The Curious World of Science: Simon Flynn ****

Simon Flynn, whose career has transitioned from book publisher to science teacher, is surely ideally placed to put together what feels (surely intentionally) a little like a science book equivalent of one of those Victorian cabinets of curiosities.

This chunky volume consists of a set of short, illustrated articles covering a very wide range of science and maths topics. One moment we're reading about the classic Monty Hall problem, then perusing Darwin's infamous list of pros and cons for getting married. Some of the historical detail is delightful - I was really interested, for instance, in the time when Leicester Square was home of scientific entertainment - first Lever's museum of 'Natural and other Curiosities' and then the amazing Royal Panopticon of Science and Art which featured a 100 foot fountain in its foyer - it looks incredible and it's so sad it soon disappeared.

This book is a supercharged version of Flynn's 2012 The Science Magpie - while probably not worth getting if you already have the original, the added visuals really increase the 'curiosities' impact of the book, with one proviso: the graphic designer was given too much leeway. Some articles - the one on Frankenstein and the reanimating power of electricity, for example - are in small white font on a black background. I found this a real struggle to read, particularly when there was italic text.

As I mentioned in my original review, not every article can thrill, and although it's interesting to see things like a translation of Galileo's confession or a period American newspaper report of a visit to Albert Einstein in Germany, it doesn't necessarily make exciting reading. But then you turn the page and something engaging burst into sight. Flynn makes quite a lot of use of science-based poetry, which I suspect will be an approach some readers love and others find tedious. Generally, the science content is solid, though it was a little odd to find an article on earthquake magnitudes using the Richter scale, pretty much abandoned by scientists ages ago - it's a bit like the book quoting energy in foot-poundals.

Overall, this is a book you can either dip into, in loo book style, or peruse as lightweight reading - ideal for a holiday title. There's nothing too challenging - but you will find material here that's surprising, fascinating and fun.

Hardback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Comments

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life. To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier. It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...

Search This Blog