A Brief History of Stuff - Science Museum ***

Ever since A Brief History of Time there have been regular outbursts of brief histories in popular science writing (even though A Brief History of Infinity should perhaps have been the end of it). The latest such offering features stuff.

It's a neat topic for the illustrated Dorling Kindersley style with a total of 50 articles, typically four to six pages long on subjects ranging from electric taxis to hot water bottles via the likes of roller skates, PCs and scissors. Strictly it's about objects rather than stuff (which I would think of as concerning material science) - but I suspect calling them objects would be too close to the history of the world in 100 objects. Most of the items here are everyday, with a mix of high and low tech. This includes an odd mix of the very general (plastic and tinned food, for instance) and the strangely specific such as the Rover safety bicycle, the AXBT microphone and the Kenwood A700 (no, me neither).

With the bewildering array of authors (see below), there isn't really a consistent style to the articles - it's a collection rather than a book. Some stick pretty much to the topic - so, for instance, the A700 (it's a food mixer, it turns out) is almost entirely about that specific model of Kenwood Chef, where, for instance, the article on the iPod spends most of its time delving into phonographs, gramophones, cassettes, CDs and streaming, only briefly dealing with the technicalities of the iPod.

One oddity about this book is that neither the cover nor the copyright page (which lists people like the copy editor and proofreader) mentions who actually wrote any part of it other than the introduction. I was starting to wonder if the whole thing was AI generated - but tucked away at the back is a contributors' page, listing the one to three articles written by each individual. It's a long list, hence presumably the names missing from elsewhere.

Overall, although interesting, it wasn't as good as I thought it would be. Many of the articles read rather like extended museum labels - a bit too worthy to be enjoyable. Although most of the objects stimulate curiosity, and the eclectic nature of the collection should have made it decidedly moreish, I felt it was quite hard going to plough through. The foreword is by Nihal Arthanayake, host of the Brief History of Stuff podcast, and I couldn't help but feel that this material would work better in that chatty audible format than on the printed page, however nice it is to have some visuals to go with the words.

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

Charge - Frank Close ****

Anyone who writes popular science books that are so thick they could act as doorstops should pay more attention to what Frank Close achieves. In a slim, small volume he manages to pack in a huge amount of information without compromising at all on quality. His latest such book is Charge - dealing with various types of charge from electrical to colour (in the quark sense). This starts off brilliantly with a point about electrical charge that had never occurred to me. Close tells us that with every breath you inhale sufficient electrons to absorb a charge of around 15,000 coulombs 'enough to spark 1000 bolts of lightning'. And if breathing steadily, the equivalent current would be about 3,000 amps. Thankfully, though, the balancing positive charge from the nucleus means you don't fry. (This is slightly misleading as the comparison with lightning only works if you consider charge - the current in a lightning bolt is typically about 10 times higher as it lasts a much briefer t

A Crack in Everything - Marcus Chown *****

This is a book about black holes - and there are two ways to look at these amazing phenomena. One is to meander about in endless speculation concerning firewalls and holographic universes and the like, where there is no basis in observation, only mathematical magic. This, for me, is often closer to science fiction than science fact. The alternative, which is what Marcus Chown does so well here (apart from a single chapter), is to explore the aspects of theory that have observational evidence to back them up - and he does it wonderfully. I'm reminded in a way of the play The Audience which was the predecessor to The Crown . In the play, we see a series of moments in history when Queen Elizabeth II is meeting with her prime ministers, giving a view of what was happening in life and politics at that point in time. Here, Chown takes us to visit various breakthroughs over the last 100 or so years when a step was made in the understanding of black holes. The first few are around the ba

The Atomic Human - Neil Lawrence ****

This is a real curate’s egg of a book. Let’s start with the title - it feels totally wrong for what the book’s about. ‘The Atomic Human’ conjures up some second rate superhero. What Neil Lawrence is getting at is the way atoms were originally conceived as what you get when you pare back more and more until what’s left is uncuttable. The idea is that this reflects the way that artificial intelligence has cut into what’s special about being human - but there is still that core left. I think a much better analogy would have been the god of the gaps - the idea that science has taken over lots of what was once attributed to deities, leaving just a collection of gaps. At the heart of the book is an excellent point: how we as humans have great processing power in our brains but very limited bandwidth with which to communicate. By comparison, AIs have a huge amount of bandwidth to absorb vast amounts of data from the internet but can’t manage our use of understanding and context. This distinct

Search This Blog