Roberto TrottaRecensioni

Imagining a world without stars, and how living in a starless world affect man's evolution
This is a gracefully written book of astronomy and history, held together by a thought experiment. The author imagines a world covered by clouds, and how humans in that world would think about themselves, illuminating the many ways in which astronomy has shaped our humanity.

An inspiring survey of cosmology and thoughts about the dark sky. Astronomy and cosmology reviews almost always require a review of the historical background of the ideas. Seeing the entanglement of fascination with the starts with most of our important ideas IS refreshing. Juxtaposing the review with an imaginary story of a people that never see a night sky is interesting but doesn’t add a lot for me.

From the big bang to black holes, from dark matter to dark energy, from the origins of the universe to its ultimate destiny, The Edge of the Sky tells the story of the most important discoveries and mysteries in modern cosmology--with a twist. The book's lexicon is limited to the thousand most common words in the English language, even excluding physics, energy, galaxy, and universe. Through the eyes of a fictional scientist (Student-People) hunting for dark matter with one of the biggest telescopes (Big-Seers) on Earth (Home-World), cosmologist Roberto Trotta explores the most important ideas about our universe (All-There-Is) in language simple enough for anyone to understand. A unique blend of literary experimentation and science popularization, this delightful book is a perfect gift for any aspiring astronomer. The Edge of the Sky tells the story of the universe on a human scale, and the result is out of this world.

Using only the 1000 most common English words, Roberto Trotta describes the mini story of how a female astrophysicist explores the deepest questions in cosmology, with a particular emphasis on dark energy and matter. There's no question that this is an original way to communicate science. But I was left a little unsure who it might be for, and what its contribution is. At first blush, this seems aimed at children, with its utterly jargon-free way of capturing the science. But if that's the case, then perhaps it would have made more sense for it to have a broader scientific scope, and perhaps a more fleshed out story as well. If it's aimed at adults, the book is so short, and the discussion of these complex scientific concepts so terse that I personally got almost nothing out of it. I was also unsure of the device. Even young kids know what a telescope is, and having constantly to remember that "big seer" means telescope is a form of jargon in itself. At times, this really feels like a writing exercise for the author and rather tedious for the reader when he, for instance, needs three lines to describe the word "coin".

In the end, this slight volume felt more of a gimmick to me than anything else, and I am struggling to find an audience to recommend it to.½

Reading The Edge of the Sky felt awkward and contrived at times, poetic at others. It also had an overarching sense of self-satisfaction. At first I found my brain was distracted trying to reverse translate the author's metaphors back into language that I understood more instinctively, but gradually I settled into the rhythm of this new way of describing things. I liked the explanation of how the universe expanded and how the light travelling to us from the early moments of the universe can be interpreted by scientists. I'm still no clearer on space-time, though, and I wasn't fully engaged with the dark matter metaphors. I think I might be the wrong audience for this book, but I don't know who the intended audience is. 8 year olds? Aliens with a limited grasp of one example of many human languages?

The premise of The Edge of the Sky is that complex ideas can be explained using the 1000 most used words in English. The first problem is that 'thousand' isn't one of the 1000 most used words. So the author has to say ten hundred. Ten hundred isn't a standard phrase, though, and it jarred. The other thing that jarred was the inclusion in the list of 'ten hundred' most used words terms like gonna and gotten. Gonna is a contraction of going to, which are both on the list, gotten is the same as got, which is also already on the list. Perhaps I'm nitpicking.

I struggled with some of the more laboured metaphors. The book is about the universe, but universe isn't on the list of words, so it becomes All-There-Is. Earth isn't on the list, so we humans live on Home Planet. Moon isn't on the list. That becomes Sun's Sister. People like Nobel, Einstein and Hubble are allowed to keep their names, so why not planets? And countries. China becomes 'the land of Mr Mao'. Why? The author wants to talk about the Big Bang theory, but bang and theory aren't on the list, so it ends up rendered as Big Flash. If you tried to look Big Flash up on the internet (internet isn't on the list, though, so you'd better use the 'world wide computer'), you'd get a lot of results for a climbing festival. Aeroplane (or airplane) isn't on the list, so every time someone wants to travel anywhere by aeroplane, they have to go in a flying car. Which raises another point. Flying isn't on the list. Fly is, though. So it's possible to make a word not on the list out of one that is on the list? That seemed a bit too convenient.

Overall, I liked the idea behind the book and I enjoyed a lot of how the tale was told, but it didn't always work for me.

A novel, fun approach to explaining complex concepts of physics and cosmology in accessible language. I'm glad he included the glossary.

At first I was a bit annoyed at the child-like language the author used to tell his tale of the amazing universe we live in. But upon completion I kind of got the message. That message being the science and language of that science in terms of the complexity and enormity of the unknown that is our universe can be more readily understood in simpler terms using simpler language to make these complex points. And with that the author succeeded in talking about maybe the most fascinating and intriguing subject and mystery we grapple with, maybe forever.

NF