The Alchemy of Us - Ainissa Ramirez ****

Materials science is one of the hardest topics to make interesting, probably only beaten in the potential dullness stakes by geology, but Ainissa Ramirez achieves the near-impossible of making the subject genuinely engaging, essentially by hardly covering materials science at all, but rather telling stories of people and their inventions with a materials science context. This is the kind of book academic publishers (and even more so academic authors) rarely achieve - lyrical and quirky, jumping around rather than linear: it's got a lot going for it.

Ramirez picks out eight topics: metal springs and crystals (for timekeeping), steel (for rails), telegraph wires, photographic materials, carbon filaments (for lighting), magnetic data storage, scientific glassware and switches plus silicon for computing. Of themselves, nothing particularly new and exciting - but what's great is the way that she headlines with excellent stories, some of which I've never come across. So, for example, the metal springs chapter begins with the story Ruth Belville who used to carry Greenwich time around London on a chronometer, while the photography section combines a very familiar topic for me - Eadweard Muybridge - with stories I've never come across, such as the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement.

The writing style can be a little flowery for me sometimes, but it's always interesting. From a UK perspective, the book has a very US orientation (it could almost be the alchemy of US) - for example, Ramirez refers to 'the difference in pronunciation of aluminum [sic], where a Union Jack accent will generate Old Glory chuckles.' This isn't a pronunciation difference - the US spells aluminium wrong, according to the international chemistry body. Similarly, for example, we only get the US version of the invention of the lightbulb (no mention that Edison had to accept that Swann got there first) and in the Muybridge story, Stanford comes across as a beneficial patron, rather than someone who tried to rip Muybridge off, making him seen like a hired help, and nearly ruined his career.

One last moan - there's a very distorted version of the history of Christmas music where we are told the traditional of carolling was a response to factories being shut down for Christmas, where in reality it goes back hundreds of years further (and don't get me started on calling Jingle Bells, which wasn't even a Christmas song originally, a carol).

However, these complaints are small fry - they don't take away from the fact that this is a fascinating book that deserves to be widely read.

Hardback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question. Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book

The Genetic Book of the Dead: Richard Dawkins ****

When someone came up with the title for this book they were probably thinking deep cultural echoes - I suspect I'm not the only Robert Rankin fan in whom it raised a smile instead, thinking of The Suburban Book of the Dead . That aside, this is a glossy and engaging book showing how physical makeup (phenotype), behaviour and more tell us about the past, with the messenger being (inevitably, this being Richard Dawkins) the genes. Worthy of comment straight away are the illustrations - this is one of the best illustrated science books I've ever come across. Generally illustrations are either an afterthought, or the book is heavily illustrated and the text is really just an accompaniment to the pictures. Here the full colour images tie in directly to the text. They are not asides, but are 'read' with the text by placing them strategically so the picture is directly with the text that refers to it. Many are photographs, though some are effective paintings by Jana Lenzová. T

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on

Search This Blog