Question Everything - Mick O'Hare (Ed.) ***

I am very fond of these New Scientist books that bring together question and answer sessions from the weekly magazine's Last Word column. The idea is simple - readers send in questions, other readers provide answers (which I assume are only used if they are reasonably correct (or funny)). The series has been very popular, but inevitably some books in the series stand out, and for me this wasn't one of the better ones.

It's not that there isn't good material. I enjoyed, for instance, entries on the spinning of cricket balls (and I hate sport), the long life of fruit cakes, skimming stones and the reason animals don't need toilet paper. But there were just too many questions and answers that didn't really give me anything new and exciting. Perhaps all the really mind boggling questions have already been dealt with.

The final question also illustrated the limitations of this approach. Someone asked how the UK TV audience figures are calculated. They clearly don't ask every viewer what they watched - so how do we know that 9 million people watched programme X? The answer about a sample of viewers whose viewing is recorded was fine, but the problem is that in a 'real' popular science book, the writer would be likely to think through what more would people want to discover? A writer would develop the question. But this 'crowd sourced' approach means there isn't that opportunity to dive in. So here, for instance, the really interesting question is how do they deal with the fact that many us now hardly watch any TV at the time of broadcast, but instead watch a mix of programmes time shifted with a PVR, catch-up TV and streamed shows? That's where the questioning should have gone, but the format doesn't allow for it unless someone happens to write in with the follow-up question.

So, overall, definitely still an interesting book to dip into and makes a great gift (the timing of the publication before Christmas is hardly coincidental) - but it wasn't one of my favourites in the series.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...

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). ...

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...

Search This Blog