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Wireheads - Mike Jay *****

This book will particularly appeal to a certain class of person (that certainly includes me) - science fiction fans with an interest in psychology and the history of science/pseudo-science. The subtitle 'an unnatural history of technology in the brain' makes it clear that, though the book is definitely about using technology to influence and access the brain, it's not about medical interventions, but rather the weirder stuff that resides as much in science fiction and the human imagination as anything that is real or practical. Although the book is not about SF per se, it's a constant thread particularly in literature, TV, and film from the mid-sixties onwards and inevitably with a strong link to cyberpunk, which is timely given the Apple TV adaptation of Neuromancer due in 2027. However, there are plenty of surprises in the real world examples from the remarkable story of James Tilly Matthews, encarcerated in Bedlam (the Bethlem Royal Hospital) in the early 1800s who ...
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Why We Ask Why - Tania Lombrozo ***

As Tania Lombrozo makes clear, we have been bombarded over the years with ideas of what makes humans special (if anything at all) - this new suggestion is that it is about eliciting explanations. Having made the case for story as our definitive behaviour in Brainjacking , I can't entirely agree with Lombrozo's assertion that explanation trumps story because 'many of our explanations take the form of stories, and often we seek stories when we want to answer why. So an even better characterisation might be this: humans are the primates who explain - distinctive amongst the world's flora and fauna in our drive to understand .' Given we are told that explanation is a subset of story (which does a lot more in its unique nature), this hardly seems a good explanation of why explanation is a better characterisation. Along the way, Lombrozo makes powerful use of case studies (stories) to make her points, though sometimes these backfire a little when she repeatedly comes bac...
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Six Maths Essentials - Terence Tao *****

This is a book in the 'compact collection of science/maths essays' category beloved of publishers because they can charge hardback prices for fewer than 80 pages of text - but don't let that put you off, because it's excellent. Terence Tao introduces six areas of mathematics: numbers, algebra, geometry, probability, analysis and dynamics. Each of these is descriptive rather than practical (there are only a couple of school-level equations in sight), done in a way that gets to the heart of 'what's the point of this subject' with precision and a good level of storytelling. It's a shame in a way that analysis and dynamics form the final third of the book (apart from a short epilogue), because they don't work as well as the other sections. For the first four, practically everyone will have a vague idea of what they are and what they do - but Tao is then able to open our eyes to their wonders and power. Because Tao has to stay away from any detail of what...
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Time Now - Colin Gillespie ***

A quote on the back cover of this book describes it as monumental - it certainly feels big enough to use as part of a structure with 664 pages plus a further 112 pages of end notes. Colin Gillespie's aim is to 'bring together centuries of ancient thought and modern insights to unearth what is real and what is not'. That certainly sounds like it would need a lot of pages, if it is to be achieved at all. A starting point is to establish what 'real' means. Gillespie gives us the guidance that 'to accept something as truly real, it must be an accurately described objective aspect of the universe.' That may seem obvious, but as he points out 'little in philosophy or physics even aims to pass this test.' Gillespie builds a new conception of physics based entirely on space. As he puts it 'space isn't something; it is literally everything.' In this worldview, the universe began with a single 'space quantum' - a Planck-sized six-dimensiona...
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Paul Murdin - Five way interview

Paul Murdin in his own words : The crucial and overriding incident that defined my life irrevocably was catching polio at the age of 7 years.  That made it difficult to walk. It made me sedentary and an avid reader – a swot. I studied because I liked to, and that made it possible for me to go to university via a scholarship to Oxford. I was able to develop this into a job as an astronomer at the Royal Greenwich Observatory (RGO).   In the late 1960s I became interested in identifying the stars newly discovered as responsible for emitting X-rays. The X-rays are a flag that a star is waving at us saying 'Look at me!  I’m interesting!  Working with Louise Webster, I found in 1971 that one such star, Cygnus X-1, was a black hole. I think that qualifies as interesting!  I went on to work at the Anglo-Australian Observatory but soon returned to the RGO to work setting up the UK telescopes on La Palma.  In the later part of my life, I became a scientific administr...
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To Think Like a Statistician - Bradley Efron ****

An old advert had the tag line 'it does what it says on the tin'. There's a vagueness about the title of this book that requires Bayes' theorem to work out whether it really does what it says on the cover. If you think this book will tell you how to think like a statistician, it's unlikely that you will be satisfied. But if you think it will tell you how a statistician thinks, it is much closer to being true. Sadly this makes the tag line I've seen 'Why you don’t need to be a statistician to think like one' entirely wrong. In the book, Bradley Efron gives us plenty of detail on how statisticians apply probability to try to understand better what is happening in the world. He makes a great point that his high school mathematical education consisted primarily of algebra, geometry and trigonometry. While these 'proved invaluable to my subsequent scientific studies' they hardly ever crop up in the news, where the one mathematical subject that does oc...
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Wonders in Motion - David Acheson ****

There are broadly three types of popular science books. There's the skim-level book that's descriptive but hasn't much depth, then there's the book that tries to go as deep as you can without getting into the mathematics, and finally there's the textbook lite. I would normally avoid this last category like the plague, but just occasionally one really works: and that's the case with Wonders in Motion . This is not a book that will appeal if you have an aversion to equations. I don't think there's anything that goes beyond the maths you'd get if studying it at school to age 18 - and you aren't expected to have much prior knowledge - but if you are happy with that, David Acheson does a great job of combining history of science stories with a the development of dynamics as an aspect of physics from Newton's second law to viscous flow of fluids. Sometimes reading it does feel a little like being lectured to, featuring rather more hard mental work ...
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