Science without the Boring Bits

Science without the Boring Bits – Ian Crofton ***

Writers of popular science books can have quite an uphill struggle on their hands in making science approachable. One technique that has proved attractive over the last few years is the bite-sized nugget approach, ideally taking on some whacky aspects of science, like the popular New Scientist inspired titles that include Why Do Penguins’ Feet not Freeze? Ian Crofton has taken this funny factoid approach and combined it with a timeline to take a varied pot-pourri of a journey through scientific history from 3750 BC (the first entry is 3929 BC, but that refers to a dating of the universe conjecture, not a bit of science) to the present day.

Along the way, the reader encounters a wonderful cornucopia of strange scientific facts and unlikely but very wrong pseudo-scientific hypotheses and quack remedies. Picking a few at random we hear of how to avoid bookworms, why people can sit in an oven with steak that is cooking without being chargrilled, and how a goat failed to transmute into a young man using black magic.

Sometimes, if you know more about the context of the little snippet of information, the approach can oversimplify things. There’s only so much you can put in a paragraph or two. (The goat transformation event, for instance, undertaken by the ghost hunter Harry Price, and probably not what many would regard as science at all, was more a publicity stunt than a serious scientific endeavour (and I seem to remember this unlikely event on the Brocken in Germany also featured a maiden in some role or other.))

There were many genuinely interesting facts here (and some rather prurient stuff too) – but my problem with this book is that it didn’t really work as something to sit down and read. You can only take so many factoids in one sitting. It would be ideal, I think, as one of those books kept in the bathroom to dip into for a few minutes – and as such would make an excellent gift book – but I can’t in all honestly call this a particularly effective book to sit down and read from end to end with the intention of learning more about science as well as being entertained. The Penguins Feet type books worked better in this regard as there tended to be considerably longer articles on any particular topic.

A good gift book, then, ideal for a few minutes here or there, but the difficulty of reading it from end to end means we have to mark it down a little in the specifics we are looking for on this site.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The New Lunar Society - David Mindell *****

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...

Search This Blog