Her Space, Her Time - Shohini Ghose ****

There are a good number of books out now celebrating female scientists - in Her Space, Her Time, Shohini Ghose, a physics professor at Wilfred Laurier University in Ontario, takes in a range of astronomy and astrophysics-related areas covering major contributions made by women since Victorian times.

Once upon a time, the only name in here that would probably have rung a bell is Marie Curie. To be honest, this is probably still true for most of the public (though, to be fair, they would equally be hard pressed to name male physicists other than Newton and Einstein). However, thanks to the seismic shift in recent years, if you read popular science, you will also be familiar with the likes of Annie Jump Cannon, Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin, Henrietta Leavitt and Lise Meitner at the very least.

What's good about Ghose's book is that it also brings in a range of others who are less well known from Anna Draper to Wu Chien-Shiung. Each of those mentioned has made a significant contribution and Ghose gives us a good summary of their work in an approachable fashion. There are some excellent, rarely-told stories here.

My only problem with books like this - and, to be honest, any that move away from a handful of leading names and try to dig down into the broader contributions of scientists, is that it can become simply too large a cast to handle. I know scientific endeavours since the 1930s have tended to be undertaken by quite large groups, but the reality is that as readers we need a relatively small number of scientists to focus on: otherwise it's hard to get any feel for any individual's story.

Ghose achieves a reasonable balance in this respect, but having a theme like does mean there are a couple of dozen names to get your head around, rather than looking at one major piece of science, or focusing on the life of a small number of scientists. Even so, it is definitely one of the better titles to take this kind of wide-ranging overview.

Hardback:

Kindle:
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 weekly email free here

Comments

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, ...

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here. We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...

Search This Blog