Skip to main content

Mind Bending Puzzles & Fascinating Facts – Paul Williams ***

There is nothing like a bunch of puzzles and factoids to help the reader recover from some heavy duty popular science reading. Although not all the puzzles and quite interesting facts in this book fall within the remit of science or maths, it has enough to qualify here.
Paul Williams has organized his book into five sections – easy, moderate, tricky, difficult and fiendish. This doesn’t necessarily reflect how puzzling a topic is, but often refers to the amount of mathematical effort involved – so most of the ‘fiendish’ topics are straight mathematical proofs.
Each item in the book is standalone, making this a good dip-in book (dare I say it, handy to install in the toilet). It is best described as eclectic. There are quite a lot of mathematical conundrums, but there are also logic problems, little bits of science and a collection of items that could best be described as ‘quite interesting’ from palindromes to ways of doing quick calculations in the head.
Some of the entries are entertainingly surprising. I liked, for example, a little piece on words that can’t be spelled or can’t be pronounced, where basically the verb applied to two different activities and sounds the same but is pronounced differently or vice versa. The problem arises when trying to use a single verb to cover both activities. This was rather neat. Elsewhere things were less effective. This was either because there wasn’t enough material, or what there was seemed feeble. We have a section that tells us, for example about what would happen if you fell down a hole through the centre of the Earth, but it doesn’t mention the really interesting point that the time is constant whether you go through the centre of the Earth or miss it and take a shorter route.
To give an example of a couple of feeble entries, we are told how everyone got it wrong by celebrating the millennium in the year 2000 – come on, this is hardly news. Worst of all is the entry that starts: ‘Poetry is fun. Some people like reading poetry but many people also write poetry.’ This seems like the kind of statement a 9-year-old would write. We are then subjected to four poems that Williams likes. What has this to do with either mind bending puzzles or fascinating facts? It’s self-indulgence, and suggests this book is in need of a good editor.
Probably the biggest fault with the book is bringing it out as hardback. This isn’t the kind of thing to be cherished, it’s a cheap and cheerful kind of subject and it would have been better to have made it a cheap and cheerful paperback rather than a hardback retailing at £12.99 (at the time of reviewing it is a bit cheaper on Amazon) – the only thing to be said for this is it makes it a good gift book.
Overall then, a real curates egg of factoids, puzzles and straightforward mathematical proofs (the last of which are hardly mind bending or fascinating). At its best, very entertaining, but all too often it’s not so much ‘quite interesting’ as ‘faintly interesting.’

Hardback:  

Kindle:  
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

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more