Dr Louise Devoy is Senior Curator at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, UK. Louise has a background in astrophysics and the history of science. She has worked at various museums in the UK and is interested in astronomical instruments, women in astronomy and historic observatories. She is author of Royal Observatory Greenwich: A History in Objects , published to celebrate the Observatory’s 350th anniversary in 2025.  Why science? I'm curious about the world around me and science is great way to ask questions. I love digging into the history of science to see how our ideas have changed over time and to appreciate how science runs in parallel with the trends of the period, whether it's improving navigation for trade or using innovative technologies to create exciting new fields of study. Why this book? Various books have been written about certain aspects of the Observatory's history (longitude, timekeeping, the Astronomers Royal etc) but I wanted to do something more holistic ...

It might seem odd to review a book on ghost hunting as popular science, but the book's blurb says it is 'A social, historical and scientific exploration of ghost-hunting' - and over the years, ghost hunters have, more often than not, made use of scientific (and pseudoscientific) methods in their attempts to undercover whether there is any reality behind hauntings. As long as you don't look for hard science in this book, it's genuinely interesting. Alice Vernon is not a science writer, she's a lecturer in creative writing, and has a loose feel for history of science: she describes William Crookes as a chemist, a somewhat limited view, and calls Eleanor Sidgwick 'an eminent physicist' - as far as I can tell, Sidgwick only briefly assisted with some experiments at the Cavendish in her youth, spending far more time on psychic research. Vernon always seems surprised that those looking into hauntings should use methods similar to science, at one point commenti...

The interesting premise of this book is that evolution goes far beyond its biological applications, reaching into everything from economics and language to invention. Strictly the title doesn't accurately fit the starting point we get regularly reiterated in the text, which is that there are basically two sciences. The first science is physics, and the other is evolution.  The idea here is that physics is based on natural laws, fundamental constants and the like and is effectively unchanging (hence my doubt about the title). This then drives chemistry and biology, which as all physicists will agree (but probably not many chemists and biologists) are just more messy applications of physical principles. The second science, though, Mark Vellend argues is all about change and explains many things that physics-based science can never deal with. I could really enjoy a book of this kind if it gave us lots of detail about evolution in those application areas like economics and languages wh...

Mystery novels have become one of the best sub-genres of science fiction. Think, for example, of the classic Asimov The Caves of Steel, Alastair Reynolds' own Prefect Dreyfus books , or Adam Roberts' Real Town Murders . We've also had the gritty gumshoe noir version, arguably kicked off by Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and hence Blade Runner , but also superbly done in Nick Harkaway's Titanium Noir.   Now, Alastair Reynolds has also embraced gumshoe noir, but with some characteristically clever twists. Here, the put-upon detective (who almost inevitably gets beaten up early on in the narrative) is Yuri Gagarin. Yes, that Yuri Gagarin (sort of). He may not be familiar to younger readers, but to anyone of a certain age, the first man in space was a big name. However, the story is not set in the early 60s Soviet Union, but rather on a generation starship called Halcyon, seemingly around 400 years in the future. Gagarin has not only to work out what has happened in ...

The title tells you exactly what this book is about, if a little cryptically. The ‘pale blue dot’ is our own planet Earth, seen from a cosmic viewpoint – and, as far as astrobiology is concerned, it’s actually the only data point we have, counterbalancing centuries of theorising, speculation and fantasy. The book’s scope is summarised in less poetic terms in the subtitle: ‘An Earth-Based Perspective on the Search for Alien Life’. Over the years we’ve reviewed quite a few books about astrobiology on this site, but while many of these have made the point that useful things can be learned about the subject by studying our own planet, it’s generally only been a few tantalising comments in passing. So a whole book on this topic is long overdue and very welcome. Having been interested in space and astronomy for over 50 years now, it irritates me how some misconceptions just refuse to go away, generation after generation. One example is the notion that the Earth and space are two completely s...

Michael D. Gordin is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and Dean of the College at Princeton University. A specialist in the history of modern science, he has published books on nuclear weapons, Albert Einstein, and debates over pseudoscience. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, and is a member of the Leopoldina, the National Academy of Sciences of Germany. Along with Diana Buchwald he is co-author of Free Creations of the Human Mind. Why science? Science is one of humanity’s most impressive activities, and like all human activities it has a history. Both Diana and I entered the field of the history of science through sustained fascination with physical sciences. Why this book? Einstein is the subject of so many studies that one might reasonably ask why there needs to be another book on him. There were two main features we found lacking in the extant biographical literature. First, they are most...