MixedThe Sunday Times (UK)\"In this exhaustively researched and sometimes exhausting book, he sets out to show that the whole scientific revolution was a global endeavour, and the West has unfairly taken the credit ... What Poskett ends up showing is not that the scientific revolution happened everywhere, but that science progresses when different ideas come together—and that process is not always fair or pretty. The communications revolution means it now, truly, is a global project, and better for it ... You’re left wondering if all this squabbling over who discovered what misses the point of science itself. The truths it finds are universal. Gravity, evolution—they are the same for us all, and surely they are grand enough to show petty culture wars for the irrelevance they are.
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Ananyo Bhattacharya
MixedSunday Times (UK)[Von Neumann] is largely forgotten by the public. Why? This book gives plenty of clues ... Perhaps that’s another reason he isn’t remembered: he just did too much. The list of his achievements is boggling, and each one is complex but fascinating. Unfortunately, each is made no less complex, and much less fascinating, by Ananyo Bhattacharya’s laborious approach, which gives the general reader little insight into the theories and scarcely any into the man.
Guido Tonelli tr. Erica Segre and Simon Carnell
PositiveThe Sunday Times (UK)With all that going for it, it’s a shame that some passages of this book are like wading through particle soup. Quarks and leptons, positrons and hadrons, gluons and muons, Tonelli chucks them all in, sometimes with a carefree disregard for the general reader’s understanding. There are parts that, frankly, I didn’t get. Perhaps you’ll do better ... All is forgiven, though, when Tonelli leaps — often in one paragraph — from minutiae to cosmic grandeur. He explains superbly how minuscule variations in the density of that first fleck of a universe are now written across the immensity of space, to be read by us in background radiation and in the patterns of the galaxies themselves. The heavy elements of which we are made were forged in those stars, and he takes an infectious joy in the implications ... He’s honest about science’s shortcomings too ... that’s the key difference between the Bible’s Genesis and science’s version. One is finished. The other is a work in progress, and is all the more exciting for that. Whether or not you buy every detail of the Tonelli version of events, his flawed but hugely impressive book gives a grand vision of the marvels we’ve discovered, and the immensity of what we still don’t understand. Maybe he should have called it Revelations instead.
Janna Levin
RaveThe Times (UK)... you have a black hole, a region of the universe that those outside it can never see into — unless we decide to cross that event horizon and take a look. Levin’s book is dressed up as a \'survival guide\' to doing just that. It’s a conceit that doesn’t have a lot of mileage because, as she is forced to admit fairly early on, black holes aren’t survivable. It hardly matters: so much about them demands we suspend disbelief that the fact you are being simultaneously shredded and pulverised by gravity during the ride is justa detail ... Just like its subject this book is a seemingly miraculous compression of a vast amount of material into an implausibly small space. It’s packed with revelations. As you approach the event horizon, for instance,you’ll reach a point where spacetime is so distorted that light orbits the hole — with the entertaining result that you could look straight ahead and see your own back ... this mind-bending little book is still, unavoidably, a difficult read at times. It’s a hugely enjoyable one, though. At the end of it you will know a lot about black holes, but you won’t understand them. At least you will have the comfort of knowing that nobody else does either.
