‘Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science’ by Mark Brake & Neil Hook
In Different Engines, Professor Mark Brake and Reverend Neil Hook take us on a tour of science fiction through the ages. They show how the genre extends far beyond mere entertainment and often provides a profound exploration of the interface between science and society and the impact that new technologies or discoveries, such as that of alien life, are likely to have. The book divides the history of science fiction, which is as old as science itself, into distinct eras. The book begins in the time of the Renaissance with the Age of Discovery before chronologically stepping through chapters...
Read More‘Death by Black Hole’ by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist based at the American Museum of Natural History in New York city. He is the director of the Hayden Planetarium here, and also writes regularly for Natural History museum. It is fair to say then that Tyson not only knows his material, but he also knows how to communicate it skilfully to his audience. And this, his latest book, is an absolute delight to read. Death by Black Hole is a compendium of articles Tyson has written in Natural History over the last four decades, it’s forty-two chapters organised into seven themed sections. He writes on...
Read More‘The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets’ by Alan Boss
“We are on the verge of determining the frequency of Earth-like planets in the Universe”, says Alan Boss, a key scientist on the Kepler space telescope. Kepler was successfully launched this month (March 2009) into an Earth-trailing orbit around the sun, its mission to seek out a clutch of new low-mass exoplanets, impossible to spot from the ground. The ultimate goal is, of course, the first discovery of a small rocky planet orbiting a sun-like star within its habitable zone: a Second Earth. Boss believes such Earth-like worlds are common in the galaxy, and hence life itself to be...
Read More‘Cosmic Biology’ by Louis Neal Irwin & Dirk Schulze-Makuch
As the title suggests, this book explores the possibilities of life on other worlds but importantly it also delves deeper into the chemical restraints or possibilities for types of organisms that have not evolved here on Earth. It is clearly written and explains chemical processes in an easy to understand manner so I would recommend this book to astrobiologically-inclined academics and amateurs alike. The book reviews numerous potential habitats in the solar system and relates these to the potential of finding life on similar exoplanets. With a chapter on the characteristics of life on Earth...
Read More‘Complete Course in Astrobiology’ by Gerda Horneck & Petra Rettberg (eds)
The Complete Course in Astrobiology, edited by Gerda Horneck and Petra Rettberg, is written up from a lecture course from late 2005, taught by tele-network and sponsored by the European Space Agency. The book includes the eleven lectures on a CD (while the book is extended by two more chapters), and the lectures are available for download, which would likely be of more use than the bare slides. The project has commendably brought together a very multi-disciplinary group drawn from seven European universities, and the breadth of topics covered is impressive. The book launches in with the...
Read More‘Comets and the Origin of Life’ by Janaki Wickramasinghe, Chandra Wickramasinghe & William Napier
This is a short book (199 pages) that summarises a particular world-view of astrobiology that has almost vanished today. Working from the perspective purely of astronomy it aims to show that dust is widespread in space and that the dust shows astronomical signs (via extinction curves) for a variety of complex molecules. This is now surely accepted. However, the book also contains the long-standing view of Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe that some of these spectra can also be fit by bacteria and spores. This idea has never convinced a wide audience, and the book repeats the claim...
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