Most people are familiar with energy, both in its everyday sense as a resource used for things like heating and powering electrical equipment, and – if they were paying attention in school – as a fundamental property of the physical world that can be converted from one form into another, but never created or destroyed. Entropy, the subject of this book, is a similar but much less well known fundamental physical property. As James Binney says in the first chapter, ‘most people without a degree in physics or chemistry will not have heard of entropy, and probably few of those with relevant degrees could explain what entropy is with any clarity’. It’s true that entropy is one of the more difficult concepts in physics, at least as regards its precise scientific meaning. At an intuitive level, however, even people who have never heard the word are probably aware of it. If you’ve ever had a sneaking suspicion that energy might not actually be conserved in the way science teachers say it is – ...

Ten years after it first appeared, we have an anniversary hardback edition of Carlo Rovelli's bestseller. It's probably the best-known popular science title since A Brief History of Time - probably more readable, but with far less content. As mentioned in my review below from 2015, it's very much a tasting menu: I'm afraid I can't agree with the Guardian's assertion, but I  hope it has led readers on to some high quality popular science. This strikes me as the kind of book that would really impress an arts graduate who thought it was giving deep insights into science in an elegant fashion, but for me it was a triumph of style over substance - far too little content to do justice to the subject. It is, in effect, seven articles strung together as a mini-book that can be read comfortably in an hour, but is priced like a full-length work.  Don't get me wrong, Carlo Rovelli knows his stuff when it comes to physics and gives us postcard sketches of a number of k...

Liz Kalaugher is a science journalist and campaigner, based in Bristol, who has written for the New Scientist, BBC Wildlife, the Guardian, BBC News and more, as well as winning science journalism fellowships from the World Federation of Science Journalists and the European Geosciences Union. She is also the co-author of Furry Logic : The Physics of Animal Life. Her new book is The Elephant in the Room . Why science? I think science is fascinating as it helps us interact with the world. Once you start to understand how things work, it opens up all sorts of possibilities. You’re no longer stumbling around in the dark, hoping you’ll find the light switch by chance; instead you’re building a map of where the light switch might be, and testing that map systematically. Hopefully that means you’ll find the light switch more easily, and learn techniques that can help you find other switches. Though lots of scientific discoveries have been made by chance. And it’s crucially important that w...

I felt a touch misled by the subtitle of this book - it refers to 'the film factory'. While technically accurate, I think most people think of 'the film factory' as a term for Hollywood, where in fact what's meant here are the two photochemical giants of the era, Kodak and AGFA. Admittedly, Hollywood gets plenty of mentions, but the movie studios' use of materials from these companies is totally dwarfed by their wider use. At the heart of the book is the chemistry necessary to make film - first based on the highly flammable cellulose nitrate and then so-called safety film (apparently no more flammable than cardboard) cellulose acetate. Parts of the companies responsible for producing these products were pressed into wartime service to make darker products, in the First World War contributing to poison gas production and in the Second World War, in the case of Kodak, centrifuging to enrich uranium. The presentation always feels as if this was not just darker, but...

This book was described to me as a 'gripping technological thriller'. It's not that at all - it's a book driven by ideas and politics which for structural reasons entirely fails to thrill, but is interesting nonetheless. Ray Nayler portrays a grim future - the West has replaced democracy with AI benevolent dictators as permanent 'Prime Ministers', while 'the Federation', essentially Russia, has an eternal non-benevolent dictator as its President, able to move from body to body. While both of these central conceits are extremely unlikely, they do provide useful vehicles for thinking about the nature of society and politics - in this sense it's an impressive book. The two key characters are Zoya, the dying author of a transformative political text that seems to be able to capture people's hearts and minds and is a death sentence to own in her homeland of the Federation, and Lilia, another Russian who has escaped to London, where she constructs some...

Michael Grunwald is an award-winning journalist and best-selling author who is now a contributor to the New York Times opinion section. His new book, We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate , is already transforming the debate over how to feed the world without frying it. Mike is a former staff writer for The Washington Post, Time, and Politico Magazine, and the critically acclaimed author of The Swamp (about the Eveglades and Florida) and The New New Deal (about the Obama stimulus bill). He lives in Miami with his wife, Cristina Dominguez, his teenagers, Max and Lina, and his three deranged dogs.  Why this book? Food and agriculture generates a third of our greenhouse gas emissions; it's also the leading driver of water shortages, water pollution, deforestation, and biodiversity losses. It occurred to me that I didn't know squat about it, and since I wrote a lot about the climate, a lot of people were probably as ignorant as I was. What I ...

One of the easiest ways to make science accessible is to tie it to everyday life - and this is something Michael Banks does well in his exploration of physical goings on from breakfast to bedtime.  Each of twelve chapters focuses on an aspect of our non-working/sleeping time. We begin with the morning coffee, take on the physics of breakfast food and so on, travelling through the day to end up in front of the TV show or film. I was impressed by just how much Banks could get from the simple (or, rather, anything but simple) extraction of a cup of coffee from ground coffee beans. One of the very first topics covered here was a fascinating surprise - how static electricity developed during the grinding process (a phenomenon not unlike the lightning produced by volcanoes) causes grounds to clump, and how baristas use a drop of water to overcome this. There were plenty of such revelations, whether it was the optics of a fishbowl that can make fish disappear or the scientific complexitie...

It's hard to believe that there could be anything more that could usefully be written about Einstein - and then this impressive little book comes along. ('Little' is not a negative here - I love short books that cram a lot in, and this one delivers impressively.) Rather than present us with the classic scientific biography, Diana Kormos Buchwald and Michael Gordin take six different cuts through Einstein's life and work, examining the process that produced his views and beliefs. After a prologue that brings together Einstein's interests and the challenges he faced we get six chapters. The first contrasts his life and work in Bern (where he had his wonder year of 1905) and Princeton as the 'sage' of the Institute for Advanced Study. We then get sections on relativity (both special and general), on quantum theory, on his sense of place and belonging (whether it be a lack of nationalism or his support for a Jewish state), on war and peace (given Einstein's ...

Luigi Vacca holds a doctorate in Nuclear Engineering from MIT and has spent decades working at the intersections of science, finance, and AI. With a career spanning tokamak research, quantitative finance, and neural networks, Vacca offers a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective. He is currently head of machine learning at a Rome-based AI startup, and holds a patent for AI in healthcare applications. His new book is Life Beyond Earth . Why science? Science is our most reliable objective tool for understanding reality. In epistemology, a classical distinction exists between the two primary sources of knowledge: rationalism and empiricism. Rationalism holds that reason is the primary source of knowledge. According to rationalists, certain truths can be known a priori — that is, independently of sensory experience. Such truths often arise from logic and mathematics, which are regarded as self-evident through reason alone. Notable proponents of rationalism include René Descartes, ...