappointment, and I can recommend it for historic interest only.
I first read this book as a teenager in the 1980s, and I was prompted to put it back onto the to-read list a few years ago when I visited Lisbon, triggered by the mention of Henry the Navigator. It turns out my memory was not quite right - it was the Phoenicians who first noted the appearance of the Sun in the north of the sky, thus demonstrating they had reached the southern hemisphere (because no-one would have imagined such a possibility); and Henry himself in fact never left Portugal.
The account of various stages of exploration of the Earth's surface is reasonably comprehensive; perhaps some more detail could now be added about deep ocean trenches. But in its exploration of other horizons, the book has not dated so well. It was first published in 1982, and so rides on the same wave as such broadcasting epics as The Ascent of Man or Cosmos; it just about covers the Voyager encounters with Saturn, but of course there is no mention of their later flybys of Uranus or Neptune, nor the various rovers that have landed on Mars, the Cassini mission to Titan, or the New Horizons encounter with Pluto. It's a reminder how much planetary science has achieved in the last 40 years. The sections on time and energy may not require much updating; the section on matter halts at neutrinos, and inevitably doesn't cover any of the more recent achievements in particle physics, such as the discovery of the Higgs boson.
Also irritating, for me, is the constant explanation of metric units; clearly it's written for an American audience. But not only that, the metric units used are a mix of CGS and SI units; while this is easier to handle, it still grates a bit. All told, this book was a bit of a disappointment, and I can recommend it for historic interest only.