Skip to main content

Science(ish) - Rick Edwards and Michael Brooks ****

Seeing the subtitle of this engaging hardback it would be easy to think 'Oh, no, not other "Science of Movie X" book - they were great initially but there have been too many since.' Somehow, though, the approach that Rick Edwards and Michael Brooks have taken transcends the original format and makes the whole thing fresh and fun again.

 I think the secret to their success is that they don't try to cover all the science of a particular film, but rather that they use each of their ten subjects to explore one particular topic. It also helps that, rather than focus entirely on franchise movies we get some great one-offs, including The Martian and Ex Machina. I suspect you may find the interest level of the chapters reflects to some extent whether or not you've seen the films. So, for instance, In found 28 Days Later and Gattaca, which I haven't seen, less interesting. The only other topic that suffered a bit for me was Planet of the Apes, which I have seen but hated (even the authors say it's a terrible film, which makes you wonder why they picked it with so many others to choose from).

 For the rest, though, Edwards and Brooks impressively manage to weave a whole lot of science into the topics they link to the movies. As well as the obvious subjects of The Martian and Ex Machina, Jurassic Park is good on de-extincting (is that a word?) from ancient DNA. Similarly, Interstellar on black holes (even managing to get a very up-to-date chunk on gravitational waves in) and Back to the Future on time travel, for example, all balanced readability, fun and a fair amount of science. It would have been nice if each chapter had ended with some further reading suggestions, as in each case, inevitably, the topic had to be covered in quite a summary fashion. At the very least I would point readers to Destination Mars for The Martian and Build Your Own Time Machine for Back to the Future.

 One of the reasons I liked the book a lot was that it turned my initial impression around. About page six I was close to giving up. This was partly because of the agonising attempt at humour in the constant backbiting 'conversation' between the authors that tops and tails each chapter (I can't say this got any better, but I got used to it). But mostly it was because of the painfully juvenile adjectives in the main text. We are told something is a ‘bum-busting 33.9 million miles away’, and something travels at a ‘pant-soiling 36,000 miles per hour’. Thankfully, this style disappears after page six, making me wonder if the whole book was like this originally and page six missed the edit. 

 There were a couple of small errors - John Wheeler is credited with originating the term 'black hole' (something most of us thought until a few years ago, but it's now widely known he didn't), and the year of the first direct detection of gravitational waves is given as 2016 on one page and 2015 on another (it was 2015), but this is minor stuff. It doesn't in any way undo the fact that this is a great book which will appeal to a wide range of readers. Recommended.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you


Review by Brian Clegg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...
Post a Comment
Read more