First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time

First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time by Emma Chapman

In First Light (2021), Emma Chapman covers the earliest eras of the universe’s existence, particularly focusing on what astronomers, due to their lack of information, call the “Dark Ages,” from about 380,000 years to one billion years after the Big Bang occurred. Even more specifically, her interest lies with the creation of the first stars and the current attempt to find out more about them.

Despite the focus, Chapman manages to bring in a host of other astronomical discoveries/investigations: the Cosmic Microwave background, inflation, dark matter, space telescopes, radio astronomy, Fast Radio Bursts, black holes, the Great Oxygenation Event, and others. She also goes on a variety of non-astronomical tangents involving King Tut’s tomb and pigeons (yes, pigeons).

Chapman does an excellent job explaining some complicated science here in lucid, easy to follow prose. Several times I wrote in my notes “excellent explanation” or “best explanation of this I’ve read,” as with her explanation of plasma (“like a gas consisting of tiny magnets, forever attracting and repelling each other”) or the creation of dark matter halos and filaments.

Equally as good as her descriptions of individual concepts is the way she ends each chapter with a concise, simplified summary of the chapter’s points, allowing the reader to solidify that knowledge and thus have it in hand to build on for the next. All of this is done via an engaging, conversational tone peppered with personal asides, pop culture references (“If you don’t know where TARDIS is from, go download Doctor Who and rejoice”), smiley faces in an illustration, and some fun-to-read footnotes.

Emma Chapman

My only issues with First Light are that while some of the tangents are interesting and amusing, others merely interrupt with little benefit. And several times Chapman’s metaphors similarly interrupt the flow without really illuminating the subject matter, and at times even perhaps adding some unneeded complication. Examples include a lengthy tangent on King Tut or an analogy between star size and human height distributions. That noted, I can sympathize with Chapman, as the analogy is typically the best way to explain difficult concepts to a lay audience, and it is not easy to come up with one that hasn’t been used before.

If First Light lacks the stylistic excellence of my favorite popular science authors, it remains an excellent example of the genre: clear, informative, concise without sacrificing important information or being overly dense, engaging throughout with a sense of personality and a sense of a personal curiosity and commitment. I hope Chapman writes others.