Becky Smethurst

Dr. Becky Smethurst's Space At The Speed of Light is fun, sobering, and enchanting history of the past 14 billion years condensed in ten small essays that range from topics such as aliens to habitable planets to black holes. This book is a quick, accessible and really interesting (and entertaining) read. Dr. Smethurst has a real gift for making huge, weighty subjects a little more understandable. And her passion for her subject is really infectious. I have always been enamored with space and astronomy and finding an accessible astronomer to explain heady concepts to this layman is a wonderful thing.

Two fascinating and sobering facts I learned from this book:
1.) The nearest planet possible of sustaining life (or producing life) is 640 light years away. So, we need to figure out how to make Mars work.
2.) There's at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe. It's likely there are more. And there is a hundred sextillion stars in the universe (estimating). Then, that means, there are, at least, a hundred thousand planets out there in the vastness of space that might have the right conditions to develop intelligent life. The chances are high, that we are not alone in the universe.

Whoa!

Pick up this book. It has math in it. But trust me, Dr. Smethurst makes it easy to understand.… (mere)

Becky Smethurst is an astrophysicist with a great love of black holes, and a desire to share her enthusiasm for them with the rest of us.

She tries to cover, concisely but with absorbing detail, everything important about them, starting with the important facts that they're not black, and they're not holes. They're not black because an active black hole has an accretion disk which generates a great deal of light and other radiation. They're not holes, because that absolute darkness inside the accretion disk isn't a void. It's an immensely dense accumulation of matter, usually many, many times the mass of a star--certainly our star. Smethurst compares black holes to mountains, which I find not personally satisfying, but entirely reasonable.

More unexpected is her comparison of black holes to sofas; things get swallowed up and lost in them, never to be recovered.

But this isn't just a book of what we should compare black holes to (she says she prefers "dark stars," but admits that's a lost chance), but their history, formation, development, and possible end.

The formation of stellar mass black holes is, apparently, pretty well understood. If a collapsing star at the end of its life is massive enough, when it collapses, it will collapse not into a neutron star, but a black hole. The problem is supermassive spring holes. There simply doesn't appear to have been enough time since the birth of the universe for supermassive black holes to form. And yet, we're now reasonably certain that every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. Where do they come from?

Perhaps from the collision of smaller black holes? It's one of the things Smethurst looks at.

She also discusses the first detection of gravity waves, the first picture of a black hole, and the fact that black holes will, eventually, evaporate. They'll evaporate very slowly, though, and only after they've stopped growing, and it's not at all clear that the largest black holes will have time to evaporate before the end of the universe, depending on what sort of end the universe is going to have. However, we do still have a shot at finding a primordial black hole, very small in size, which might have had time to evaporate. If we detect that, we may be able to detect Hawking radiation, which we're unlikely to be around to detect from any supermassive black hole.

There's lots of fascinating information in this book, and Smethurst has both an engaging enthusiasm, and a lively sense of humor. She also has a good reading voice, which overall makes this a wonderful book to listen to.

Recommended.

I bought this audiobook.… (mere)

I think even very complex ideas can be communicated at some level to most adults. It’s just that most scientists lack the particular and valuable ability to do so without dumbing down. I recall a lecturer at a public event at Gulbenkian - so a pretty savvy public audience - who put up Maxwell's equations on Powerpoint and said, these are beautiful and fundamental but too complicated to explain so I'll move on. Shame on him.

I think the problem is not scientists telling people what to do. I think the most common issue is that the press take a statement out of context from a research paper, then hype it up and misrepresent what the scientist or research said, so that it makes a more fun story. And then it looks like scientists are telling you to stop eating apples, drink more red wine, or whatever, when they never even said that. This is not helped by the fact that most mainstream media do not seem to have presenters with a science background. In Portugal, for example “5 Minutos com um cientista” (5 Minutes with a Scientist”) - I've often heard the presenters asking 'that's nice, but what the point of the research?' They never seem to ask what the point is of artists, sports people, etc. And another thing... Using the term 'scientist' to cover the while of science. They should be more specific, and refer to biologists, physicists, etc.

There are problems with science communication, but what Smethurst did is right; the problem is that she didn't go far enough. For example, showing a graph is not enough; you have ask if that person understands the graph, and then whether they accept the data as being true. This sets a baseline for conversation. If you want to reach out to how people feel, that's great, good and necessary, but it has to be built on a foundation, and that foundation (in the case of climate change for example) is establishing the understanding and acceptance (or not), of the data.

My suggestion:

STEP 1 - This is the graph.

STEP 2 - Do you understand it? Can you tell me what it is showing? (Repeat as long as necessary, do not go onto step 3 before step 2 is complete, otherwise there will be no context to the conversation) [As an aside it's often a good idea to remind the person you are speaking with that understanding something is not the same thing as agreeing with something, and you are not trying to trap them]

STEP 3 - Do you accept the data as being true, if not why not? The onus is then on them to prove that NASA or whoever is wrong. Some people won't get past this point, for those that do...

STEP 4 - DO NOT jump up and down "IN YOUR FACE, DENIER!!!"

STEP 5 - This is the winning of hearts and minds space, be gentle and understanding of the change in worldview that might be occurring. Help them to not feel bad about not understanding this issue. Talk about vested interests, power and Exxon wanting to continue to sell oil.

It's tribalism I know, but a tribe which anyone with an open and enquiring mind can join.… (mere)