Star-Craving Mad: Tales from a Travelling Astronomer

Watson, Australia’s most popular astronomer, offers a lighthearted excursion into the history of mankind’s understanding of the universe. The subtitle refers to the astronomy tours he leads, which also inform the book’s structure, and the book is a combination of travelogue—incorporating time spent aboard an astronomy cruise—and popular science, as it explores several continents, eras, and scientists of historic note. Colloquial riffs on cell phone coverage, bad acronyms in science organizations, and commercial space flight’s “well-heeled joy-riders hooning [sic] into space,” keep the tone light. While the conversational, anecdotal voice conveys Watson’s personality, the scientific material suffers, as it is only broadly summarized; the result is somewhat shallow. Limited to introductions to the most famous breakthroughs in astronomy and physics, Watson offers little to readers already familiar with the development of telescopes, Newtonian physics, relativity, Copernicanism, or quantum mechanics. (Nov.)