The Scientific Sherlock Holmes – James O’Brien ***

I’m a fan of Sherlock Holmes in every form from the original stories to the modern day TV version Sherlock, so it was with some enthusiasm that I came to The Scientific Sherlock Holmes. What I hoped for was something along the lines of one of the better ‘the science of’ type books – but in reality this is something quite different.

As the understated cover suggests, this feels like more of an academic book that a popular title. This comes through in a number of ways. James O’Brien is too interested in cataloguing every instance of something, rather than giving an interesting narrative. He also uses an infuriating approach, apparently common in academic writing about the Holmes stories, of using a four letter code to represent each story. So after a first reference to, say, The Hound of the Baskervilles, it is thereafter designated as HOUN. Similarly, A Study in Scarlet is STUD and so on. Unless you are a devotee, this makes the text rather impenetrable. Another academic tendency that does the author no favours is to keep referring to the way someone has theorised something about the particular topic, then giving a reference – not a great way of putting an argument across.

There is some interesting material in here as to how Doyle got his ideas, and examining in detail the different aspects of Holmes’ use of scientific and forensic methods – sometimes quite groundbreaking – and the degree of his scientific knowledge. In this, O’Brien is generally quite defensive of Holmes, giving him the benefit of the doubt when others like Isaac Asimov have suggested he was actually not up to scratch. But overall the package does not give the reader enough to get their teeth into and is presented in such a dry fashion that it is hard to consider it any more than a passing interest.

If you are deep Holmes enthusiast, the kind of person who buys and studies all the surrounding literature, this will be a must-have addition to your collection. Otherwise, probably not for you.

Hardback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

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). ...

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...

Search This Blog