If there's one big gap in the science writing sphere, it's popular engineering (you can quibble over whether engineering is science, but where else would you put popular engineering?). Alex Davies does the field a real service with this insightful introduction to the world of test engineering. The concept is simple. If we build something and sell it, we need to test it to make sure that it won't fail in a way that's dangerous to the consumer. The most obvious example is airliners, which feature at some length, but this applies to everything from cuddly toys to hair straighteners: someone needs to predict what could go wrong and to put the product through its paces to see if it will survive under any reasonable circumstances. When Davies is telling a story of test engineering in action, the book is a delight. He opens with the way that real bears are used to test if bears can get into coolers and trash cans - and the impressive ways these animals can  circumvent human in...

This is a re-read of a 1964 science fiction novel that in some ways holds up very well, though there are some issues. Sunburst is what you might call an anti-superhero novel. After an accident at the local nuclear power plant, Sorrel Park is now the only town in the US with a coal-fired power plant and is cut off from the rest of the country. Initially this isolation of the town was to stop others hearing more about the nuclear disaster, but when children born after radiation exposure begin to develop psi abilities, the place remains locked down as they prove to be disastrous - after a night of horrendous behaviour they are captured and put in the Dump, surrounded by a field that suppresses psi abilities, stopping them from getting out. As we get into the story the government is getting ready to open up Sorrel Park. The central character, 13-year-old Shandy, who has a had a difficult life after her parents died when she was young, gets pulled into the influence of the scientists who r...

The sub-genre of alternate history has always felt an uncomfortable fit with science fiction - but where else are you going to put it? Two of my favourite classics of the genre both posit a modern England where the Reformation didn't happen and the Catholic Church is still a powerful force. I've already reviewed The Alteration by Kingsley Amis, but I've now re-read Keith Roberts' 1968 classic Pavane . Though usually described as a novel, this is really a linked set of short novellas, featuring an 1960s Britain that follows on from Queen Elizabeth I being assassinated, resulting in a clamping down of Catholicism that also has ended with an iron grip across half the world. The novellas present (mostly) charming snapshots of a rural, low-tech England where steam traction engines pull trains of wagons across the country, long distance communication is largely by semaphore towers and monks work on lithographic printing presses. Roberts does a wonderful job of giving us the ...

This is an oddity. I heard about this book on the excellent Science Fictions podcast, where I was told that anyone with an interest in popular science had probably read this 2017 book - I hadn't, and after hearing their podcast I wouldn't want to, but felt it worth highlighting some key points. As the Science Fictions podcast notes, the book 'said, among other things, that we are living through an epidemic of sleeplessness, that the less we sleep the sooner we die, and that sleeping less than six hours a night doubles your risk of cancer.' No surprise it was a big seller. But it appears that the book is riven with errors and its underlying thesis seems to have little or no scientific basis. A lot of the podcast was inspired by a fact-check by Alex Guzey that only covered the first chapter, yet uncovers a whole host of issues. I'd suggest taking a look at that fact check and, if you want more, listening to the podcast. But if, like me, you haven't read the book...

In the past I've found Steven Pinker's books hypnotic - I drift along enjoying the words and feeling I'm getting something deep from it without anything much sinking in. This one was different - it was sometimes a little harder to get your head around the underlying concept, descending as it tends to into infinite regression, but overall I did feel I'd gained a lot.  Pinker's focus here is 'common knowledge' which is when not only do we both/all know something, but we know that the other(s) know as well and the implications this has for human interactions. One entertaining thing to emerge from this is the ability to get into infinite loops of the 'I know that you know that I know that...' variety. Although we aren't mentally equipped to deal with more than a handful of iterations, we are told that a simple but limited interaction like a text exchange strictly needs the full infinite set to be definitive. For example, if you and a friend are tryin...

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...