Skip to main content

The Universe Inside You – Brian Clegg *****

If you like QI you will love this book. Like the TV show, it takes a basic theme and then delights in finding all the strange and wonderful reality that can be discovered from that concept. Here the starting point is your body as a vehicle
for exploring science. Some of what you will read is literally about the body, whether it’s the voyage of red blood cells or the paradox of your hair being dead but still part of you. But at other times it will link your body to the bigger world of science – so, for instance, we follow a photon of light from a star in the constellation Orion to your eye, finding out about cosmology and quantum theory along the way.
The main chapter headings start us off from a human hair, a cell of your body, your eyes, your stomach, the dizziness you might feel after going on a theme park ride, sexual attraction and your brain. But each of these sections of the book contains so much more. On the theme park ride, for example, we find out more about the senses, seeing why there are many more than five (how do you know you are upside down if you have your eyes closed? Which of the traditional five detects heat on your skin?) – but also manage to find ourselves in the remarkable world of Einstein’s relativity. Without over-simplifying, this all comes across at a level that would work for secondary school students as well as the general adult reader.
The book will inevitably be compared with Brian Clegg’s very successful Inflight Science – I understand the attraction of that one – it’s wonderful to have with you on a plane journey, or just to explore the science around a flight, not just flying itself. But for me, this one has the edge, because we’ve all got a body that is kind of important to us – and being a bigger book, there is much more room for extending into science and getting better insights. Like Inflight Science there are experiments scattered through the book – I very much liked the linked website which includes a number of experiments you can try online, whether watching a video, trying an optical illusion or interacting with an artificial analyst.
No book is perfect. Although the illustrations are mostly clearer than in Inflight Science one or two still suffer from the murkiness that comes from being reproduced in-page. Although I said Clegg doesn’t over-simplify, at times I really wanted more. There is a good further reading section (enhanced in the website by being able to click through to the books), but on or two of the topics I felt that they had been crammed in because they ought to be there, but that the coverage was more summary than I would have liked. These were relatively few though – mostly they were pitched at the right level.
This is an Alice in Wonderland trip through science. The book starts and ends with looking at yourself in the mirror (typically, Clegg can’t resist exploring why the mirror reverses left and right but not top and bottom). But where Alice encounters absurdity, on our trip through the looking glass, we discover and enjoy the wonders of science. Brilliant stuff.
Updated 14/1/13 – Now in mass market paperback
Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
You can see more about the book at its website: www.universeinsideyou.com
Review by Jo Reed
Please note, this title is written by the editor of the Popular Science website. Our review is still an honest opinion – and we could hardly omit the book – but do want to make the connection clear.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Keep a Plane in the Sky - Alex Davies ****

If there's one big gap in the science writing sphere, it's popular engineering (you can quibble over whether engineering is science, but where else would you put popular engineering?). Alex Davies does the field a real service with this insightful introduction to the world of test engineering. The concept is simple. If we build something and sell it, we need to test it to make sure that it won't fail in a way that's dangerous to the consumer. The most obvious example is airliners, which feature at some length, but this applies to everything from cuddly toys to hair straighteners: someone needs to predict what could go wrong and to put the product through its paces to see if it will survive under any reasonable circumstances. When Davies is telling a story of test engineering in action, the book is a delight. He opens with the way that real bears are used to test if bears can get into coolers and trash cans - and the impressive ways these animals can  circumvent human in...
Post a Comment
Read more

On the Equality of All Things - Carlo Rovelli ****

There is a wide gulf between the worldviews of physicists and philosophers. Many physicists present a rather sweetly naive, child-like view of the world, where philosophers bring a distinctly more adult, cynical tone. This being the case, it can be a little worrying when a physicist dips a toe into the philosophical mire. Infamously, in The Grand Design , Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow told us that philosophy was now dead because science could deal with anything it had previously been needed for. Thankfully, Carlo Rovelli is not trying to do away with philosophy, though it has to be said that when he veers into the topic that physicist's naivety can make it feel like the philosophising of an earnest eighteen-year-old. Take the opening paragraph, which tells us 'electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies do not essentially differ in nature from one another. They are notions that illuminate each other'. I almost expected a Pink Floyd soundtr...
Post a Comment
Read more