Marcia Bartusiak, Black Hole. Literary Review, July 2015. Review by Andrew Crumey.

In 1756 troops of the Nawab of Bengal over-ran a fort manned by British forces. The captured occupants were imprisoned in a cell where most died overnight from heat exhaustion. The precise numbers are unknown, but the Black Hole of Calcutta was a colonial horror story imprinted on the minds of schoolchildren over the next two centuries of British imperialism. The tale was well known to American astrophysicist Robert Dicke, and according to Marcia Bartusiak's engagingly written scientific history, it was Dicke who transferred the epithet to those escape-proof cosmic dungeons that are the subject of her book.

Science writers, unlike biographers or political historians, aren't generally expected to come up with some new opinion or revelation in order to justify adding another volume to the bookshelf. Discovery, after all, is what the scientists are meant to have done, and Bartusiak's work is for the most part a faithful and accurate chronicle of a well-trodden subject. We are led through Einstein's general relativity, its unexpected prediction of gravitationally collapsed objects, their possible discovery by means of their influence on surrounding matter, and Stephen Hawking's realisation that black holes "ain't so black", emitting radiation of their own. All of this is well told, in non-technical terms that stretch imagination rather than comprehension. For me, though, it's Dicke's place in the story that comes as an interesting surprise. Read just about any other book on the subject, and credit for the name is more likely to be attributed to Dicke's contemporary, John Archibald Wheeler.

Dicke died in 1997, Wheeler in 2008, and the latter claimed only to have popularised the name "black hole", which first appeared in print in 1964. But Bartusiak cites physicist Hong-Yee Chiu who attended a talk Robert Dicke gave around 1960, where he said the hypothetical objects were "like the Black Hole of Calcutta". According to Bartusiak, "It was one of Dicke's favourite expressions... His sons recall their father exclaiming, 'Black Hole of Calcutta!' whenever a household item appeared to have been swallowed up and gone missing."

Whether this is more interesting than getting to grips with spherically symmetric solutions of general relativity is a matter of personal taste. Die-hard physicists can be apt to see the history of their subject as trivial gossip about the contingencies of human life, which is exactly why we need people with a different outlook to chronicle what they do. But it is science that occupies most of this fairly brief book, and Bartusiak relates it with aplomb.

The astronomical story in fact begins, like the name, in the eighteenth century. Isaac Newton and his followers believed light to be made of tiny solid particles. Throw a ball in the air and Earth's gravity will bring it back down; shoot it upwards at a speed greater than eleven kilometres per second (Earth's "escape velocity") and it won't come back, instead flying off into space. What if a planet or star were so massive that its escape velocity was greater than the speed of light? John Michell asked this in 1783, and suggested that astronomers search for light-trapping "dark stars" which might betray themselves through their tug on neighbouring objects. He was a black-hole theorist ahead of his time.

Newton's particle theory of light was wrong, and so was his theory of gravity. Einstein's general relativity offered a more accurate one, describing gravitation as a distortion of space-time. As a consequence, light would be bent by strong fields. Michell had the right idea for the wrong reason.

Einstein's theory was a recipe rather than a meal: his equations had to be solved in order to make predictions, and finding solutions was hard. Karl Schwarzschild found one in 1916. It showed that if an object's mass could be contained within a certain volume, then light - or anything else - would be unable to escape the interior. The boundary of this critical volume is known as the event horizon, and its size is the Schwarzschild radius, a curiously appropriate name since Schwarzschild roughly means "black shield".

Bartusiak recounts the decades of controversy that followed. The equations suggested that a very large star could collapse under its own weight, shrinking right down to a point or "singularity", hidden within its own event horizon. It was not until the 1960s that the existence of such objects began to seem plausible, and in 1971 the first candidate emerged, named Cygnus X-1 after its location in the night sky, in the neck of the celestial swan. It is now believed to be a collapsed star roughly fifteen times more massive than the Sun, compressed within a radius of about forty four kilometres. It is closely orbiting a visible star, some of whose material gets pulled round the black hole, creating the intense X-rays that reveal its presence.

Since then, numerous black holes have been discovered, including a "supermassive" one at the centre of our galaxy. Exactly how it formed is still debated, whether from a coalescing of stars or a merger of smaller black holes. What is no longer doubted is the existence of these bizarre objects.

Bartusiak explains the unpleasant result of falling into one, being stretched like spaghetti while to observers on Earth you would seem frozen forever at the point of no return. She deals with some popular questions such as why black holes don't just eat up everything. The answer is that you could orbit one forever without noticing ill effects, it's only if you stray too close that things go awry. She ends with the hunt for gravitational waves, produced when black holes form. She reports on what seemed like the most exciting astronomical news of 2014, the claim by the BICEP2 team that gravitational waves from the Big Bang had been detected. That has now been discounted; but since my copy was an advance proof, maybe that false alarm will be quietly removed from what is otherwise a reliable and readable account of an amazing story.

Thomas Levenson, The Hunt for Vulcan. Literary Review, December 2015. Review by Andrew Crumey.

If aliens somehow manage to tap in to our internet then I wonder what they'll make of the Vulcan Language Institute. Its website proclaims, "In addition to language lessons and many, many dictionaries with specialized terminology, we have information on noted Vulcans, Vulcan history etc." The planet is, of course, the fictional home of Star Trek's Mr Spock, but fans have been developing the language since 1980 and it now has a vocabulary of 12,000 words.

Levenson's book is about a fictional planet, but not Spock's, whose pop-culture universe sadly doesn't get a look in. In the nineteenth century there was believed to be a planet inside the orbit of Mercury, and because it was so close to the Sun and presumably very hot, it was named Vulcan after the Roman god of fire. The planet was first of all predicted theoretically, then supposedly observed, and finally killed by Einstein. Those are the three acts of Levenson's narrative.

The story begins at the outermost part of the solar system. Careful measurements of the planet Uranus showed its orbit to be deviating from the one predicted by Newton's law of gravitation. A more distant, unseen planet was tugging it. Two men tackled the mathematical problem independently: Urbain Le Verrier in France, and John Couch Adams in England. It was a formidable task. The mass and distance of the mystery object were unknown, as well as the tilt and shape of its path around the Sun. Both scientists had to make guesses; a clue was "Bode's law", a hypothesis about planetary orbits that has since turned out to be as fictitious as Spock's ears. Even so, both were able to pin down the new planet's position well enough for astronomers to start looking for it. Le Verrier's prediction was closest and his colleagues in Germany were quickest off the mark, discovering Neptune in September 1846. British astronomers continue to fly the flag for Adams, but for the 35-year-old Le Verrier it was the pinnacle of an illustrious career. When the Eiffel Tower was constructed half a century later, the names of seventy-two of France's greatest scientists were engraved on it, and Le Verrier's was among them.

Le Verrier turned his attention to Mercury, whose orbit also showed an irregularity. The planet's elliptical path doesn't bring it back to the same place; instead the orbit slowly swings, tracing a pattern like petals around a flower. The explanation seemed to be the influence of all the other planets beyond Mercury, but when Le Verrier did the maths he found that this could not account for the full effect. In 1859 he announced a very small excess that might be explained by the pull of another planet inside Mercury's orbit.

At the same time, a French village doctor was on the verge of unexpected fame. When not treating patients, Edmond Lescarbault liked to observe the Sun using a specially filtered telescope. He was on the lookout for sunspots - small dark patches now known to be caused by kinks in the Sun's magnetic field - but in March 1859 he saw what appeared to be a tiny dark disc moving at an unusual pace across the Sun's face. Belatedly hearing of Le Verrier's theory, he wrote to the astronomer in December to report it. Le Verrier immediately made the journey from Paris to see him. Lescarbault's methods were crude: his watch had no second hand, and he had missed the precise moment when the object crossed the Sun's edge, so his timings were as unreliable as his estimate of the object's size. But Le Verrier was convinced, and in January 1860 he announced the discovery. Within weeks the new planet was dubbed Vulcan.

After that, many people claimed to see it, while others maintained it was an illusion. A school textbook of the time, Lockyer's Elements Of Astronomy , said Vulcan was "suspected - it is not proved". The best chance for a sighting would be during a total eclipse, when the planet might be found twinkling beside the blackened Sun. In July 1878, ten months after Le Verrier's death, two leading American astronomers grasped the opportunity. Lewis Swift was in Colorado while James Craig Watson set up his telescope at Separation, Wyoming; "a fly-speck of a place" according to Levenson, chosen because it was on a rail route and offered a hope of clear weather. During the two minutes of totality, Swift and Watson both thought they saw something, which they duly announced. It brought a hostile response from rival astronomer Christian Peters, who accused Watson of incompetence and Swift of cheating. Both made dignified replies, but Vulcan's credibility was weakened. Even if it existed, it could not be large enough to explain Mercury's anomalous orbit.

Other ideas were suggested, such as adjusting Newton's laws by a tiny amount to make the numbers fit, but it was Einstein who found the answer in 1915 with his general theory of relativity. Newton's laws are only an approximation; the Sun's bending of spacetime explains Mercury's orbit. Further vindication came four years later, during another eclipse, when starlight grazing the Sun's edge was shown to bend.

Levenson ably tells the three-act story, whose first and third parts are familiar episodes of scientific history. The middle, which best fits the book's title, is intriguing and entertaining. I do still wonder how much the Star Trek creators knew about it.

David Nixon, International Space Station: Architecture Beyond Earth. Literary Review, June 2016. Review by Andrew Crumey.

If you're the sort of person who likes looking up at night, you might on occasion notice what appears to be an extremely bright star moving slowly across the sky. If it's not a helicopter searchlight or UFO then there's a good chance it's the International Space Station, a structure about as large as a football pitch orbiting two hundred and fifty miles above the Earth at a speed of five miles per second. That bright light in the sky, according to David Nixon, is a feat of engineering and architecture on a par with the Eiffel Tower or Aswan Dam. While his sumptuously illustrated book amply justifies the claim, the jury is still out on whether the brilliant technical achievement justifies the enormous bill the ISS has run up for the fifteen countries contributing to it.

Amid the mass of information assembled in this coffee-table format book is a flow chart used for planning NASA missions. Step one is "refine user needs and objectives", and it gives the first clue to the problems that beset the project from the outset. What exactly is a space station for? In the minds of mid-twentieth century science fiction enthusiasts it could be a floating city, luxury hotel or launch pad to the outer planets.

When Ronald Reagan officially gave the go-ahead for development in 1984, NASA had already been ploughing through their flow charts for five years, and had decided that it would be, as David Nixon says, "a space research laboratory, an astronomical observatory, a transportation node, a servicing facility, an assembly platform, a manufacturing plant, a storage depot and a staging base all rolled into one." [p31] Hard economic realities stepped in, with rising costs and slashed budgets creating a need for constantly revised plans. In the end, a single objective remained intact: space research laboratory. Yet so far there has been no great discovery or breakthrough, nor is any seriously expected. What the ISS has produced is a lot of information about how people, plants and materials behave in near-zero gravity, plus numerous technical spin-offs. Perhaps more important, in the long run, is its political and social impact: a significant part of the astronauts' activity is doing web chats with schoolkids or generating good-news headlines for their sponsor nations. Well, the Eiffel Tower was very expensive too, and served no practical purpose at all. And if all that cash hadn't gone into the ISS, we can be sure it wouldn't have been used instead to eradicate poverty or cure cancer.

Reagan wanted to call the space station "Freedom", a name that went by the wayside as partner countries were brought in to help support the troubled project. The biggest boost came in the wake of the Soviet Union's demise, when Russia joined the club. It was Russia that put the first piece of the ISS into orbit in 1988, and the multi-national design has left its mark on the structure, most of which was completed over the following decade. As astronaut Nicole Scott writes in an introduction, "The U.S. modules are somewhat sterile, with a lot of white panels and exposed cables and equipment, while the Russian modules are what I would describe as 'cosy', with a plush tan fabric covering the major surfaces." [p20] On the other hand, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield did not entirely regret the austere American decor. He is quoted as saying, "the psychiatrists who were consulted thought that soothing colours were key to mental health, so they chose... salmon. Either they changed their minds or stopped dabbling in interior design..." These personal perspectives are very welcome in what, for the most part, is a factually comprehensive but rather dry account of the ISS project. The level of technical detail is more than the general reader is likely to require, but as a history of the planning, design, assembly and functioning of the space station, this book is unlikely to be surpassed. The story of the ISS is not one of visionaries or mavericks, but of committees, consultancy teams and endlessly redrawn blueprints.

Among the discarded proposals was one for a rotating wheel, like a smaller version of the one seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's just as well it never happened: the rate of spin would have made astronauts nauseous, and the artificial gravity would have negated what has become the chief scientific attraction of the ISS. Also serendipitous is its orbit. Satellites are best launched to fly eastwards, to get a boost from Earth's rotation, but the Russian launch site is far north of the American one, so a compromise was reached. The result is a path that progressively takes the ISS over much of the Earth's surface, and it has enabled ground observation to become a major activity, with benefits in agriculture and meteorology. It also means we get to see it fly over every now and then, which is more than you can say for the Eiffel Tower.

David Bodanis, Einstein’s Greatest Mistake. Literary Review, October 2016. Review by Andrew Crumey.

It took me a while to figure out what this book was about. Einstein famously said (or is said to have said) that his biggest mistake was the inclusion in general relativity of a "cosmological constant" that he came to regard as spurious. But he also made other great mistakes, arguably greater, such as declaring that God doesn't play dice when quantum mechanics suggested the contrary. The subtitle of this book, "The life of a flawed genius", meanwhile suggests a biography highlighting Einstein's less than saintly behaviour in regard to those closest to him, particularly the two wives he cheated on. In fact Bodanis touches on all of these, with a breeziness that will please anyone not too concerned with scientific detail, psychological insight or historical accuracy.

Einstein, we are told, had a "Victorian childhood", when the scientific universe consisted of "two great realms", energy and matter, that he would come to unify. Bismarck would have had something to say about the first assertion, while the second is a less obvious abuse of language. What Einstein showed with his famous equation, E=mc² , is the equivalence of energy and mass. Confusing matter and mass, as Bodanis does repeatedly, is like mixing potatoes with kilograms.

Einstein's early years are summarised in a few pages that soon quell any suspicion this book might be called a biography. The immediate destination is 1905, the annus mirabilis when Einstein not only published his first papers on relativity theory, but also showed that light could be considered as being made of particles (later called photons), and that the existence of atoms could be proved by the dance of pollen grains sprinkled on water. What we are offered is a heavily cut-down version with a level of simplification suggestive of a Hollywood screenplay. Scientists are of two types: visionary revolutionaries (Einstein) or obstructive old fools (his teachers and university professors). Einstein's single significant breakthrough in 1905 is E=mc² , the rest is incidental background. The equation itself is portrayed as a "tunnel" between the "domed cities" of matter and energy.

We get rather more on Mileva, Einstein's fellow-student who fell pregnant by him. Their daughter Lieserl was given up for adoption - her existence only came to public notice after Einstein's death, and it's not known what became of her. After marrying in 1903 the couple had two sons, but the relationship cooled and Einstein struck up with a distant relative, Elsa, who became his wife in 1919. In the same year Einstein became world famous after measurements during a solar eclipse showed the gravitational bending of starlight in accordance with his general theory of relativity. Bodanis' abbreviation for that theory, fair enough given its complexity, is G=T . Really it stands for ten equations, with G expressing the geometry of four-dimensional spacetime, and T encoding the sources of gravitation, which Einstein showed included pressure as well as mass/energy. Bodanis explains it with the analogy of objects moving on a bendy surface, familiar to anyone who's ever watched a Brian Cox documentary or rolled a ping-pong ball into a "black hole" in a science museum.

Like most popularisers, Bodanis emphasises the novelty and strangeness of general relativity in comparison with Newtonian gravitation. This is good for dramatic effect but disguises a fundamental similarity. Newton's theory is still accurate enough for most situations, so Einstein had to come up with something almost identical, differing in only the most extreme scenarios. So when Einstein applied general relativity to cosmology he found exactly the same problem Newton had: if all the stars are pretty much stationary in space, as was thought to be the case, then gravity will make them fall together in a lump. Newton solved it with the hand of God, Einstein did it by supposing empty space to have pressure and therefore gravitation. That's the cosmological constant, though Bodanis doesn't explain it that way, staying instead with curved space and rolling boulders.

There are unexpected detours from Einstein's life and work, into those of Edward Abbott (author of the famous fantasy Flatland ) and Henrietta Leavitt, who discovered how certain stars could be used as "standard candles" revealing the true extent of astronomical distances. Other players appear: Lemaître, Hubble. In Bodanis' version, the unknown Lemaître approaches Einstein, shows him data from unknown astronomers, and argues that the universe is expanding. Einstein rejects the idea, only being persuaded when he later visits the famous Hubble. In fact the data that Lemaître showed Einstein was Hubble's, and the demise of the cosmological constant was a complicated story involving theoretical as well as observational work. But subtle details are not Bodanis' concern, and his sketchy account gives the gist well enough.

Einstein's other big mistakes are left for the latter part of the narrative; a sensible arrangement that, if it had been signalled in the opening chapter, would have made the overall shape and scope of the book much clearer from the outset. Heisenberg and Bohr appear on the scene, and Einstein enters the famous debate on quantum theory which he was ultimately to lose. His last years were spent in Princeton, working on a futile attempt to unify gravitation and electromagnetism. Technical details are, as ever, kept to the barest minimum, reliance instead being placed on metaphors and analogies that Bodanis clearly relishes. Imagine, for instance watching actors in an operetta in a Berlin theatre, and note the costume changes that occur between each scene. Do this over several nights, and notice how the same singer might be a princess or a peasant. After a paragraph of this picturesque reverie it dawned on me that it was meant to be an explanation of Heisenberg's matrix mechanics. An appendix is supplied for readers wanting a bit more scientific detail, and there we get an extended story about ordering items in a Zurich restaurant, which is supposed to explain tensors, but may well leave the reader with mental indigestion.

There are hundreds of books about Einstein's life and work, not to mention countless websites that explain relativity at any level of sophistication one might desire. Bodanis' offering is no better or worse than most. Like the cosmological constant it has no obvious reason for existing; it just does.