Sky in a Bottle

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Review - Sky in a Bottle - Peter Pesic

This reviewer is old enough to fondly remember Sting's old band, the Police, and one summer (I think it was summer) when all you ever seemed to hear on the radio was their Message in a Bottle. Now it comes flooding back when I see the title of this book. There are some intangible things that still have a lot of importance to us - and the colour of the sky is one of them. It doesn't make sense when you think about it - how can something that doesn't really exist (what is sky, after all?) have a colour?

You may be able to tell from that first paragraph that this book inspires some philosophical thinking. Peter Pesic looks at the answers to the age-old question "why is the sky blue?" taking it back to the ancient Greeks (who largely dismissed colour) and bringing it all the way up to Victorian times.

At the same time he looks at some of the artistic approaches to the sky, starting from the first attempts at realism and working up to Ruskin, who he clearly greatly admires.

This art/science mix is hard to do, and it's fair to say that Pesic does a reasonable job, but doesn't exactly set the reader on fire. It's not a dull book, but neither is it full of fascinating insights. It builds in a slow, ponderous fashion that makes it feel longer than in actually is.

Perhaps the saddest thing is the way Pesic largely grinds to a halt in the Victorian period. Ruskin is the peak of his artistic consideration, and a Victorian idea of light is as far as the science goes. There was a great opportunity to make a reader-friendly venture into at least some of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), the definitive theory of the interaction of light and matter, but Pesic never even mentions it.

It's not all bad, though. The book ends with some fun experiments to try to capture the colour of the sky, reproducing experiments from da Vinci's time onwards. And the content is interesting. It just could have been even better.

Only in hardback.

Reviewed by Peter Spitz

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