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:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Premonitions Bureau - Sam Knight ****

Not everyone would class this as popular science, but it concerns an attempt to take a scientific approach to paranormal abilities - notably premonitions (aka clairvoyance) and as such, it fits the category. Writing in the typical dramatic storytelling style of a US magazine, Sam Knight brings to life the remarkable tale of the work of two British figures from the 1960s. The central one is psychiatrist John Barker, with a supporting role given to newspaper and TV science reporter Peter Fairley. Barker had a long interest in extra sensory phenomena - the story takes off when he was inspired by a number of people claiming to have foreseen the Aberfan disaster (which terrible tragedy Knight covers movingly). As a result of the Aberfan premonitions, the pair were responsible for London's Evening Standard newspaper setting up a long-running experiment in the form of 'The Premonitions Bureau.' Aware that the Aberfan predictions were only reported after the event, and hence flawe...
Post a Comment
Read more