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

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...

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). ...

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