Passacaglia and Fugue

Book Review: The Information - A History, a Theory, a Flood, by James Gleick
Most often, the work book sale contains new releases, but sometimes there are older titles too, either because a publisher has a new up-and-coming reissue, or possibly just because they were discovered down the back of the sofa. Either way, this one emerged and despite my disappointment at Time Travel, I decided to persevere.

In fact this is a much better book, covering a difficult and enigmatic subject with clear examples, whether it's the redundancy of repeated information in African drums, Babbage's engines, Maxwell's demon, or the fall from Netwonian and Laplacian determinism to quantum mechanics, Gödel and Turing. The theme of the book is the development of Shannon's information theory, but it casts widely in order to do so, carefully circumscribing the technical meaning of "information" to avoid doubt with its more everyday usage. Gleick strives to be inclusive, so there is discussion along the way on topics such as the OED, philosophy about daugerrotypes, genes, memes, and Wikipedia.

Book Review: Breaking the Chains of Gravity - The Story of Spaceflight before NASA, by Amy Shira Teitel
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department", says Wernher von Braun

Tom Lehrer, Wernher von Braun

This is what I like about the book sale: an unexpected but potentially interesting find. This was an interesting book, with quite a lot of background beginning in 1920s and 1930s Germany, documenting inter-war research and amateur enthusiasm for rocket propulsion. Some of this is strikingly basic, such as accidents caused by misfiring or accidental ignition. Teitel's portrayal of von Braun is generally rather sympathetic, suggesting that it was rocket science that drove him rather than military objectives; but to say the least, that sits uneasily with some of his behaviour, both during and after the war. The story then moves to the USA, with various military and civilian agencies working on various related technologies and themes such as super- and hypersonic flight, human endurance and exposure to high acceleration. In the context of preparations for the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58, US bureaucracy (not entirely unrelated to the awkward position occupied by von Braun, though also based on rivalry between the different military services and civilian agencies) was eclipsed by the launch of Sputnik, and the book concludes with the formation of NASA in late 1958.

The book does, however, have flaws: although I discovered that there is a Newbury in Wiltshire, for example, within a few pages, I discovered that The Hague is in Belgium, which seemed even less likely. The description of the allied D-Day forces as "English, American and Canadian" grates, not only because of the frequent American conflation of English and British, but also because there were nationals from other occupied countries in Europe, and the wider British Empire, present additionally. These do somewhat reduce confidence in the accuracy of matters on which I have less knowledge. The other, rather obvious, omission or misrepresentation, is that the book plainly isn't a history of spaceflight before NASA, but rather, a history of American spaceflight. There's no discussion of the history of Soviet spaceflight at all prior to the Sputnik launch. I can accept that there may be difficulty in researching and accessing documents on the subject but it does feel rather swept under the carpet, as if Sputnik emerged fully formed from a vacuum. But, within these constraints, it's a decent read.

Book Review: The Upright Thinkers, by Leonard Mlodinow
Having enjoyed previous works by Mlodinow, I picked this one up straight away at a work book sale some time ago. In this volume Mlodinow takes the rather broad subject of - more or less - everything that has ever happened, from a human point of view.

He begins by pointing out that, although chimpanzees can communicate with human researchers, and can answer questions posed, they never show evidence of asking questions, and that this is a very fundamental difference from even a quite small human child. The first few chapters examine prehistory and early history, from before the Neolithic revolution through Göbekli Tepe and the writings of Aristotle, with an emphasis on the rational inferences and behaviours that were drawn by early humans from the evidence around them. The second part of the book considers the way Aristotelian science was cast aside from the seventeenth to nineteenth century, with a focus on Galileo, Newton, Mendeleev and Darwin. The third part focuses exclusively on physics, which is Mlodinow's profession, in the twentieth century, with a non-specialist overview of quantum physics. It is, perhaps, a shame that other scientific achievements, such as the discovery of DNA or the development of the electronic computer, are omitted. The book is interspersed with memories and anecdotes of his father's time as a survivor of the Holocaust, perhaps in part as a memorial and also as a cautionary tale of un-thinking. Overall, this is an entertaining and eminently readable book, and Mlodinow's dry humour also frequently shows through.

Book Review: The Glass Universe, by Dava Sobel
It's always good to discover a book in the work book sale that's already on my "to-read" list. This is the story of the women who analysed astronomical photographs at Harvard from the late nineteenth century through to the Second World War and who were, in common with people in other disciplines doing calcultions, often referred to as "computers".

Dava Sobel begins with the death of Dr Henry Draper in 1882, which led Mrs Draper to fund work related to his research and practice in the early years of astrophotography and spectroscopy. Ultimately, the result of this was the Henry Draper star catalogue, by which many stars (prefixed "HD") are known today. In this emerging discipline various discoveries were made, such as spectroscopic binaries, Cepheid variable stars, the element helium, the elemental distribution in stars, and red-shift. As the computing power behind the analysis of photographs, many of these discoveries were by women, though poorly paid and clearly regarded as second-class citizens in the academic community. I'd previously been aware of the work of Henrietta Leavitt (whose period-luminosity law for variable stars was of fundamental importance in Hubble's discovery of the expansion of the universe and settling the question of "the nebulae"), but there are many other names in this book that deserve to be better known too, such as Williamina Fleming, Antonia Maury, Annie Jump Cannon and Cecilia Payne.

The book combines the story of these women with the story of the Harvard Observatory, and its outposts in South America and later South Africa, and with general astronomical topics and progress of the time, such as eclipse observations, stellar classifications, national and international relations in astronomy, and the perennially parlous state of funding for research. Whilst these are all interesting topics and provide a necessary background for the work of the computers, the end result can be a bit dry and does somewhat lack the focus that a book on a single individual would have.

The moon landings hadn't finished before I was born, but I am way too young to remember them. As a youngster and through my teenage years, though, there was news from time to time about the Voyager probes, and I am nostalgic for the BBC's Horizon documentaries that followed each planetary encounter. Marking the 40th anniversary of their launch is the documentary film The Farthest. It didn't appear in the listings for this term's Reading Film Theatre, so I looked for other options. Working in central London gives you the widest opportunity and I found it was showing at Picturehouse Central, by Piccadilly Circus. Billed as a "no ads" showing, I was getting a bit restless after about 20 minutes of adverts, concerned that maybe I was in fact in the wrong screen, but it turned out all right in the end.

There are some negative points to the film. The music, like some of Murray Gold's work for Doctor Who, was intrusive at times. For whatever reason, the director couldn't resist the unscientific whooshing sound in animations as the spacecraft passes by the point of view of an observer in the vacuum. There seems to be quite an emphasis on the "human-interest" aspect of the Voyager programme, which is I suppose reasonable, but dwells in particular in the early stages of the film on the Golden Record. (It's not without interest; in particular, it's good to see Nick Sagan, one of the child voices on the record, reminiscing about his father).

There is also some politics. The mission was approved by Nixon, initially to cover Jupiter and Saturn only. This was a 1-in-176 year opportunity to visit all four major planets in the outer solar system ("The last person who had the opportunity to make this decision, Mr President, was Thomas Jefferson. He blew it.") Curiously the film doesn't delve into the process whereby funding for the project was extended to Uranus and Neptune, though it does cover the scientific aspects of that decision. (Voyager 1 was given a path for a close fly-by of Titan, which precluded it venturing to the other two planets; had the results of the Titan observation justified Voyager 2 taking the same path, the mission would have ended there).

What's left, then, is the story of the science and the scientists. The many interviews that are spliced together over the course of the film are mostly - though not exclusively - now of old men, itself a sobering thought. The "technology freeze" for the mission was in 1972. The computing power of Voyager is minuscule by today's standards but was leading-edge at the time - the first spacecraft that could be re-programmed en voyage. The revelations of the Jupiter observations in 1979, including its satellites and ring, were followed by the majesty of Saturn in 1981. Problems with the motors on Voyager 2's instrument arms had to be resolved after Saturn. The flyby of Uranus in 1986 unfortunately coincided with the Challenger disaster. Although a success scientifically, the tilted planet was surprisingly bland and un-photogenic. In 1989, Neptune was more spectacular.

In 1990, Voyager 1 took the famous Pale Blue Dot picture, a frippery in scientific terms, inspired, as were many things in the programme, by Carl Sagan. It is the most distant human-produced artefact and is reckoned to have left the solar system in 2012. Both Voyager probes are still in contact with the NASA mission, with light signals taking more than 19 hours between Voyager 1 and Earth. As Lawrence Krauss observes in the film, it's almost certain that the Voyager probes will survive longer than humanity, and also almost certain that no other civilisation will ever encounter them. But there's the Golden Record, just in case.

Book Review: Five Billion Years of Solitude - The Search for Life Among the Stars, by Lee Billings
I picked this up around a year ago at a work book sale. It turned out to be quite a patchy book. There is some interesting science in here, but Billings has chosen to make it more of a human-interest story, which doesn't work as well as it sounds it should, given the subject.

The first chapter starts off with a discussion about the Drake equation, and quite rapidly focuses on the longevity of a technical civilisation as the critical factor. The rest of the book weaves through the advances and discoveries of exoplanets in the past 20 years or so, and also terrestrial evolution, past, present and future geology and chemistry. Depressingly, the other rocky planets in our own solar system show that it is easy for such worlds not to be hospitable to advanced life. However, the book is also a story of planet-hunters, astrobiologists, space scientists, and dreamers; and where humans are involved, politics is not far away, with rival groups within the scientific community arguing over the validity of their techniques and which projects to spend money on, and the US government (the book is essentially US-focused) regularly reprioritising NASA and trimming its budget.

It's speculative that we would recognise signs of life (though we would recognise signs of life sufficiently similar to ourselves); it's speculative that we could detect such signs (though that is probably only a matter of time); and if we did, what then? Dubbing such a world "Earth 2.0" hints at our colonial ambitions, but surely such a world would be already taken. In the mean time, we need to take care of the only world known to support (allegedly) intelligent life.