BOOKS
The Magicians
Marcus Chown
Faber & Faber £14.99 ● HB
In his 14th book, Marcus Chown dramatises key discoveries in physics, explaining the science underpinning major revelations while incorporating fun, personal anecdotes about the key individuals involved.
From the link between electricity and magnetism to imaging the shadow of a black hole’s event horizon, Chown explores the timeline of many fascinating phenomena in the Universe, from their theoretical prediction to their eventual confirmation through experiments.
One such was towards the end of the 18th century, when William Herschel doubled the size of the Solar System via his accidental discovery of Uranus using his garden telescope in the UK city of Bath. However, astronomers struggled to determine the orbit ofwe follow the story of French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier, who used mathematics to predict the existence of another planet, Neptune, which was causing Uranus to be in the ‘wrong’ place.
