Skip to main content

Will We Ever Speak Dolphin – Mick O’Hare (Ed.) ****

Welcome to the latest in New Scientist‘s hugely popular quirky science answers series. As with its predecessors, we have here what ought to be a disaster, as it’s a book made up of a series of columns from newspapers. With a few exceptions, these are, frankly uninspiring books that are very cheap to produce, and it shows. But because the questions are so fascinating, the books culled from the New Scientist‘s Last Word column continue to be a delight.
I think the reason they are so successful is because they tap into the reason human beings are driven to do science. Curiosity. That nagging urge to get an answer to the question ‘Why?’ that drives every conversation with a five year old. As Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory demonstrates, to maintain such a level of questioning into adulthood would be irritating indeed – but it is the residue of that childhood curiosity that thankfully makes us interested in all things scientific.
Without that drive the questions would have become dull after a book or two, but in practice they still keep coming up with crackers, from silly but burning questions like ‘Why do we have earwax?’ to seriously interesting subjects like whether we will ever be able to truly communicate with dolphins and, perhaps most important of all, whether they ever would have got the gold out of the coach in The Italian Job.
The only criticism I have is the means of getting answers. The answers also come from readers writing in. I can see this minimises effort for the editor, and is entertaining for those who write in, but it does mean that some of the answers are a bit questionable. The very first answer, about squeaky cheese gives a suggestion for why we don’t like the sound of fingernails on a blackboard that does not fit with the research I’ve seen. And there is another example where two separate questions appear to have contradictory answers, both of which are accepted by the editor without question. One says ‘Air at a given temperature can only hold a certain amount of water vapour: the colder it is, the less it can hold.’ Fifty pages later we read ‘The belief that warm air can hold more water was disproved in 1802…’ Confusing. Maybe there could be a bit more fact checking.
Despite this slight moan, this remains a solid gold series that will entertain science enthusiasts (who haven’t already read them in the back of New Scientist) everywhere.

Paperback 

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

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...