Update for new paperback title The original title of this book was 'The Magicians': this may seem an odd one for a popular science book, but it referred to what Chown describes as ‘the central magic of science: its ability to predict the existence of things previously undreamt of which, when people went out and looked for them, turned out to actually exist in the real universe’. That may be true of all branches of science, but physics – which is what the book is about – is a special case, because its theories are rooted in mathematical equations rather than words. This makes the matter completely black-and-white: if the equations predict something you had no inkling of, then either the maths is wrong, or that thing really does exist. This book describes some remarkable instances where the maths was right. Actually, I’m not sure the old title was strictly accurate. It’s true that it centres on people – both the theoreticians who came up with the predictions and the experimenta
Today, we mostly remember H. G. Wells as a writer of science fiction, but he was a prolific non-fiction author (not to mention penning comic/romantic novels such as The History of Mister Polly , which became Half a Sixpence as a film). To those used to his tightly crafted science fiction, the non-fiction can be distinctly disappointing. In its day, some of it was very popular, but now it comes across as turgid and mannered. But this little book, which I'd never seen before, is a bit lighter on the reader, in part because its main content is a series of speeches on a concept that some suggest prefigures Wikipedia - there's an element of truth in that, but Wells' intent was much broader. While I hadn't come across the speeches that are pulled together in World Brain , I was aware of the suggestion that Vannevar Bush's 1930s memex concept was a sort of precursor of hypertext based on the then hot new technology of microfilm. Wells is also influenced by the ability of