BANG! EMINENTLY RECOMMENDED

24 Aug 2011

Each day on TheBrowser.com, in their FiveBooks feature, they interview an expert -- a scholar, artist, politician, journalist, or other eminent figure -- who recommends and discusses the five best books in his or her field.

Astronomy professor, Andy Lawrence has recommended Bang! The Complete History of the Universe as one of the best five books on Astronomy, Physics and People.

Here is the link: http://thebrowser.com/interviews/andy-lawrence-on-astronomy-physics-and-people

EXTRACT:

THE BROWSER: Let’s look at some of your choices, which reflect this idea. First up is Bang! The Complete History of the Universe, by Brian May, Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott. As well as having a PhD in astrophysics, Brian May wrote “We Will Rock You” for Queen. Is this book as catchy?

PROFESSOR ANDY LAWRENCE: Yes, it is, and I will come on to Brian May in a moment. ... . 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.

What do you think it is about him that makes him stand out as this iconic figure for so many budding astronomers?

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.

What about Brian May?

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.

And then he came back to it.

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.

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