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

Patricia Fara - Four Way Interview

Patricia Fara lectures in the history of science at Cambridge University, where she is a Fellow of Clare College. She was the President of the British Society for the History of Science (2016-18) and her prize-winning book, Science: A Four Thousand Year History (OUP, 2009), has been translated into nine languages. An experienced public lecturer, Patricia Fara appears regularly in TV documentaries and radio programmes. She also contributes articles and reviews to many popular magazines and journals, including History Today, BBC History, New Scientist, Nature and the Times Literary Supplement. Her new book is Erasmus Darwin.

Why history of science?
I read physics at university, but half-way through the course I realised that had been a big mistake. Although I relished the intellectual challenge, I was bored by the long hours spent lining up recalcitrant instruments in dusty laboratories. Why was nobody encouraging us to think about the big questions – What is gravity? Does quantum mechani…
Post a comment
Read more

The Idea of the Brain: Matthew Cobb *****

Matthew Cobb is one of those people that you can’t help but admire but also secretly hate just a little bit for being so awesome. He is professor for zoology at the University of Manchester with a sizable teaching load that he apparently masters with consummate skill. He’s a scientific researcher, who researches the sense of smell of fruit fly maggots; I kid you not!  He’s also an attentive and loving family father but he still finds time and energy to write brilliant history of science books, three to date. His first, The Egg and Sperm Race, describes the search for the secret of human reproduction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is one of my favourite history of science books, on the period. His second, Life’s Greatest Secret is a monster, both in scope and detail, description of the hunt to decipher the structure and function of DNA that along the way demolishes a whole boatload of modern history of science myths. The most recent, and the subject of this review, is …
Post a comment
Read more

The Search for Life on Mars - Elizabeth Howell and Nicholas Booth ***

From the book’s enticing subtitle, ‘The Greatest Scientific Detective Story of All Time’, I was expecting something rather different. I thought the authors would kick off by introducing the suspects (the various forms life might take on Mars, either now or in the past) and the kind of telltale traces they might leave, followed by a chronological account of the detectives (i.e. scientists) searching for those traces, ruling out certain suspects and focusing on others, turning up unexpected new clues, and so on. But the book is nothing like that. Continuing with the fiction analogy, this isn’t a novel so much as a collection of short stories – eleven self-contained chapters, each with its own set of protagonists, suspects and clues.

Some of the chapters work better than others. I found the first three – which despite their early placement cover NASA’s most recent Mars missions – the most irritating. For one thing, they unfold in a way that’s at odds with the cerebral ‘detective story’ na…
Post a comment
Read more