There have been many books on global warming, but I can't think of any I've read that are so definitively clear about the impact that climate change is going to have on our lives. The only reason I've not given it five stars is because it's so relentless miserable - I absolute accept the reality of Bill McGuire's message, but you have to have a particularly perverted kind of 'I told you so' attitude to actually enjoy reading this. McGuire lays out how climate change is likely to continue and the impacts it will have on our lives in a stark way. Unlike many environmental writers, he is honest about the uncertainty, telling us 'Despite meticulous and comprehensive modelling, we just don't know how bad things will get, nor can we know.' But any climate change deniers seeing this as an escape clause entirely miss the point. The uncertainty is over how bad things will be, but not over whether or not things will be bad. As we are told, 'tipping poi...

Frank Close is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Oxford University and Fellow Emeritus in Physics at Exeter College, Oxford. He is the author of The Infinity Puzzle and most recently Trinity . He was awarded the Kelvin Medal of the Institute of Physics for his 'outstanding contributions to the public understanding of physics' in 1996, an OBE for 'services to research and the public understanding of science' in 2000, and the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize for communicating science in 2013. His latest book is  Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass .                  Why this book?  Back in 2012, around the time of the Higgs boson discovery, I realised I was in a unique position to write about Peter Higgs and his boson. I had interviewed him on stage before the discovery, been with him when he got the call to go to CERN at the time of discovery, and then interviewed him aga...

I saw this 2013 collection of twenty-first century SF short stories recommended as a way of discovering authors that are new to the reader - and it worked really well for me. It's an impressively meaty collection running to 576 pages featuring 34 stories ranging in length from a Nature sub-1,000 words short short to a novella. Inevitably there were a couple of stories I didn't enjoy - but in a collection of this size, two was an impressively small miss list. For me Finisterra by David Moles never engaged me, while A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel by Yoon Ha Lee simply didn't work as a story - but those aside, while there was a mix of quality and style, every other story had something going for it. If I were to pick out one favourite it was Cory Doctorow's novella Chicken Little which closes the book - I thought Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was excellent, and the contribution here reminded me that here's a writer that I want to revisit...

I expected this to be a popular maths title, so was somewhat surprised to find it's actually a physics and cosmology book, but using the hooks of interesting numbers. As well as being slightly thrown by the title, I thought the introduction was remarkably similar to Douglas Adams' description of the way that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy gets far too over-excited about how mindbogglingly big the universe is, but eventually it settles down and you get some useful stuff. Antonio Padilla's introduction was loaded with rhetoric on how biggly wonderful it was all going to be. Once we get into the chapters proper, though, it does settle down a bit and Padilla gives us a whole range of mathematical insights to physical theories. We start with time dilation and relativity more generally before leaping to supermassive black holes. From here the dance of ideas continues - googols and googolplexes bring up the possibility of cosmic doppelgängers, while we then jump again t...

Alastair Reynolds has already proved himself a master of intelligent space opera such as Shadow Captain - with Eversion he enters more exotic territory, giving us an SF novel where things are much more weird and wonderful, and he succeeds equally well here. We start Eversion on a nineteenth century sailing ship, looking for a strange fissure in the sub-Atlantic ice that is thought to lead to a vast, mysterious structure. The narrative is told from the point of view of Dr Coade, the Demeter's surgeon, along with a number of suitably disparate characters (one with a name surely intended to bring A. E. van Vogt to mind). These range from a greedy financier to an obsessively driven mathematician and cartographer, plus a titled lady who seems intent on ridiculing Coade, particularly over his attempt at writing a scientific romance. Before long, soon after the crew discover the wreck of the Europa, the ship that was supposed to have brought back news of the walled city (or whatever th...

Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including H 2 O: A Biography of Water, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour , The Music Instinct , and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths . He lives in London. His latest title is The Book of Minds . Why science? As the pandemic has shown, there has never been a time when an understanding of science is essential for making informed decisions. But Covid-19 has also revealed the process of science in action, with...

Image by Nick Morrison from Unsplash As both a science writer and editor of www.popularscience.co.uk I get quite a few emails asking about writing science books, wondering if self-publishing is a good idea and asking if it's possible to get a review on the popularscience.co.uk site. Writing a book - typically in the region of 80,000 to 100,000 words - is not a trivial task, but it can be very fulfilling. There are a handful of essential questions to ask yourself before going any further, which add up to 'Why am I the right person to write about this topic?' and 'Why would other people want to read it?'  As far as being the right person goes, you don't have to be a working scientist to write a good popular science book, but you do need to have a strong understanding of the subject and to be able to present it in a way that others will find accessible. It should be a subject that excites you - if it doesn't, it's very unlikely that you will be able to exci...

The title of this book was probably selected because it's doubly apt. The Higgs boson and what the subtitle describes as 'the mystery of mass' were elusive for many years, but the term equally applies to the extremely low profile Peter Higgs himself. Frank Close is ideally placed to to give us a handle on both of these topics, though I not sure if he's aware of the degree to which there's a third reason for the book's title to work so well - I'll come back to that. The first great thing about Elusive is discovering a little bit about Peter Higgs as a person. Close makes clear one of the reasons this is so difficult to do - Higgs has an Edwardian view of communication with the world. That a person of his age doesn't do social media or video calls is not entirely surprising, but for someone who has been a working scientist to not even use email is pretty much unheard of. Hampered by Covid, Close relates having to rely on answering machine messages to set ...

It's not entirely surprising that Dante's Divine Comedy should provide the inspiration for fantasy or SF - this was already the case with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's 1976 fantasy novel Inferno , which I remember reading in an all-night session shortly after it came out. (It was a weird night, as the hamster from my next door-but-one neighbour at university had escaped and kept appearing on the floor of my room despite a closed door, contributing to the feeling of weirdness.) Adam Roberts, as we might expect, takes a more interesting approach than simply re-writing Dante. The book consists of three sections, apparently corresponding to the three sections of the original featuring hell, purgatory and paradise - though the parallels in the first and last section are not particularly obvious. These outer sections of Purgatory Mount, featuring a strange far future expedition discovering a vast structure that brings to mind a larger scale version of Dante's purgatory,...

I missed this one when it came out, possibly because the cover looks somewhat amateurish. Stephen Strogatz starts by exploring the prehistory of calculus - arguably the most widely applied mathematical tool in physics and engineering. We tend to think of calculus starting with Newton and Leibniz, but there was a long prehistory stretching back to the Ancient Greeks. This involved using methods that might, for instance, mentally cut something up into smaller and smaller pieces, then rearranged those pieces in order to work out, for instance, the relationship between the area of a circle and its circumference. This background is delightfully introduced. Strogatz takes us through some, though not all, of the intervening history before the real thing bursts on the scene, but oddly then gives up on the historical context, so we don't hear about Newton and Leibniz until we have absorbed a whole host of detail, including where necessary some equations, ranging from functions to the natura...

This sequel to Jeremy Szal's Stormblood  builds on the original novel's strength in providing page-turning battle sequences as Szal's self-tortured main character Vakov Fukasawa tries to deal with the way that his stormtech - alien DNA he has been injected with - is transforming his body and interfering with his mind. I'm not usually a fan of either heavy military SF or books the thickness of a brick, but it says something for Szal's pacing that the pages fly by. This could have been just another law and order versus drug dealers plot, but by bringing in a cult that worships the apparently long-gone evil alien race whose DNA is in the stormtech as a route to a transhuman future, plus various groups with a grudge against the not-exactly-squeaky clean law enforcement grouping, we get a much richer mix of problems for the main characters to face. As before, Szal also provides a great setting in the hollowed-out asteroid Compass, with everything from sub-Blade Runner na...