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 Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...

The Premonitions Bureau - Sam Knight ****

Not everyone would class this as popular science, but it concerns an attempt to take a scientific approach to paranormal abilities - notably premonitions (aka clairvoyance) and as such, it fits the category. Writing in the typical dramatic storytelling style of a US magazine, Sam Knight brings to life the remarkable tale of the work of two British figures from the 1960s. The central one is psychiatrist John Barker, with a supporting role given to newspaper and TV science reporter Peter Fairley. Barker had a long interest in extra sensory phenomena - the story takes off when he was inspired by a number of people claiming to have foreseen the Aberfan disaster (which terrible tragedy Knight covers movingly). As a result of the Aberfan premonitions, the pair were responsible for London's Evening Standard newspaper setting up a long-running experiment in the form of 'The Premonitions Bureau.' Aware that the Aberfan predictions were only reported after the event, and hence flawe...

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