James Vincent is a senior reporter from the Verge, the Vox Media site devoted to technology and society. He has also written for the London Review of Books, Financial Times, and Wired. He lives in London. His new book is Beyond Measure on the hidden history of measurement. Why science? I don't really think I write 'science.' Rather, I hope what I do is an amalgamation of science, history, sociology, and any other narrative or factual ingredients I feel like tossing into the pot. I say this not with the intention of giving myself any special precedence either, it's just that I think it's impossible to write about science without straying into these other categories. The world is an amalgamation: horrifically tangled, dense, and interconnected. Science is the name we give to one of many methods of unpicking the whole.  Why this book? Because I have that childish instinct to look for the category above the category, like hands grasping a pole, one on top the other, to...

It was perhaps a mistake to read this book so soon after Stephen Baxter's 1995 sequel to The Time Machine called The Time Ships . For some reason, Baxter had passed me by until recently, so, impressed by reading his recent The Thousand Earths  and World Engines: Destroyer  (which confusingly features another version of the same main character is this book), I've been digging back into his earlier work. Time is certainly is a book of ideas - but there are three big problems with this 1999 novel. Despite a totally different setting, it has too many similarities to The Time Ships , it has structural issues and its view of 2010 is bizarre. Time features time travel, a portal on an asteroid, talking squids in space, the sudden emergence of super-intelligent children, a riff on time travel, alternate histories and universes, and more. You can't fault it for its reach, or all the (admittedly highly speculative) scientific concepts that are brought in. And when Baxter settles do...

There has been a long tradition of writing sequels or variants of H. G. Wells classics - think, for example, of Christopher Priest's mashup of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds in  The Space Machine. This 1995 novel from Stephen Baxter is, in one sense, a straight sequel to The Time Machine , picking up immediately after the time traveller returns to the 'present' of 1891. If I'm honest, The Time Machine is my least favourite of Wells' SF novels. Although the early chat about time as a fourth dimension was distinctly visionary, I find the actual adventure in the distant future heavy going. There are still elements of that in this sequel - but there's no doubt that Stephen Baxter managed to go way beyond Wells' original vision. Firstly, Baxter invokes the Many Worlds hypothesis, to enable time travel without paradoxes, which intriguingly means that every journey through time potentially produces a totally different future. Then he brings in other...

It's notable how many of the superstar physicists from Newton and Einstein through to Feynman have been theoreticians. Experimental physicists - utterly essential, apart from anything else to temper the imaginations of the theoreticians (which is probably why there are so many wild theories in cosmology) - rarely penetrate the popular imagination. Because Suzie Sheehy is covering the development of experimental particle physics here, she doesn't include arguably the greatest experimental physicist of all time, Michael Faraday - but as well as, for example, Rutherford and Thomson, there are plenty of names here that will be unfamiliar, making this an important book in uncovering the practical difficulties that particularly the early experimenters faced. Starting with the discoveries of X-rays and the electron using cathode ray tubes, we are taken through Rutherford's evidence for the atomic nucleus, cloud chambers and cosmic rays, particle accelerators, neutrinos, quarks and...

Although not all science is quantitative, most fundamental science is - and measurement is, in effect, the foundation of quantitative science. In this engaging exploration, James Vincent looks into both the historical origins of measurement and the development of standards, including the way that they have changed over the centuries. For those who regard metres and kilograms an evil imposition of the EU, he gives the heretical view that the introduction of the metric system in France was 'the single most significant event in the history of measurement' - and it's hard to imagine any scientist would argue with this. What's clever about Vincent's approach is that he combines the TV documentary style of visiting places and talking to people (arguably not strictly necessary for the topic, but making it more engaging) with far more depth than a TV show can ever cover. So, for example, to bring us into the early days of measurement in the Nile delta, he starts us off in a...

This is a cracker of a book (I did read it over Christmas), combining excellent science fiction with a very cold, cold case murder mystery. Medical doctor Rima Cagnac is suspected of murdering her husband 80 years previously. Soon after the crime, she left on a sublight ship heading to another star in suspended animation - the first manned trip to another star system. Thanks to a distinct MacGuffin, this ship (which has just arrived at Mu Arae) carries the necessary technology to establish a wormhole connection to Earth - technology that has finally become workable after the subsequent 80 years. Cold case detective DI Gordon Kemp is sent through the wormhole to arrest Cagnac, while his boss, DI Danni Bellini looks into the matter back in London. Keith Brooke and Eric Brown keep the plot bubbling nicely, with impressive twists and turns that ensure things are rarely how they first seemed. Kemp's worn-out character is nicely developed, as are some of those he meets on Mu Arae. It...