Caleb Scharf received the 2022 Carl Sagan Medal while director of astrobiology at Columbia University and is currently the senior scientist for astrobiology at NASA’s Ames Research Center. He has written several previous books and is a frequent contributor to Scientific American and Nautilus magazine. He divides his time between Silicon Valley and New York City. His new book is  The Giant Leap : Why Space is the Next Frontier in the Evolution of Life. Why science? I still feel the sense of great wonder at the world that I did as a child. For me science isn’t about some harsh, clinical deconstruction of things, it’s a type of contemplative discipline that amplifies that wonder and helps create a better sense of connection to this vast, crazy, messy universe we’re part of. I also love toying with ideas and asking questions, and I’m in awe of all the ways we humans continue to invent to help answer those questions.  Why this book? I said to my agent that I wanted to write a book ...

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

There are plenty of novels featuring time travel out there, but this is one of the more interesting ones. In a 2040s lab, owned by a tech billionaire, a pair of brilliant scientists have discovered a kind of time travel - but it's different from the usual variety. There's no physical travel - the person simply experiences a short passage of time from their past. But it's not a memory: the device sends their mind into the ether and somehow (thanks to the wonders of negative energy) they are 'really' present for the 90 seconds limit of the visit. However, there's no control over the destination time - Beth, the central character - is intensely focused on finding some way to control this, left with dwindling resources and without the help of her husband who was killed in a car accident. So far, a little bit 'meh' as time travel goes - it might be more real than a memory, but the experience appears to be the same as a perfect memory (that third rule is '...

Ian Stewart is arguably the UK's best raconteur of mathematics - here he takes on some of the extremes of the mathematical world, and in doing so gives us some real insights into what makes mathematicians tick. There's a good mix here of the flashy fun aspects of maths - think, for instance of the wonders of infinity or the monster group - and the solid everyday that nonetheless can turn up surprises. The book is littered with little insights. For example, if we think it's easy to work out the area of a rectangle by dividing it up into unit squares, what do you do with one that measures square root of two by pi? You'll find yourself jumping around from what lies beneath calculus to game theory (rock, paper, scissors anyone? - I hadn't realised a version of this game dates back around 2,000 years). One minute you'll be considering colouring maps and the next finding the shortest distance between two points on a curved surface. Some of the mathematics here has eve...

Without doubt one of the most original science fiction books I've ever read. With a mix of narrative and reports (featuring occasional redaction-like antimimetic decays) we are introduced to the work of the Organisation, which takes on weird happenings in the world, from conventional monsters and ghosts to those central to this story. A large contingent of Organisation staff deal with mimetics - ways that concepts can spread in a non-natural fashion and have to be controlled. But a smaller group deals with antimimetics - concepts and even living things that are able to remove themselves from human memory. One of our first introductions to antimimetics is when a senior civil servant summons a supposed spy to his office, only to discover that she is in fact the head of the Antimimetics Division: an antimimetic has stopped the civil servant from taking the medication that enables him to remember the Division's existence, so he is totally unaware of it. This kind of convoluted comp...

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...