Why Does a Ball Bounce – Adam Hart-Davis ****

… and 100 other questions from the world of science the title continues, in case balls and their bouncing aren’t your favourite topic (oddly the cover images and the Amazon.com text only allow us 99 other questions, but the real book in front of me proudly insists on 100).

The book consists of 101 pairs of pages – one with text, the other with a striking colour photograph taken by author. It’s beautifully produced, and that’s part of its attraction. The text is simple, entertaining and eyecatching. Adam Hart-Davis is a popular TV presenter in the UK, specializing in history of technology, and he has this sort of thing off to a fine art.

At their best, the entries are concise and fun. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of space for text, so some of the entries are so condensed that they miss out some of the best bits. For example, a piece on the age of the earth gives over nearly half the text to Archbishop Usher’s delightful attempt at calculating the age from the bible, dating it back to 4004 BC, and most of the rest to Charles Lyell’s geological work. Hart-Davis then throws into the last sentence that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old without giving any clue as to how this figure (which certainly isn’t Lyell’s) was reached. A little later, he asks why flames are bright, but never mentions why hot things give off light, which seems odd. And again, when commenting on the colours of the rainbow, Hart-Davis tells us that Newton saw seven colours, without pointing out why Newton identified this particular number of colours (because he thought light, like sound, ought to operate in octaves).

However, this desire for extra content aside, the book has a fascinatingly eclectic combination of good basic science, like the stuff about light, weird and wonderful stuff like the rocks that appear to move at Racetrack Playa in Death Valley (though the “why” of this one is very much speculation), and items where there’s a certain tendency to reply to the title question on the page with a brisk “Who cares?”, like the magnificently irrelevant question, “What is brimstone?”

If there’s a problem with the book apart from the fact that it should have at least three times as much text per item, it’s that it uncomfortably straddles the market between a children’s book and an adult book, which is why we’ve listed it as both. It would get three stars as an adult coffee table book, but it works best as the sort of delightful children’s book that teases the reader with beautifully fascinating facts, and as such we’ve given it four stars. Probably the ideal age for the reader is 10-14. But having said that, many adults will enjoy its bite-sized wonders, and perhaps be inspired to something with a little more depth.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

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). ...

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...

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...

Search This Blog