Bang!

"Yes, it is, and I will come on to Brian May in a moment. This is actually the book which least demonstrates the starting speech I just gave. It is a straightforward astronomy book which is really good. Mostly I choose it because I thought I have to have something by Patrick Moore for myself and for all the other working astronomers who started life as kids reading his books. Somewhere in the 1960s I had The Observer’s Book of Astronomy by Patrick Moore. He really is an institution – a national treasure. I don’t know! He is a fairly weird guy. I wouldn’t go with his politics, but he is very colourful. He is very straightforward. He knows the science but he is really an amateur astronomer. So he has always presented astronomy in a very concrete way to the public. It is about saying, anybody can look at the sky and here it is. He did it in this eccentric British way, which is very captivating. Also, he has always felt to the public like one of them. There are hundreds of books by him, but I went for this one because it is so good and colourful. It has a mixture of history and science and maps of the sky and all sorts of things. Brian is a lovely success story because he started doing a PhD in astronomy at Imperial College back in the 1970s but then he had this other life with the pop group Queen and eventually when Queen took off he gave up his PhD. Yes, and he actually finished his PhD after all that time, which is unprecedented. He was supervised by an old friend of mine, Michael Rowan-Robinson, and it was a very good piece of work. Chris Lintott, the third of the three authors of Bang! is different again. He is a professional astronomer who works a lot with Patrick. They are three very different people – a colourful 80s rock star, an eccentric British amateur astronomer and a regular working astronomer – so they are a bit of a dream team. This is a much more controversial subject than the Big Bang. It has not been clear for many years whether the universe keeps expanding and getting bigger and bigger and will endure a slow cold death over an infinite period of time or whether the universe will stop expanding and collapse, so that you get a big crunch and then it all starts again. This has been a controversy throughout my whole career."

"This book is a general overview of astronomy, and doesn’t go into detail about any one thing. It basically takes the reader on a tour of the entire universe, and tells you everything you want to know. When I was a kid, I loved books like this. I would read them cover to cover. There were so many of them out there and there have been many since. Most don’t hit me hard but I really liked this one. It’s beautifully described, accurate and they feature fantastic photography. If you like astronomy and those Hubble pictures on the Internet, don’t know much but would love to learn more, this would be a great book for you. Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott are very famous astronomers in England from a long-running BBC series called The Sky at Night . The third author is Brian May, the lead guitarist for Queen. That may sound funny, but he has a PhD in astronomy and became a very good astronomer. If you were to ask me what is the single most amazing thing that science has ever done, I would say: calculating the birthdate of the universe. There are so many different creation myths. But now we have the ability to measure things. Take the Earth: We can estimate its age through a lot of different techniques, like radioactivity, continental drift and how long it would take the Earth to cool after it was formed. All of these measures point toward an age of about four and a half billion years. “If you were to ask me what is the single most amazing thing that science has ever done, I would say: calculating the birthdate of the universe” Then by looking at the sky we can put an age on the universe itself. We learn that the universe is expanding, and by reversing the clock you can calculate when the universe must have started expanding. There are a lot of different ways of doing that, by studying galaxies or galaxy motion. Using radio telescopes, you can see a glow across the whole sky that is basically the leftover cooling fireball from the Big Bang. By very carefully measuring that lingering glow – using complicated but well understood physics – you can calculate how old the universe is. You get an age of about 13.7 billion years. My book is specifically about objects in space that can damage us in some way – asteroid impacts, solar flares, black holes, galaxies colliding, stars exploding and all the fun violent stuff in the universe. I wrote it as a serious book, in that the science is as accurate and up-to-date as I could possibly make it. But I aimed to make it like getting on a rollercoaster: It’s scary while you’re on it but then when it’s over you think, Phew! The two catastrophes that have the highest chance of happening are an asteroid impact or a big solar flare damaging our satellites and our power grid. There are preventative measures we can easily take to prepare for those. The other scary scenarios you hear, like a black hole swallowing the Earth or a nearby star blowing up, would happen too far in the future for us to worry about."