The Infinite Cosmos : Questions from the frontiers of cosmology [Kindle Edition]

Joseph Silk is an expert on galaxy formation, structure and clustering. He knows how to read the cosmic microwave background for pointers on these things and for confirmation of the influence of dark matter. Unfortunately, the chapter on these topics is somewhat impenetrable for anyone not already familiar with concepts such as last scattering horizon, angular scales, sonic peaks, Compton scattering and so on. There are not even any diagrams as an aid to comprehension. The general idea is sufficiently discernible to whet the interest; but it is then necessary to get busy with Google because there is no bibliography in this book.

Anyway, the earlier chapters contain so many errors that you will probably want to check everything you read by this point. Some mistakes can be put down to unchecked misprints or imprecise language, but others are just plain wrong.

Examples: p18 - Earth contains 10^80 atoms (out by a factor of 10^30); p20/29 - Sun orbits galaxy every 200/100 million years (about 225 perhaps?); p36 - baryons include electrons (ouch!); p54 - Cosmic ray protons can have the energy of 1Kg dropped from the Eiffel Tower (out by x60 even for the most energetic particle ever recorded); p57 - a billion solar mass black hole has a radius equal to the diameter of Earth's orbit (out by x50; nearer to Jupiter's orbit); p71 - there are a billion galaxies within 10 billion light years (out by something like x100?). . .

The chapter on supernovae combines error with unintelligibility. I wonder if it was dictated but not read. We read that Supernova 1987A (a Type II, core collapse) was lit up by decays of radioactive cobalt, first to nickel, then to iron. A glance at the periodic table shows this order must be wrong, and it is. The general scheme of events for Type I explosions is so muddled as to be harder to fault. No mention is made of mass accretion to a critical threshold as the key standardisation mechanism for Type Ia explosions. It is variously suggested that uniformity is due to a one solar mass limit on burning before core collapse, or to the ejecta consisting predominantly of iron and heavier elements. And yet we were just told that the iron decomposed to neutrons, protons and neutrinos. But hold on, some iron is converted to radioactive nickel, and yet about seven tenths of a solar mass is ejected as iron in a final burst of neutrinos.

I read as far as p90 where it said that supernovae had been detected in galaxies "beyond redshift unity, corresponding to a distance of about 10 billion megaparsecs"! I wondered what sort of co-moving coordinates were in mind for the observable universe, and decided to give up and stick with Google rather than read further. Wikipedia is a good source on supernovae. So is The Magic Furnace by Marcus Chown.

Joe Silk is a very distinguished cosmologist, an experienced writer of cosmology books for the popular audience, and (from my fairly limited acquaintance with him) a nice guy. I bought this book with a view to including it in the "directed reading" exercise of my introductory astronomy course, where students have to read a good popular book on some aspect of astronomy and answer questions on it. A book on a topical subject, by an acknowledged expert who is an experienced populariser - what could be more suitable? I expected it to be a no-brainer.

Unfortunately, it won't be on the list. The subject is fine, but the execution has fallen far short of what I would have expected. The reason is partly that Joe has been very badly served by the editors at Oxford University Press: the book is riddled with minor errors, some of which are typos ("10 billion megaparsecs" for "10 billion parsecs", some simply careless (he twice says that melting ice RELEASES, instead of REQUIRES, energy - which would mean that adding ice to your cold drink would warm it up!), and some a consequence of overconfidence (I know he's not a stellar astrophysicist, but he really should NOT have said that the Sun will become a red giant when it starts burning helium - that's the end of the red giant phase, not the beginning). A decent scientific copy-editor should have spotted most of these. The publishers should also have insisted on a bibliography, and some decent references - not just sources for direct quotes.

However, this isn't the only problem. The book also has structural faults: things get introduced in the wrong order (when the COBE experiment doesn't get discussed until 60 pages after the ground-based experiments that followed it, you know something's gone wrong), there is too much repetition, and the level is inconsistent: he explains that a billion is a thousand million, but expects his readers to be happy with entropy and ergs, neither of which is defined. It is also, I regret to say, not really very well written. I defy anyone who doesn't already know about it to make sense of the discussion of baryogenesis (the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry) in chapter 12. Chapter 19, on God, is disconnected from everything else, in the wrong place (if you must have it at all, it should be an epilogue), rambling, and poorly argued.

I think this book was written in too much of a hurry. It reads like a first draft, not a finished product - perhaps he had unwisely agreed to too stringent a deadline for the copy. I know that Joe can write much better than this: indeed, his previous popular book, "On the Shores of the Unknown" (published by the opposition, Cambridge University Press; on this showing, Cambridge win this particular varsity match by a very large margin), written I think for a slightly more knowledgeable audience, is very much better, and has some nice colour pictures in it as well. Buy that one - don't buy this one.

Professor Joseph Silk has written a mind-expanding account of the latest developments in cosmology. Topics covered include the Big Bang, dark matter, dark energy, galaxy formation, black holes, the ultimate fate of the universe and the role of God in cosmology.
Each of the 20 short chapters are headed with thought-provoking quotations from poets, writers and scientists.
Occasionally, Prof Silk assumes too much knowledge on the part of the reader but it's worth persevering with this fascinating book which gives an up-to-date picture of the origin and evolution of our extraordinary universe.