Never Mind the B#ll*cks, Here's the Science

Never Mind the B#ll*cks, Here's the Science - Luke O'Neill ***

This is a real 'neither fish nor fowl' book. On the one hand it is trying to look edgy with that presumably Sex Pistols inspired title and chapter headings like 'What makes you think you are in control of your life?' and 'Why aren't you in jail?' - but on the other hand the text is clearly written by an academic, being somewhat over-heavy on giving us facts with limited narrative and a stodgy writing style to accompany it.

The confusion begins with the very first lines of the book. We are told at the start of the introduction 'The title captures exactly what this book is about' - but actually the title tells the reader nothing about what this book is about. The subtitle helps more. It's 'A scientist's guide to the biggest challenges facing our species today' - and to make sure we know this is a real scientist writing it, the author's name is given as 'Professor Luke O'Neill.'

A more accurate subtitle might have said 'some of the biggest challenges' as it's very much oriented to medical/psychological challenges plus climate change - there's very little about any of the physics-based challenges, say. By far the biggest of these is climate change which, presumably because it's outside O'Neill's usual remit (he's a biochemist) gets only 18 of the book's 281 pages.

Entitled 'Why are you wrecking the planet?' the climate change section provides quite a good summary of the problems but is decidedly skimpy on solutions. We get solar and wind, a passing mention of the need to change to electric vehicles (without any suggestion of how to make them affordable) and a touch on means to extract carbon from the atmosphere. No mention of, for example, nuclear, the pointlessness of little countries taking action if the big players don't, or, for that matter, the way that academics like O'Neill need to stop flying around the world. And to top it all, there's an effusive mention of environmental campaigners including Extinction Rebellion without seeming to understand how their actions turn people against the message. Overall, not very well handled.

There are some good points in other sections, notably the timely one on vaccination, and it's interesting to get an Irish viewpoint (the 'international' part of the 'international bestseller' on the front cover) rather than the usual US or UK worldview. But overall, this book didn't really engage me as much as the topics suggested it would.

Paperback:

Bookshop.org

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied), the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re

Search This Blog