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 Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms. On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...

Search This Blog