You Can't Polish a Nerd - Festival of the Spoken Nerd ****

The Festival of the Spoken Nerd have become the definitive example of the best in performance science and maths (yes, it's really a thing). If you haven't come across them, they're mathematician Matt Parker, physicist Helen Arney (who mostly provides the musical side of the evening) and experimenter Steve Mould who does the dangerous experiments we'd all love to do, but probably shouldn't.

I've attended FotSN's shows and a live event is, frankly, the best way to see them. Just like a standup comedian, this standup science does work best when you're surrounded by an audience - and there's usually some entertaining audience participation. However, if you don't manage to make one of their shows, this is still a good way to get a highly entertaining dose of nerdity.

When Mould tells us he has been experimenting with his microwave at home, you just know that something interesting and quite possibly dangerous is going to happen - and it does. We begin with a microwave in a video, but it moves on to live action on the stage. Arney's songs are entertaining as usual, whether her own quirky numbers or Tom Lehrer's element song. And Parker proves himself as usual to be the best of the three as a straight comedian, and though his mathematical explorations are, as always entertaining, he excels himself visually by exploring spherical geometry (and some aspects of Escher's work) using a camera that can see the whole view around it at once (he tells us off for calling it a 360 degree camera).

And, of course, there's more. Whether its Mould querying a dodgy statistic in a children's book and demonstrating gravitational waves with a rubber sheet or Parker having a good spot of tessellation and using a huge circle of pies to estimate the value of pi and leading onto some of the bizarre places that pi appears.

If, for example, you enjoy watching Dave Gorman's Modern Life is Goodish, you'll love an evening with the nerds. This is funny, nerdtastic, and genuinely entertaining.

Best bought from the FOTSN website - you could even get it on a floppy disk (come on, Nerds, that's not a floppy disk, it's a diskette), but they're sold out.

DVD:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...

Search This Blog