Bruno’s Brilliant Heresy

From one perspective, contemporary science can seem like an expensive inquiry into nature’s vast store of trivia. Few of us lie awake at night worrying about the mass of the Higgs boson, after all. String theory does not balance a chequebook, and loop quantum gravity will not drive your ten-year-old to soccer practice. It is easy to forget that the questions scientists are addressing are, at root, the oldest and simplest ones. How big is the universe we live in? What is it made of? What are we looking at when we look at the night sky?

University of Toronto professor Ray Jayawardhana’s Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System surveys the modern answer to one of those simple, venerable questions: are there planets orbiting other stars and are any of them similar to Earth? And it does so in a lively, literate fashion.