Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize 2017

The winner of the Royal Society Insight Investment Science book prize 2017 has been announced:

Congratulations to Cordelia Fine for her success with Testosterone Rex.

The shortlist was:

Beyond Infinity - Eugenia Cheng
I Contain Multitudes - Ed Yong
In Pursuit of Memory - Joseph Jebelli
Other Minds - Peter Godfrey-Smith
Testosterone Rex - Cordelia Fine
To Be a Machine - Mark O'Connell

Congratulations to all those on the shortlist. As always we've a list of other superb science books that should have been on the list too to round out our own longlist:

Algorithms to Live By - Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
Are Numbers Real - Brian Clegg
Gravity's Kiss - Harry Collins
Storm in a Teacup - Helen Czerski
Furry Logic - Matin Durrani and Liz Kalaugher
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived - Adam Rutherford
The Invention of Science - David Wootton

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...

John and Mary Gribbin - Five Way Interview

Mary and John Gribbin are bestselling authors and science writers. As a pair, they have written several science books, including Being Human, Fire on Earth, major biographies of Richard Feynman and Robert Hooke plus Edmond Halley , and the 'in 90 minutes' series of biographies. Mary is a previous winner of the TES Junior Information Book Award and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sussex. John’s title Six Impossible Things was shortlisted for the 2019 Royal Society Science Book Prize and he is also a Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex. Their latest book is Against the Odds . Why this book? We enjoy writing biographies of scientists, which gives us particular scope to collaborate, with Mary rooting out the biographical background and John focussing on the science (although neither role is exclusive). We hadn't done one for a while, and particularly wanted to highlight a female scientist this time. But we had great troubl...

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