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Ten Tantalising Truths - John Gribbin ****

Veteran British science writer John Gribbin has produced a number of excellent short titles of late in the form of handsome little hardbacks along the lines of 'N somethingly somethings' - for example, Six Impossible Things and Eight Improbable Possibilities. In his latest, we get ten tantalising truths.

The book is subtitled 'why the sky is blue and other big answers to simple questions': in his preface, Gribbin tells us that these are all genuine questions he has been asked by younger members of his family. Amongst the topics are why the sky is dark at night, where did everything come from, why does blood taste salty like the sea, and why are men bigger than women (as well as that blue sky one).

Some of these are very familiar; others, even for adults, are in the realm of 'hmm, I never thought of that'. It might seem that what's being done here is similar to Alom Shaha's Why Don't Things Fall Up, but though there are overlaps, they are very different books. Both are suitable for beginners in science, and both happen to use 'why is the sky blue?' as one of their starting points. But Shaha's book is more about building a wide picture of science, starting from basic questions, and sticking to the science with very little context. By contrast, Gribbin takes each point and uses it both to bring in some history of science and to dive into a little more depth, while staying approachable. I liked both books and would say they are more complementary than competitive.

To get a feel for the approach here, let's look at a couple of the topics in a little more detail. In exploring why the sky is dark at night we start with the obvious - there's no Sun visible then - then jump to Thomas Digges in 1576, musing that there should be stars in all directions, but the distant ones would be too faint to see. Gribbin then develops the story with famous characters like Kepler and less so such as Jean-Philippe Loys de Chéseaux, leading onto Olbers and Poe who will be familiar to anyone who has read about this before. At the end of a parade of ideas, presented with enough context to never make it seem dull, we get a twist in the tail that brings in the big bang and seeing (or, rather, not seeing) the cosmic fireball in the gaps between the stars.

Gribbin usually sticks to physics, astronomy and cosmology, so it's interesting to see him venture into biology with a couple of questions, such as 'why are men bigger than women?'. As he points out straight away, of course not all men are bigger than all women, but around the world, the population averages for men's height are bigger than women's averages. We get a little introduction to natural selection before noting that 'men being larger than women must have been a successful evolutionary "strategy" for our ancestors'. (I think this isn't strictly true as evolution can produce characteristics that are not helpful if they are side effects of something that is particularly beneficial, but let's leave that aside.) In many species, though, particularly insects, the females are bigger. We then explore reproductive strategies before coming to the viewpoint that relative male size in mammals often reflects the number of females the male is in a group with.

The questions may have come from youngsters, but the writing style here is very much for an adult audience. I enjoyed it, though I would have preferred to have had more topics that were less frequently covered - it seemed odd to finish with the blue sky one, which crops up extremely frequently in popular science writing. Even so, a good addition to this elegant little collection.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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