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The Shape of Wonder - Alan Lightman and Martin Rees ****

I found this book hard to rate as it's a really good idea, but one where I'm not sure who the natural audience is. The authors (an astrophysicist and an astronomer) are responding in part to an artist friend who said that she didn't know what scientists do, and also to the zeitgeist where a reasonable proportion of the population don't trust science and scientists, particularly on subjects such as global warming and vaccines.

Alan Lightman and Martin Rees, in an introduction that almost makes it sound as if they live together Morecambe and Wise style, rightly emphasise the dangers of the population having a negative view of science when we live in a society that both has been hugely enhanced by science and where our very existence is now so tied into technology that is based on science.

They give science the label 'disciplined wonder', an approach echoing Richard Feynman's famous contradiction of Keats' suggestion that Newton's 'destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow', and reflecting the way most scientists come to their studies from that sense of wonder that is also often said to be behind the best science fiction.

On the whole, the authors do well in breaking down how scientists think, what gets them started, what keeps them going, the patterns of scientific discovery, and the ethics and responsibilities of scientists. These topics are interspersed with profiles of working scientists, starting with a long 'day in the life' profile of a scientist working on brain conditions, then shorter circa 10 page snapshots of individuals. These are the weakest part of the book, in part because of the inconsistent level of detail, down to never seeming sure whether to call someone by their first name, surname, title or a random mix of the above. 

The other possible content weakness is that the book doesn't properly address assertions about time arguably wasted on speculative science, based purely on maths with little likelihood of ever getting any evidence. The authors suggest that 'individual scientists sometimes become so enamoured of their theories and experimental results that they lose objectivity and become blind to contradictory evidence. Rarely so in the community of scientists.' Yet there seem to be significant cases of this in some communities, particularly for instance in theoretical physics and cosmology, where these rare events appear quite commonplace. (Dare I mention string theory, multiverses or dark matter, for example?)

My bigger concern, though is about that audience. Who is this book supposed to appeal to? It feels very much to be preaching to the choir - I don't think any science sceptic is going to pick it up, and if you are already involved in the science community, this isn't adding much you don't know. Perhaps it is best seen as a philosophy of science book for those who want to think more about what science does and should do, but who aren't already immersed in the field. It also has the potential in, for example, emphasising the importance of presenting science in a way that is both accessible and not over-hyping findings, and the need not to label preliminary data as discoveries, of giving scientists and science communicators something of a guiding hand.

Don't get me wrong - this is a good book, and one I enjoyed reading. And I appreciate the near-impossibility of producing a book that has any chance of winning over those who don't trust science and scientists. Perhaps what I'm feeling most is frustration: I'm being told why those I don't agree with have the wrong view of something genuinely wonderful, but not given any real solutions to this problem.

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