Skip to main content

Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire - Thomas Lin (Ed.) ***

This book contains a considerable amount of good (and interesting) science - but, for me, it's not a good science book. A book should have structure and flow, leading the reader through its narrative. This is a collection of articles (from the website Quanta). As a result, what we've got here is a magazine in book's clothing. And at that it's not a very good magazine.

What do we look for in a science magazine? Good illustrations, for one. Even a top-level science magazine such as Nature has plenty of illustrations and graphics. Here there are none. Also we want a smorgasbord of interesting articles - the origin of the term 'magazine' is a storehouse - the editor's job is to ensure variety and range, so even if one article isn't really to your taste, the next one will be something completely different. Here, the articles are grouped in topics, and are often quite similar within the topic - many even have quotes from the same handful of scientists over and over again.

Take the first section, which surely should be one designed to whet the appetite. Titled 'Why doesn't our universe make sense?', these articles are all what I'd call fantasy physics. As the book's title suggests, they obsess over purely theoretical concepts like black hole firewalls. There is no observational or experimental evidence for black hole firewalls. They are simply the result of playing mathematical games - which is fine for mathematicians, but shouldn't really be presented as science when there is no prospect of taking a close look at a black hole in the foreseeable future.  Every single one of the seven articles in this section is concerned with mathematical or philosophical considerations (such as 'naturalness') which are arguably not really science at all. There is a lot of discussion in the physics world at the moment about the validity of this kind of work - but none of it surfaces here.

Another section I struggled with was one labelled 'How do machines learn?' This was about AI and was very gung-ho about artificial intelligence, giving us hardly anything about the problems it raises and the concerns that it is being overhyped, reflected so well in books such as Common Sense, the Turing Test and the Search for Real AI and The AI Delusion.

The sections I found most interesting were those on biology - 'What is Life?' and 'What Makes us Human?' There was a time when physicists could deservedly be snide about biology, culminating in Rutherford's famous 'stamp collecting' put down. Yet these biology sections felt far more like real science than the physics ones. The articles were excellent and there seemed far more that was generally interesting here. (And I say this as someone with a physics background.)

In the end, I'm not sure that collecting together the 'best' articles (if the first section were the best physics articles, I'd hate to see the worst) from a website makes for a particularly useful book. By all means visit Quanta and read the articles there (they even have illustrations!) - it's a great resource. But the book doesn't do it for me.
Paperback 

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...

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...

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 ...