One of the comments on the cover of this book is from fantasy author Alan Garner, who calls Carlo Rovelli 'the poet of physics'. White Holes is probably the most appropriate of Rovelli's books for this accolade, which also makes it one of the most frustrating. There is some really interesting (if totally speculative) cosmology/astrophysics here in the suggestion that as black holes come to their end they (quantum) tunnel into tiny white holes - but there is an awful lot of poetic waffle surrounding it. Is this really science? Bearing in mind it's highly unlikely there will ever be good, real world evidence to support the theory, I'd suggest it is ascientific (to use Sabine Hossenfelder's term). Not unscientific, but not supported by evidence. Another way of looking at it is hard science fiction - it's based on good current science, but as Rovelli says himself 'I do not know if it is correct. I do not even know if white holes exist.'  If we are to us...

This has probably been the hardest popular science book to review I've ever read, and because of this I'm going to give a relatively unusual structure to this write-up. The topic is fascinating. It's about the reality of making predictions - in general, and particularly about climate change. David Stainforth is very firmly of the opinion that climate change is an emergency that requires our action - but he is unusually honest it admitting that the problems of forecasting how climate change will proceed are so great because we face a whole pile of issues along the way. He highlights how predicting the way the climate will change is a 'one-shot bet' - we don't get to make a forecast time and time again, improving our technique. There will only be a single climate future. This isn't great because we are dealing with a very complex system, we are extrapolating into an unprecedented situation, and the chaotic, non-linear nature of the systems involved make predic...

Tim Marshall is a leading authority on foreign affairs with more than 30 years of reporting experience. He was diplomatic editor at Sky News, and before that was working for the BBC and LBC/IRN radio. He has reported from 40 countries and covered conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Israel. He is the author of the No. 1 Sunday Times bestsellers Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics (which has sold over 2 million copies worldwide) and The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World. His latest book is The Future of Geography . Why geography?   After World War 2 the ‘geo’ in geopolitics fell out of fashion, but as a foreign correspondent, I always made sure to explain not just what was going on, but why it was going on – and I found that so often where it was going on played a big part. Geography often remains an overlooked factor in reporting on inte...

It's inevitable that us humans have a distinct interest in where we come from as a species, and in this book Sarah Wild takes us through the latest state of knowledge on the origin of our species and of the various extinct species that broadly fall within the 'hominin' descriptor. There's plenty of compact information here, with occasional boxes filling in basics, such as how fossils form and what a hominin is. Some of the facts are eminently quotable - my favourite was that of all the species mentioned, only Homo sapiens has a chin (not sure what this says about chinless wonders). I particularly liked the chapters on 'the first sapiens' - what we know about the earliest members of our species - and on 'the big questions', notably what happened to all the other related-ish species and the ways in which we are still evolving. Unfortunately, though, the book does suffer from Rutherford stamp collecting syndrome. The great physicist commented (roughly) that...

My latest book, Interstellar Tours , is set on a tour starship of the twenty-second century. Clearly the context is fictional, to give what can sometimes seem the rather remote sciences of astrophysics and cosmology a more hands-on feel. But the science itself is based on our best current knowledge. This does, however, raise a wider question - how to deal with the relationship between speculation and science. Given that the book is set in the future, I have to occasionally speculate about how our scientific knowledge will progress. As much as possible, I describe phenomena as we believe them to be now, but inevitably there are some circumstances where things are currently uncertain and I need to come down on one side or another. So, for example, despite visiting many planets, in my future life has yet to be discovered for certain beyond our solar system. To make sure readers don't confuse my speculation with 'real science' I have a number of speculation alerts - boxes that ...

Former Young Professional Physicist of the Year, Sharon Ann Holgate has a doctorate in experimental physics and has worked for the past twenty-five years as a freelance science writer and broadcaster. She has presented on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service, and written for newspapers and magazines including Science, New Scientist and The Times Higher Education Supplement. She was co-author of The Way Science Works, a children’s popular science book shortlisted for the 2003 Junior Prize in the Aventis Prizes for Science Books, and has written four undergraduate physics textbooks. She also contributed to the popular science books 30-Second Quantum Theory and 30-Second Energy. In 2022 Sharon Ann won the Institute of Physics’ William Thomson, Lord Kelvin Medal and Prize 'for work in communicating science to a wide variety of audiences and for positive representations of scientists from non-traditional backgrounds'. Her latest book is Nuclear Fusion: The Race to Build a Mini-Sun ...

Nuclear fusion, as this book reminds us, has been on the cards as a potential safe, clean, green energy source for around 60 years - but still isn't a practical solution. Even so, we're a lot closer now to making it a reality, so it's helpful to have a technical backgrounder on what has happened so far and how far we have to go. This book sits on the borderline between popular science and textbook lite. So, for example, although it has no maths in it, in the first section on plasma physics we are plunged into fairly sophisticated detail. Page 5, for example, features a graph showing the 'Comparison of the strong nuclear force between two nucleons and the electrostatic repulsion (Coulomb's inverse square law) between two protons'. It's hard to see how this diagram betters a sentence explaining it, adding visual complexity where none is required. A little later in the same section, we get what's described as a 'deep dive into plasma models', starti...