Royal Society Winton Prize 2013

The winner of the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize, arguably a summary of the best popular science books published in 2012 (and now worth £25,000 for the winner) has been announced:

Winner

The Particle at the End of the Universe by Sean Carroll (Oneworld Publications)

Shortlist

Bird Sense by Tim Birkhead (Bloomsbury)
Cells to Civilizations: The Principles of Change that Shape Life by Enrico Coen (Princeton University Press)
Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory by Charles Fernyhough (Profile Books)
The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson (Granta)
Ocean of Life by Callum Roberts (Allen Lane)

Rest of the Longlist

The Spark of Life by Frances Ashcroft (Allen Lane)
The Story of Earth by Robert Hazen (Viking)
Life’s Ratchet by Peter Hoffmann (Basic Books)
Air: The Restless Shaper of the World by William Bryant Logan (WW Norton)
The Cosmic Tourist by Sir Patrick Moore, Brian May and Chris Lintott (Carlton Books)
The Life of a Leaf by Steven Vogel (The University of Chicago Press

and here are our favourites that didn’t make the long list, but certainly should have:

Gravity’s Engines – Caleb Scharf
Higgs – Jim Baggott
Ignorance – Stuart Firestein
The Moral Molecule – Paul Zak
The Righteous Mind – Jonathan Haidt
Turing, Pioneer of the Information Age – Jack Copeland
The Universe in Zero Words – Dana Mackenzie
The Universe Inside You – Brian Clegg

Comments

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here. We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...

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