Skip to main content

The Science of Breaking Bad - Dave Trumbore and Donna Nelson ***

At first sight I'm probably not the best person to review this book as I have never watched Breaking Bad (apart from repeatedly seeing bits of episode 2 when I played it more than 50 times while battery testing laptops) and have no desire to do so. However, I am very interested in how fiction portrays science and the claim this book makes is that Breaking Bad was uniquely impressive in the amount of real science it contained.

The format of the book is more than a little odd. One of the contributors, Donna Nelson, is a chemistry professor who responded to a call for a science consultant to the show. Each chapter starts with a section of reminiscence from Nelson about the joys and tribulations of the role. That's fine and often gives interesting insights, but for some reason it's printed in tiny text, significantly smaller than the rest of the book. I think the idea is to make it look like an email, but it just makes it hard to read. I remember chatting to a physicist who had just been science consultant on a science fiction movie and he was full of the production team's enthusiasm for science - but the movie was later slated for terrible science content. Nelson seems similarly beguiled by Hollywood and perhaps is a little too starstruck not to over compliment the production team for their dedication to science.

We then get two versions of an explanation from science writer Dave Trumbore of the Breaking Bad science on a particular topic, often focussing on one or two episodes. The first version is a high-level summary, labelled '101' after the odd US way of denoting basic university courses, and the other is 'Advanced'. These are well written and can be quite interesting - for example in the discussion of explosives and of producing a DIY battery. Although Trumbore probably gives the Breaking Bad people more credit than they deserve for being accurate, he is careful to point out where the demands of good storytelling or filming were reasonably thought to outweigh the requirement for scientific accuracy. I did feel, though, that some sections - for example the ones dealing with medical conditions from psychology to oncology - were just there to fill things out and weren't really about the presentation of science in the show.

Overall, despite the odd format, it's quite a good example of the 'science of...' genre. Though not as interesting as, say The Science of Middle Earth (which inevitably was a considerably harder task for the writer), it puts across quite a lot on that under-represented science chemistry - and though occasionally there was a little too much detail for this kind of book, it was generally well presented by Trumbore. There was too much obsession with the drug that was central to the storyline - the reverence the writers of the book had for the TV show occasionally verged on the sickly, and this particularly came across in the word count given over to the creation of the drug.

Realistically, few others will try reading this just for the science content. It will be read by fans of the show - the kind of people who watch the DVD again with the commentary switched on (I don't know if Breaking Bad has this, but other shows with cult followings do) - and such readers will certainly enjoy picking over the fine details of what happened in particular episodes, even if some of the heavier science points perhaps don't interest them. A good effort.
Paperback:  

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

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more