Skip to main content

The Aliens are Coming! - Ben Miller *****

This book is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The packaging – from the exclamation mark in the title to the frequent use of words like “witty” and “entertaining” in the various celebrity endorsements, and the emphasis on the author’s track record as a comedian and TV personality – all lead you to envisage a flippant, unchallenging read. I opened the book expecting a light-hearted debunking of ufology (always good for a few laughs), followed by a journalistically glib recycling of the “real science” of SETI, exoplanets, extremophiles et al. But what I got went much, much deeper than that.

There’s a lot of science in this book – and not just the obvious topics. What other popular book on astrobiology embraces subjects like information entropy, or the anthropic principle, or gamma-ray bursts, or Zipf’s law? Miller’s explanations of the first two are as engaging and lucid as I’ve seen anywhere, and as for the last two – well, I never would have guessed they were relevant to SETI until he pointed it out.

A longstanding hobbyhorse of mine is that the aliens of popular imagination – as evidenced in sci-fi movies and UFO reports – look much too similar to homo sapiens to have any scientific credibility. Real aliens are going to be much more alien than that. It’s a point Miller makes in the very first pages of the book – and before long he’s gone even further. Professional scientists make analogous if less obvious mistakes. Most SETI initiatives are based on the unstated assumption that aliens are going to think and communicate in much the same way that Earth scientists do in the early 21st century. Astrobiologists tend to think of “life” as synonymous with multicellular DNA-based organisms, with so-called extremophiles being as weird as it gets (Miller, incidentally, thinks the extremophiles came first, so actually we’re the extreme ones). Even here on Earth, however, there may be non-DNA life in the form of desert varnish – the jury has been out on that one since Darwin’s time.

Despite the expectations set by that titular exclamation mark, anyone looking for dumbed-down science isn’t going to find it in this book. Quite the opposite, in fact. Although Miller has a lively, easy-to-read style, he clearly thinks like a scientist – and occasionally he does scientist-like things that a more seasoned pop-science writer would never do. He uses equations, for example – not just once or twice, but quite a lot. He assumes readers know what logarithms are, and how to convert between logs to different bases. Sometimes he forgets who he’s talking to, and uses words in a way that only physics graduates use them (Example: “The chance of a third helium nucleus colliding with beryllium-8 in time to make carbon-12 is therefore vanishingly slim. Hoyle’s genius was to suggest that there might be a fortuitous resonance, in the form of an excited state of carbon, which exactly matched the energy of the beryllium-8 nucleus when capturing a helium nucleus.”)

To put it in a nutshell, The Aliens Are Coming! is highbrow content in lowbrow packaging. For me, the biggest downside of this arrangement is that the author doesn’t cite his sources. The book has an unusually large number of footnotes, but they’re almost all textual asides rather than references. Miller clearly put a lot of effort into primary-source research, and I would have welcomed a few pointers to help me dig deeper into some of the topics for myself. A second “lowbrow” feature of the book is the lack of an index – but that hardly matters, because this isn’t a book for dipping into. It’s one you’re going to read from cover to cover.

Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you


Review by Andrew May

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work - Roger Highfield ****

It is easy to suspect that a biographical book from highly-illustrated publisher Dorling Kindersley would be mostly high level fluff, so I was pleasantly surprised at the depth Roger Highfield has worked into this large-format title. Yes, we get some of the ephemera so beloved of such books, such as a whole page dedicated to Hawking's coxing blazer - but there is plenty on Hawking's scientific life and particularly on his many scientific ideas. I've read a couple of biographies of Hawking, but I still came across aspects of his lesser fields here that I didn't remember, as well as the inevitable topics, ranging from Hawking radiation to his attempts to quell the out-of-control nature of the possible string theory universes. We also get plenty of coverage of what could be classified as Hawking the celebrity, whether it be a photograph with the Obamas in the White House, his appearances on Star Trek TNG and The Big Bang Theory or representations of him in the Simpsons. Ha

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur