Skip to main content

How the Ray Gun Got its Zap – Stephen Wilk ****

In Stephen Wilk’s How the Ray Gun got its Zap two key factors for a science book’s effectiveness go into a head-to-head battle and neither entirely wins – yet the outcome is rarely bad and sometimes downright fun.
The downside comes from the way the book is put together. It is a set of essays, an after-the-writing compilation, which is an approach that never makes for as effective reading as a book that is actually written as a book. However, some of Wilk’s topics are hugely entertaining or informative, and some even achieve the pop sci nirvana of managing to be both.
What we have here are optical physics essays (they are a bit too formal and stiff to call articles) on topics ranging from the earliest attempts to put together a mathematical rule behind refraction to the possible nature of tractor beams. The book is divided into three sections, history, weird science and pop culture, and it is arguable that they become more interesting as you go through them.
I love history of science, but the danger with taking an academic approach to it in a book for a general audience is that you spend far too much time picking at little details that only an expert could love, and as a result lose your audience’s attention. I felt this was the case with some of the historical pieces. The story and drama necessary for popular science (which is there in spades when we discover the obscure wonder of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg or the background to the Crookes radiometer) becomes lost amongst the technical details and careful attribution of every little contribution to too many names. In the second and third sections there was far more opportunity for interesting storytelling, which the author particularly seems to enjoy when talking about science fiction – and when he is enjoying himself, we enjoy it too.
Overall, this is a book that is well worth the effort of getting through the less interesting pieces (the essay format makes skipping easy if you feel rebellious) to find plenty of gems. A good cue is that generally speaking if spectroscopy or ‘color centers’ (the author’s speciality) are mentioned, the item is likely to to be less approachable. But How the Ray Gun is  well worth persevering with, as you will be rewarded with both plenty of optics-based entertainment and some excellent knowledge, worthy of Stephen Fry and QI.

Hardback 

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Meteorite Hunters - Joshua Howgego *****

This is an extremely engaging read on a subject that everyone is aware of, but few of us know much detail about. Usually, if I'm honest, geology tends to be one of the least entertaining scientific subjects but here (I suppose, given that geo- refers to the Earth it ought to be astrology... but that might be a touch misleading). Here, though, there is plenty of opportunity to capture our interest. The first part of the book takes us both to see meteorites and to hear stories of meteorite hunters, whose exploits vary from erudite science trips to something more like an Indiana Jones outing. Joshua Howgego takes us back to the earliest observations and discoveries of meteorites and the initial doubt that they could have extraterrestrial sources, through to explorations of deserts and the Antarctic - both locations where it tends to be easier to find them. I, certainly, had no idea about the use of camera networks to track incoming meteors, which not only try to estimate where they wi...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

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 ...