Seeing Science - Jack Challoner ****

As Jack Challoner reminds us in the introduction to this beguiling book of scientific images, in 1911, the editor of the New York Evening Journal, Arthur Brisbane, advised advertisers 'Use a picture. It's worth a thousand words.' There's no doubt that scientific discoveries can be made more approachable - and sometimes jaw-dropping - with appropriate imagery.

We're used now, for instance, to seeing wonderful imagery from space telescopes. (Oddly, one of the less impressive pictures here is a Hubble image of part of the Andromeda Galaxy, that just looks like a bit of fuzz with bright lights.) But there is so much more that's possible. The first thing that randomly attracted my attention was a false colour scanning electron microscope image of the Covid virus, but every few pages something leaps out that you want to share with other people.

Accompanying these excellent images is a balanced narrative from Challoner. With a book like this there's a temptation to just stick the images in and leave it at that - let them provide those thousand words for themselves. But Challoner gives us interesting observations without ever going into too much depth (occasionally a problem with his in some ways similar book Water). Whether you want to dip in, or read through sequentially, there's plenty to occupy the mind.

You could argue about things that should have been in there, from Hooke's incredible image of a flea in Micrographia (there is something from that book, but it's much less eye-catching), or Anderson's image of the first detected antimatter particle - but any collection will miss some personal favourites. I could also have done without the artists' impressions and occasional artworks - there's so much wonderful science photography out there that we could have stayed with that. But that's a minor issue. It's also significantly too expensive.

Overall this would make a good gift book - or would function well as that much maligned entity, the loo book. It's a visual treat.

Paperback:

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

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