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

Luna: Moon Rising (SF) - Ian McDonald ****

I'm not the natural audience for this book. Game of Thrones l eaves me cold - and it's hard not to feel the influence of GoT (and a whole lot of Dune ) underneath a veneer of science fiction and the trappings of a South American drug cartel in the cod-medieval family power battles and chivalric details. There are even dragons (of a sort). I'd be really sad if the future did involve this sort of throwback feudalism. However, remarkably, despite this I found Luna: Moon Rising kept me engaged. The fact is that Ian McDonald can put together a good plot with intricate machinations, which is enough to carry the reader through what can be a bewildering collection of characters. The two page scene-setter saying who did what to whom at the start was useful, but I could have done with family trees for the main family as I was constantly forgetting who was who - especially easy as McDonald endows many families with characters with the same first initial (e.g. Ariel and Al...

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...

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...

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