Skip to main content

The Astounding Science Puzzle Book - Matt Brown ****

It's that time of year again when many of us are searching for good presents for difficult-to-buy-for people: the latest title from science writer and London expert Matt Brown seems an ideal stocking filler for scientifically-minded types. It's not that many purchasers are likely to run a quiz from the book (although you certainly could), but there's plenty of entertainment to be had from having a go at the 101 themed rounds, which range from questions on the science of alcohol to science on TV and the IgNobel prize.

The blurb on the back reads 'Do you know what item of clothing Einstein refused to wear or what embarrassing mishap cost NASA a $125 million Mars orbiter', and I was feeling rather smug that I knew the answers to both - but although for those who know their science there will be some familiar questions, there was plenty inside that was new to me and that gave that fun frisson of surprise. It's the kind of book where you end up irritating anyone sitting near to you by asking them 'Do you know what hot drink Hans Sloane, whose collection formed the foundation of the British Museum introduced to the UK?' or 'Which Beatles song includes a chemical element and the surname of a famous physicist?'

As the book's name suggests, Brown's collection is not all quiz questions, but includes a range of science-oriented puzzles from a little crossword to strange abbreviations combining a number and a string of letters which spell out a particular phrase, such as 42 ITMOLTUAE (think humorous science fiction). The Astounding Science Puzzle Book is not the only option for science quizzers. How Many Moons Does the Earth Have? and What Colour is the Sun?, for example, are both in a quiz format. But where they have around 100 questions with a page of detail in the answer of each, so can be used more as an end-to-end read, here the questions are far more numerous (typically between 5 and 10 per section), with only very short answers, so it's more a matter of hurtling through, testing yourself as you go. The book compliments what's already out there, rather than competing with it.

Pitched just right, entertaining without being heavy handed, The Astounding Science Puzzle Book is ideal to fill in time on a boring train journey... or to stuff a stocking.
Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are
Post a Comment
Read more

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied),  the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i
Post a Comment
Read more

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re
Post a Comment
Read more