Skip to main content

The Undercover Scientist – Peter J. Bentley ***

I was very much looking forward to this book, I suspect in part because I had greatly enjoyed the book The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford, and was expecting something similar, point out the unexpected science that lurks behind our everyday lives. In a sense, that’s what Peter Bentley sets out to do, but it just doesn’t work the way Harford’s book does.
In part the problem is the context. Bentley has each section start with a running story of everyday disaster, told in the second person, where the protagonist suffers everything from slipping on a wet bathroom floor to breaking a tooth. This whole continuing story is very forced and feels rather amateurish. It is designed to fit his descriptions of how everyday science works into a framework, but that framework wasn’t necessary. Like Harford’s economist, there was no need to do anything more than pick up on the really revelatory bits of science in everyday life.
The other way that the book fails in comparison with Harford’s is that where the economics in Harford’s book was a surprise to everyone but an economist, here a lot of the science is so everyday and basic that it’s hard to get too excited about it. There are moments of ‘gosh, that’s interesting,’ but they tend to be overwhelmed by a sea of so-what. The same underwhelmedness, I’m afraid, goes for the cover. When I saw it, I thought it was a boiund-proof, one of the cheap and cheerful pre-books that are sometimes sent out for review, which often just have a cover quickly knocked together before the real one comes out. But, no, it’s the real thing.
In many ways this would be better positioned (if you lost the ghastly second person introductions and tuned it a little) as a children’s book, where it would really have some legs. There is, you see, nothing wrong with the content, it just doesn’t really work for an adult reader. Give it some good illustrations and much of what is in there would work excellently as a competitor to Horrid Science. Bentley is clearly enthusiastic about his science and communicates that well – but this just doesn’t work for me as an adult popular science book.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
I have just finished reading the book and I thought it was just wonderful. I read the books where Terry Pratchett collaborated with popular science writers and hated them – awful stories compared to the normal Pratchett books and tedious science. But in Bentley’s book I liked the stories about accidents which made the science really stay with me and brought the explanations into my head at different times of the day when I got reminded of similar things that happened to me. The book is The Undercover Scientist, Investigating Mishaps of Everyday Life so that’s why mishaps are described at the start. They were great! Made me want to keep reading: a real page-turner. I don’t find the “normal” popular science books very interesting – as far as I can see they are just full of opinions and not real science. If I want opinions can I listen to the ladies gossip on the bus. This book used real science and explained everything to me and made the everyday truly fascinating. For the first time in my life I actually feel as though I understand the world around me better: I can imagine what atoms and molecules are doing and why things behave like they do and that feeling is just wonderful for a middle-aged woman who never any excitement from science at school. The book is written in super clear language in an entertaining way, and the cover is friendly and nice.
Community Review by Diane Clarkson
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Govert Schilling - Five Way Interview

Govert Schilling is an acclaimed and prize-winning freelance astronomy writer and broadcaster in the Netherlands. His articles appear in Dutch newspapers and magazines, but he also has written for New Scientist, Science and BBC Sky at Night Magazine, and he is a contributing editor of Sky & Telescope. He wrote dozens of books (including a couple of children’s books) on a wide variety of astronomical topics, many of which have been translated into English, German, Italian, and Chinese, among other languages. In 2007, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named asteroid 10986 Govert after him, and in 2014, he received the David N. Schramm Award for high-energy astrophysics science journalism from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society.His latest book is Target Earth . Why science? We live in troubling times. Fake news and conspiracy theories abound, and trust in science is diminishing. Many adults don't seem to realize that almost everythi...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinite Book – John D. Barrow ****

Authors are often asked to review books on a topic they’ve written on themselves. The reasoning is sensible – they ought to know something about the subject – but there’s always that uneasy suspicion that there’s going to be a bit of bias creeping in. So I think it’s only fair to admit up front that I have written a book on infinity (of which more later). Infinity is a wonderful subject, because it’s intimately mind-bending (if the combination sounds paradoxical, that’s what infinity is all about) and gives you the chance to pull in all sorts of different concepts and assocations along the way, something Barrow does with great gusto. There’s a surprisingly large amount of coverage here for God, and for the universe, and the book jumps around from Aristotle to Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel (explained at great length), from the paradoxes of infinite sets to the paradoxes of time travel. Overall it’s an enjoyable journey that gives plenty of opportunity to be amazed and surprised. The...
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