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

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily, Introducing Artificial Intelligence is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

Search This Blog