Skip to main content

The Big Ideas in Science - Jon Evans ***

The starting point of a review like this has to be to congratulate the author on his achievement, Jon Evans, because getting all of science into one relatively short book is a massive (and thankless) task. Although inevitably the result is a fairly hectic dash through the material, with limited space for subtleness, Evans manages to make the experience readable and has a light touch that is effective without becoming too simplistic.

 There is only one reason this book doesn't get four stars - it's not the quality of the writing but rather the selection of the contents. Of course, there is bound to be plenty of stuff missed out - how else could you get all of science into 269 pages? But the balance is strangely skewed. Chemistry is pretty much omitted, though aspects of chemistry occur under other headings. But for me, the real problem is that physics is really under-represented. It's interesting to use Jim Al-Khalili's recent excellent physics summary title The World According to Physics as a guide. Al-Khalili rightly identifies three pillars of physics: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. In Evans' book, quantum theory gets two pages (in a section labelled 'When Science Goes Bad'), thermodynamics gets three lines and there is no mention of relativity at all. That's like doing biology without mentioning genetics.

 If we overlook this oddity, many other topics get good coverage. The book starts with cosmology, astronomy, the beginnings of life and evolution. We then get plenty on DNA and genetics, cell biology, the immune system and the nervous system. Then there's a whole section on Earth science - geology and weather get an impressive 45 pages (which is why that physics and chemistry gap is so depressing). The final three sections are less science per se as meta-science, including some of the most interesting material on, for example, technology and materials (particularly graphene and nanomaterials), fraud in science, climate change (including why some doubt it) and future science and technology (mostly technology). We do get some physics in the technology section with subsections on energy and waves - but that doesn't make up for lacking those three pillars.

 It's not that there's anything much wrong with anything that's here - it's just that there are 50 to 100 pages missing. Okay, there is the occasional error, but every book has one or two - and it's particularly difficult when trying to cover everything. The one that stood out to me was that LUCA (the 'last universal common ancestor') is described as 'the very first life form' - in fact that 'last' bit means it's the most recent lifeform that is ancestor to all of us, not the very first. I'd also comment on the cover, which is decidedly mean to the author - his name doesn't appear on the spine at all, and you really have to search for it on the front.

 All in all, Evans has done an admirable job in what's here. I just wish there had been a bit more. It makes the subtitle somewhat ironic.
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

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more