This is the first book I've read where I had to force myself to stop thinking about the author's name - and specifically from asking myself if his middle name is 'To' (I bet he hasn't heard that one before) - to be able to concentrate on the subject. It's the second book I've read on gravity and gravitational waves in the last few weeks, and it didn't work for me as well as the Pierre Binétruy title  Gravity!   In part it's down to A Zee's writing style, which is extremely mannered (not to mention constantly referring to his other books), but the content also simply didn't put the information across very well. Things start in a promising way (despite the style). The first lines of the prologue give a suitable feel: 'Finally, finally, the long wait was over: we the human race on planet earth collective heard the song of the universe. Yes, we, a rather malevolent but somewhat clever species, can now proudly say we have detected the rip...

I had to really restrain myself from adopting the approach taken by The Register in referring to Yahoo! by putting an exclamation mark after every word in the text when faced with reviewing Gravity! One thing to be said about the punctuation, though, is it makes it easier to search for amongst a whole lot of books on gravity and gravitational waves (the subtitle is 'the quest for gravitational waves') since their discovery in 2015. Despite the subtitle, Pierre Binétruy gives us far more - in fact, gravitational waves don't come into it until page 160, which makes it really more of a book about gravity with a bit on gravitational waves tacked on than a true exploration of the quest.  However, those early pages aren't wasted - Binétruy gives us plenty of detail on all kinds of background, for example plunging in to tell us about element synthesis, something you wouldn't expect in a book on gravitational waves. I also really liked a little section on experimen...

This book contains some impressive and important content - so I struggled initially to understand why I found it difficult to get on with. More on that in a moment. Applied mathematician David Sumpter takes apart our current obsession with algorithms, information bubbles, AI and fake news, showing that all too often what we read about it is more hype than reality. Whether he is dealing with the impact (or otherwise) of Cambridge Analytica on elections, or the ability of algorithms to out-think humans, he shows that we have too often assumed that sales pitches were a reality: at the moment AI and its algorithms are rarely as good as we are told. It might seem that this is the work of an academic with an axe to grind about the other mathematicians who are coining it in, but this is no unsubstantiated polemic. In many cases, Sumpter describes constructing a model to simulate the workings of an algorithm and demonstrates how feeble it really is. It was also fascinating to d...

Dean Burnett is a neuroscientist and stand-up comedian. He lives in Cardiff and works at the Institute for Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neurosciences at Cardiff University. The most-read blogger on  the  Guardian  Science  network, his 'Brain Flapping' blog has been viewed over 11  million  times. His latest book is The Happy Brain . Why science? Obvious answer would be 'Why not science?', but I imagine that's been done. My own interest in science stems, I think, from being an early love of sci-fi that offered some escapism from being a shy, chubby child in an isolated rural community. I wanted to find out why I was different, never really got a good answer, but my research into the brain sparked my interest and it pretty much snowballed from there. Why this book? I never planned to write a second book. I didn't even plan to write a first one, if I'm honest, but I got the opportunity to do so and thought I should take it. Figured it would ...

If you wanted to classify this book, you might guess ‘music’ or ‘mathematics’ from the title. Actually, ‘history of science’ is a better fit than either of those. Roughly half the book deals with various ways in which music influenced the development of science. These weren’t always to the good, either. For example, we’re told that Pythagoras – who tried to shoehorn musical and cosmic harmonies into an over-simplified geometric model – ‘impeded the progress of science for the next two millennia’. There are some surprises, too. Fourier analysis, which might top many people’s list of musically-relevant mathematical techniques, was originally developed in the context of the propagation of heat in solids. On the other hand, the world’s first partial differential equation – courtesy of  d’Alembert in 1746 – really did come out of music theory. Personally I found these insights fascinating, but readers who aren’t sure what Fourier analysis and partial differential equations are migh...

A companion to Bodyology , Brainology consists of articles originally published on the Mosaic Science website and funded by medical charity Wellcome. These are well-written, professional articles: if you hit on a topic that interest you, it's very easy to be sucked in. Because I'm not a great fan of medical journalism, I was less interested by topics such as 'the nerve cure for arthritis' and 'you can train your body to receive medicine.' However, some of the other articles really rewarded my read: for example, 'How should we deal with dark winters' and (despite the 'doctor' word) 'How doctors are reclaiming LSD', which was genuinely interesting on the history of attempts to use LSD and MDMA for medical purposes (though perhaps a little light on the deaths allegedly caused by the latter).  For me, though, the standout article was 'What tail-chasing dogs reveal about humans', which uses studies of the compulsive behaviour o...

This book was sitting on my desk for some time, and every time I saw it, I read the title as 'The Happy Brian'. The pleasure this gave me was one aspect of the science of happiness that Dean Burnett does not cover in this engaging book. Burnett's writing style is breezy and sometimes (particularly in footnotes) verging on the whimsical. His approach works best in the parts of the narrative where he is interviewing everyone from Charlotte Church to a stand-up comedian and various professors on aspects of happiness. We get to see the relevance of home and familiarity, other people, love (and sex), humour and more, always tying the observations back to the brain. In a way, Burnett sets himself up to fail, pointing out fairly early on that everything is far too complex in the brain to really pin down the causes of something as diffuse as happiness. He starts off with the idea of cheekily trying to get time on an MRI scanner to study what his own brain does when he's...

In an article I read recently, the author opined that would-be novelists shouldn't consider writing short stories as training for the craft of novel-writing, as the discipline is totally different. This is certainly true for most short stories - but, strangely, this collection by Alastair Reynolds (almost all on the long side as short stories go) is the exception that proves the rule. The majority of these pieces are, in effect, the seeds of novels. Usually a short story will be a compact, self-sustained morsel of reading - a tiny delight, often with a twist in the tail.  These chunky pieces feel as if they could so easily be continued to fill out a full novel. It's not that they don't work standalone. This book isn't like reading a collection of opening chapter samples (thank goodness). The stories are satisfying as they stand - but cry out to be expanded. They're rather like the pilot episodes for TV shows. I don't think this is a bad thing at all - the...

Perhaps the most impressive thing with a good piece of writing is when careful plotting brings together disparate  pieces of information that the reader has absorbed (in this case over two previous books) to provide a lucid whole. In Before Mars , Emma Newman powerfully  combines a truly engaging mystery, based on a small Mars base, with the unfolding drama that took place on Earth in the previous novel After Atlas . While it's not essential to have read the earlier book first, it's highly recommended to do so. This gives the reader a strong sense of having an overview of what's happening in the background, where the characters don't - only to have the twist near the end of the book add satisfying complexity. As with the previous novels, Newman perhaps works a bit too hard at making her central character someone with personal difficulties, not helped by a distinct lack in places of 'show, don't tell' with page after page of internal monologue - some o...

If, like me, you read Emma Newman's first Planetfall novel and expected After Atlas to be a direct sequel, it is initially a little off-putting to discover that it involves a whole new set of characters - but after a little bedding in, this proves to be an advantage as the plotting in After Atlas is much tighter than the first novel and it works brilliantly both as science fiction and as a murder mystery. The setting is Earth, decades after the departure of the Atlas spaceship that carried the colonists who featured in Planetfall , with a central character who is related to one of the Planetfall characters. For me, the Earth setting worked significantly better than the Planetfall one and the whole thing slotted together better, actually making the first novel seem better than it did on its own, as now we got a lot more of the context of the people involved. The only small negatives here were weaker versions of the problems of the first novel. The central character seemed...

In Planetfall , and its sequels After Atlas and Before Mars , Emma Newman has produced some of the most original and intriguing science fiction I've read in a good while. There are many familiar SF tropes here, yet they are handled in an extremely intelligent and unexpected fashion.  Planetfall sees a group of colonists on a distant star, who enjoy a high tech lifestyle alongside a strange relationship with a non-human construct known as God's City. Exactly how and why they are there is only very gradually made clear, helped by the arrival of a stranger in paradise, a survivor of a group of the colonists who were cut off from the rest on arrival and were presumed to be dead. The stranger does not have the same technology and seems better integrated with the natural environment. Central character Renata, who quickly becomes one of the main contacts for the stranger, is a damaged individual - we only gradually learn why she is like this and the extent of the personality ...