608 BOOK REVIEWS

C. J. Hogan,The Little Book of the Big Bang: A Cosmic Primer, Springer-Verlag,New York, 181 pp., 1998, hardback DM 39,80/US $20.00/GB £15.50, ISBN0-387-98385-6.

This little book gives an exceptionally lucid and compelling summary of mod-ern cosmology, including the inflation paradigm, the formation of structure, themany connections to particle physics, and philosophical questions like the antropicprinciple. The level is elementary, there are no formulae in the main text, anddifficult points are adstructed with the help of illuminating diagrams. The materialis grouped together in the following chapters:The Big Picture; A Survey of Spaceand Time; A summary of Physics; The Cosmic Expansion; Cosmic BackgroundRadiation; Primordial Matter; The Formation of Structure; The Beginning; TheFuture. The story of the Big Bang and the formation of matter and structure inthe expanding universe has been told many times. The first of these accounts wasSteven Weinberg’s famousThe First Three Minutes, written more than 20 yearsago, before inflation theory and astro-particle physics had their radical impact onmodern cosmology. Hogan’s book may be regarded as the modern successor toWeinberg’s book. Level and scope are the same. In a text of such a small sizeand wide scope it is not feasible to explain everything nor to avoid contradictions.For example on p. 3 the Universe is said to be ‘young’, but two pages later it isdeemed ‘old’. Of course both statements are true within the appropriate context.Some magic ensuing from these and other clashes is unavoidable, and arguablyeven desirable to keep the reader spellbound. The author has told the story as hesees it and that gives the text an air of originality and freshness. And the styleis free from that annoying egocentric high-priest attitude of some popular textsthat diffuse the holy mantras of modern physics to a devoutly receptive public.The author is to be complimented with this booklet, that I warmly recommend toeveryone interested in cosmology, to laymen and professionals alike.

SRON Laboratory for Space Research, P. HOYNG

Utrecht, The Netherlands

C. C. Petersen and J. C. Brandt,Hubble Vision: Further Adventures with the Hub-ble Space Telescope, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,XV+274 pp., 1998, hardback GB £24.95/US $39.95, ISBN 0-521-59291-7.

A mixture of beautiful pictures with a text of which the authors were apparently notsufficiently aware what audience should be addressed. The pictures are a collectionof magnificent observations with the HST. The text balances between explainingnotions like ‘ultraviolet light’ and ‘wavelength’ (p. 11: ‘the shortest wavelength for

BOOK REVIEWS 609

light would be 100 ångstroms’) via a fairly technical description of the telescopeand its ancillary instrumentation to dealings with notions such as the Hubble con-stant, baryons and�0.

SRON Laboratory for Space Research, CORNELIS DEJAGER

Utrecht, The Netherlands

Stuart Ross Taylor,Destiny or Chance; our Solar System and its Place in theCosmos, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 229 pp., 1998, hardback GB£17.95/US $24.95, ISBN 0-521-4817-8.

A clear account, addressing a broad audience, describing the properties of the solarsystem and discussing the ways it, as well as other planetary systems, could havebeen formed. This booklet is a little jewel, with stimulating ideas, worth to be readand being reflected upon in quietness. I was pleased with the defence of scienceand scientific thinking in the last chapter, but after all, the whole of the book is aprecious little monument for science.

SRON Laboratory for Space Research, CORNELIS DEJAGER

Utrecht, The Netherlands

Yoshiaki Sofue (ed.),The Central Regions of the Galaxy and Galaxies, IAU Sym-posium 184, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 521 pp.,1998, hardbound Dfl. 360,00/US $195.00/GB £123.00, ISBN 0-7923-5060-X,paperback Dfl. 95,00/US $105.00/GB £67.00, ISBN 0-7923-5061-8.

Galactic centres are exciting as well as excited places. Their study is pushing atthe limits of technology, with high spatial resolution and wide wavelength cov-erage essential for progress. This conference volume follows the traditional IAUSymposium format, with long articles reviewing progress, and 2-page original con-tributions. Most of the short papers are too short to convey much. A few howeverfascinate: the story by Miyoshi of the near-discovery of the megamaser evidencefor a massive black hole in NGC4258 in 1992, 3 years before its actual discovery,illustrates just how close to the limits of technology, and available efforts, are majordiscoveries. Sakamoto et al. present elegant results showing that dense nuclearconcentrations of molecular gas are common. Importantly, most of their galaxiesshow no AGN activity – why are their central black holes so black, or do they notexist? Also, galactic bars seem unrelated to central gas mass: there is apparentlysomething seriously wrong with our understanding of nuclear gas flows, and the