Book of the Month: April 2021
Emma Chapman, First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020)
Summary: An effortless tour through the cosmos conducted by a rising star in popular science. Also an epistemological study: how do we know what we know, and where is our data the weakest? (Answer: Between 380,000 years and 1 billion years after the Big Bang.) A welcome reprieve from quantum ad nauseam—full of humor, storytelling, and patient explanation.
Key Quote: “It is only in the last 250 years that we have understood that not all stars are (in fact most stars are not) the same as our Sun.” - p. 14
Bottom Line: Read this book if you’re bored with trendy strings and the multiverse, and would like to branch out into less well-traveled but more tangible ground, such as the Epoch of Reionization and stellar archaeology.
