Skip to main content

Q&A: Cosmic Conundrums and Everyday Mysteries of Science – Robert Matthews *****

This is a little cracker – not what you’d call heavy duty popular science, but a wonderful bit of light reading that throws in some genuinely fascinating facts.
This is what you could call Last Word Lite. New Scientist magazine has for a number of years had a Last Word page at the back where individuals write in with questions and readers come up with sensible answers. (Though they’ve always resisted our half-humorous question, if black is defined by a lack of reflection of any colour, what colour is shiny black.) The trouble with Last Word is that the answers tend to be a touch tedious, not generally being written by professional writers, and can be over-technical. Robert Matthews does the same job, but his responses are pithy, light and enjoyable.
The book is divided into a number of sections, but to be honest they don’t make much difference. Each is just packed with those sort of questions that we all ask ourselves, but lacking the straightforwardness of children, we don’t actually bother to say aloud. Many that have occurred to me over the years – why don’t mosquitoes spread HIV/AIDS and why don’t people get injured when idiots fire guns into the air (they do) for instance – are in there, along with many others that I’m sure I would have thought of at some point. Sometimes the answer is “we don’t really know”, but often Matthews can bring a light and effective insight to play.
Just occasionally the questions seem a bit hackneyed or childish (how do they get the stripes into toothpaste?) – but I’m pretty sure anyone will find plenty to surprise here. For the know-it-all, there will be some distinct surprises. Bicycles probably don’t stay up the way you thought they did, and those of us who have always impressed people by telling them that glass is really a very stiff liquid, and so old glass tends to be thicker at the bottom, need to think again. Apparently it would take 10 million years for a window pane to get 5% thicker at the base, and the effect we see in old glass is just because medieval glaziers used to put the unevenly manufactured glass of the day thick end down (it makes sense). Oh and Eskimos/Inuit don’t have lots of words for different types of snow, it’s a myth. Sigh.
If there is any complaint about this book, it’s just that the format of lots of little question and answer sections, typically ranging from half a page to a page in length, doesn’t make for an entirely smooth read – it could get rather irritating after a while. However this makes it even better as a dip-in book (dare we say it’s a great one to keep in the bathroom), and most of the content is so fascinating that it’s hard to stop reading once you start. Excellent stuff.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Martin O'Brien
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Data Empire - Roopika Risam ****

The central thesis presented by Roopika Risam is that information gives us (and particularly countries) the power to organise, control and dominate others. Although I have a couple of issues with the presentation, this is a genuinely interesting trip through the history of our use of stored information from the earliest tallies to the latest information technology. I loved a quote from Lisa Gitelman that data is is always 'cooked' so 'raw data is an oxymoron'. This neatly underlines Risam's thesis that data and information are not neutral facts, but rather tools that (like everything from fire to electronics) can be used for good or evil. As we are taken through the historical context, it can sometimes be a little difficult to judge whether Risam regards a particular example as bad or good, even when the outcome is disastrous. One thing I didn't like too much is the adherence to a popular science writing approach that has got distinctly hackneyed: opening chapte...
Post a Comment
Read more

Andrew Jaffe - Five way interview

Andrew Jaffe is professor of astrophysics and cosmology at Imperial College, London and director of the Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology. His new book is The Random Universe. Why science? I’ve always been interested in science, in particular in  astronomy, astrophysics, and space. One of my earliest memories - back in nursery school in New Jersey, I think - was watching one of the moon launches. I wanted that excitement to be part of my life! I never got to be an astronaut, but I did get to be part of the Planck Satellite team, and was privileged to be able to travel to the ESA Spaceport in French Guiana to watch the launch.  In between, I was lucky enough to have a supportive family, get a good education, and find inspiring teachers, mentors, and collaborators. They helped me model the universe, and helped me learn how to refine those models in the face of experimental and observational evidence. That is, they taught me to be a scientist. Why this book? The Random...
Post a Comment
Read more