Skip to main content

Electric Universe – David Bodanis ****

We need to admit straight up that the four star rating is a bit of a fudge. This is both a three star book and a five star book!
If we had a category for teen readers it would make five stars. As an adult book, it would only get three. Outcome – the fudged four.
The book is about electricity in various different forms and manifestations, with all kinds of ventures off into interesting snippets and side alleys.
Why’s it a great teen book? Because it communicates great enthusiasm for the subject. It really does make an exciting, page turning read. It never dives into any technical complication, it brings in fascinating characters and the presentation is high energy all the way. In fact it’s a natural successor to the best of the Horrid Science books and the like that we recommend in our children’s section for up to thirteen/fourteen-year-olds.
Why the hesitation for adults? There have been too many compromises made in order to give it that oomph. It’s more like the taster provided by a TV show than a good popular science book – it’s just too shallow. That energy is conveyed in an exhausting barrage of superlatives and emphatic words. Electric current doesn’t flow, it rushes, roars, rampages and generally thunders along the wire. The same problem applies to the people – the biographical sketches lack the depth of characterisation we expect in an adult book. Sometimes the simplicity is revealing; at other times it’s misleading. For instance Edison is wholly credited with the electric light bulb with no mention of the fact that Swann’s getting there first was proved in court when Edison sued Swann for breach of patent and ended up having to give Swann half his company.
The book is divided into five main parts that portray electricity through wires (around telegraphs, telephone and mains electricity), waves (Faraday’s work and jokily back to the telegraph for under the waves in the amazing transatlantic cable), wireless “electricity” (i.e. electromagnetism, and specifically radar), computing and the transistor, and bioelectricity. Each of these parts has fascinating insights and revelations to intrigue. The radar section was particularly enticing in its portrayal of a remarkable raid on a German radar station to discover how their version of the technology worked.
Some concerns remain. Bodanis tells us that there was no electronics before the transistor (many pages later he mentions valves, but only as a half way house) – that’s verging on lying to make a point. Valves are electronic devices. What he really means is that electronics had to be solid state to change the world, but that’s not the same thing. And the emphasis given to the electric field, while useful to counteract its frequent absence from simple descriptions, goes too far in the way it totally dominates. These concerns are real, but shouldn’t obscure the fact that this is a superbly approachable book.
It’s great, then, for younger readers – but it could have retained the energy and enthusiasm for the teens while also appealing more to discerning adults if Bodanis hadn’t doubted the ability of his readers to cope with a little more depth.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you 
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more