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Einstein and the Quantum Revolutions - Alain Aspect ***

What an opportunity missed. This little book (very little) provided a wonderful opportunity for one of the great physicists of the last 50 years to bring to life his work on quantum entanglement - a topic in which he excels - but instead all we get is a very high level description of the history of the subject. The book is clearly modelled on Carlo Rovelli's massive-selling Seven Brief Lessons (down to the cover design) - but here we get significantly less than even that provided. Alain Aspect identifies two quantum revolutions (although Einstein, of course features, the book isn't about Einstein, only seeming to appear in the title for visibility). The first was the introduction of quantum physics itself - the second starts in the 1960s with Bell's Theorem, opening up the possibility of first testing the weird reality of quantum entanglement, then into the applications of entanglement in quantum computing and quantum encryption. Aspect's work was fundamental to showin

The Genetic Book of the Dead: Richard Dawkins ****

When someone came up with the title for this book they were probably thinking deep cultural echoes - I suspect I'm not the only Robert Rankin fan in whom it raised a smile instead, thinking of The Suburban Book of the Dead . That aside, this is a glossy and engaging book showing how physical makeup (phenotype), behaviour and more tell us about the past, with the messenger being (inevitably, this being Richard Dawkins) the genes. Worthy of comment straight away are the illustrations - this is one of the best illustrated science books I've ever come across. Generally illustrations are either an afterthought, or the book is heavily illustrated and the text is really just an accompaniment to the pictures. Here the full colour images tie in directly to the text. They are not asides, but are 'read' with the text by placing them strategically so the picture is directly with the text that refers to it. Many are photographs, though some are effective paintings by Jana Lenzová. T

The Heads of Cerberus (SF) - Francis Stevens ****

This book in the MIT Press ' Radium Age ' series somewhat stretches the 'and other stories' label as the title work is a complete novel, followed by a number of stories from Francis Stevens, real name Gertrude Barrows Bennett, written in the first 20 years of the twentieth century. Stevens' writing style is very much of the period at the popular end of the market - think Conan Doyle, for example. This is a bit of a wolf in sheep's clothing for the series, which is supposed to explore proto-science fiction from the period before the pulp SF magazines, but after pioneers such as Wells and Verne. Although Stevens uses some of the props of science, most of the content would be more accurately described as fantasy (but I'm allowing it to slip in here). The title novel propels three main characters (two male, one female) into a strange world that acts as a gateway to an alternate future version of Pennsylvania. It's entertainingly done, doubtless with some ins

Webb's Universe - Maggie Aderin-Pocock ****

The Hubble was the space telescope that launched a thousand picture books destined for the coffee table, such as Hubble Legacy . Inevitably, its new, more capable brother, the Webb is following suit. Thankfully, though, this is more than just a picture book as you can only marvel so much over pretty pictures from space. The book is structured into three sections - the first is about the telescope itself, beginning with its predecessors, including, for instance, some interesting material on the pros and cons of using a Lagrange point for a telescope. The second looks at Webb's mission - what it's intended to capture and how it will do that. And the final section, around twice as big as the other two added together, takes us through the already impressive range of Webb imagery. That final section is where many such books descend into pure picture book territory, but Maggie Aderin-Pocock continues to include pages of informative text with diagrams showing, for example, how the sol

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question. Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book

Daydreaming in the Solar System - John Moores and Jesse Rogerson ****

It has always seemed that combining fiction and non-fiction should be a good way to put popular science across. After all, SF provides a great vehicle for exploring places where we can't actually go. In practice, though, it seems extremely difficult to successfully pull off the crossover without the result seeming overly contrived. Thankfully, John Moores and Jesse Rogerson make it work well. It's interesting to make a comparison with Interstellar Tours , which takes a tour of our galaxy on a fictional starship. There, the setting is provided by fiction, but what's experienced around the galaxy is based on best current science. In Daydreaming in the the Solar System we stick to our near neighbourhood: each location from the Moon out to Pluto starts with a short fictional account of 'being there', followed by a chapter on the science behind that scene. This is like a more effective version of the approach attempted with mixed results in the Springer Science and Fict

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