At first glance a book about imaging technology sounds like one of those promotional titles that technology companies make about themselves that no one will ever read - but with a light, approachable touch, Daniel Sodickson takes us from the imaging mechanisms of nature, through the early technology to the present and the potential future - featuring both benefits and risks - with aplomb. It wouldn't have struck me to include eyes in a history of imaging, but Sodickson successfully does so, going back even further to the first biological cells developing. As he asks in his opening '"OK, wait just a second!" I hear you cry. "What does imaging have to do with the first cells?"' - this chatty approach pulls the reader in very effectively. (You'll have to read the book to get the answer.) We then get on to the first augmentation of nature, using lenses to modify the flow of light.  As always there's the potential for a non-historian to distort histor...

There are some big gaps in my SF reading, particularly between mid 80s and the early 2000s - this novel from 1990 is hailed as a masterpiece, but I'm afraid it largely left me cold. I can see why it was well received - it's very clever, but for me it tries much too hard to show just how clever it is. Our central characters are pilgrims, being sent to the planet Hyperion where a monstrous and supernaturally powerful creature (or possibly lots of them) called the Shrike is killing many of the population, who are also due to be attacked by reiver-like characters called Ousters, on the way to devastate the planet. Most pilgrims in a group are killed but one is granted their desire.  Simmons is great at piling on the SF tropes, with lots of exotic-sounding names and genuinely weird flora and fauna (notably tesla trees, that blast everything around them with lightning). And there's no doubt he's a good writer. But one of the particularly clever-clever aspects (alongside the l...

Jon Willis is a professor of astronomy at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. His day job, if you like to call it that, is to study the physical contents of the Universe with a  particular focus upon giant clusters of galaxies both for what they can tell us about the large-scale properties of the Universe and the astrophysics of galaxy evolution. However, alongside astronomy, Prof. Willis is fascinated by the science of astrobiology: the search for life in the Universe. This interest has seen him travel the world in order to answer the questions not just of 'What does an astrobiologist actually do?' but also 'What does a scientific field look like as it approaches its defining moment of detecting life?'  The Pale Blue Data Point: An Earth-based Perspective on the Search for Alien Life is his current book. Why science? I like answering questions, finding things out and, for me at least, science provides the language and definitions to do these things...

Embarrassingly, I read and reviewed this book back when it came out in 2022, but forgot I had when I wanted to read more about the simulation hypothesis and virtual reality as it's a topic that comes up when considering multiverses  - but originally I focused more on it as a piece on VR, where this time I was more focused on the simulation hypothesis. I've written a new review, but in case you want to see if my opinion has changed (it hasn't much) I've included the old review below. David Chalmers uses the idea that we might be living in a computer simulation, rather than a real universe, to explore a number of philosophical queries. Initially I was really enjoying his approach, bringing in pop cultural references (the inevitable Matrix but various others too), though the cartoon illustrations are somewhat painful. However, after a while we seemed to lose sight of the deeper philosophical applications to provide a heavy going manifesto for our digital existence. Chalme...

After the success of Titanium Noir , it was almost inevitable that Nick Harkaway would give us another novel featuring his future noir detective Cal Sounder - and in many ways this doesn't disappoint. The action takes place at a faded beach resort with a weird (and not entirely explained) phenomenon that gives the book its title - hundreds of people are lying on plastic beds on the (not very pleasant sounding) volcanic beach, effectively having totally given up on life. Sounder is there at the request of a Titan who has gone through the medical procedure that he has had once - this extends life but also makes the Titan bigger each time, and arguably less human. He is hired to look into the death of a young woman with a mysterious past who was found dead on the beach. As he digs deeper, Sounder is both looking into the dominant (Titan-led) industry of the area and the revolutionary socialist background that the dead woman seems linked to. There's some nice detective work, and a ...

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...

Dr Louise Devoy is Senior Curator at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, UK. Louise has a background in astrophysics and the history of science. She has worked at various museums in the UK and is interested in astronomical instruments, women in astronomy and historic observatories. She is author of Royal Observatory Greenwich: A History in Objects , published to celebrate the Observatory’s 350th anniversary in 2025.  Why science? I'm curious about the world around me and science is great way to ask questions. I love digging into the history of science to see how our ideas have changed over time and to appreciate how science runs in parallel with the trends of the period, whether it's improving navigation for trade or using innovative technologies to create exciting new fields of study. Why this book? Various books have been written about certain aspects of the Observatory's history (longitude, timekeeping, the Astronomers Royal etc) but I wanted to do something more holistic ...

It might seem odd to review a book on ghost hunting as popular science, but the book's blurb says it is 'A social, historical and scientific exploration of ghost-hunting' - and over the years, ghost hunters have, more often than not, made use of scientific (and pseudoscientific) methods in their attempts to undercover whether there is any reality behind hauntings. As long as you don't look for hard science in this book, it's genuinely interesting. Alice Vernon is not a science writer, she's a lecturer in creative writing, and has a loose feel for history of science: she describes William Crookes as a chemist, a somewhat limited view, and calls Eleanor Sidgwick 'an eminent physicist' - as far as I can tell, Sidgwick only briefly assisted with some experiments at the Cavendish in her youth, spending far more time on psychic research. Vernon always seems surprised that those looking into hauntings should use methods similar to science, at one point commenti...

The interesting premise of this book is that evolution goes far beyond its biological applications, reaching into everything from economics and language to invention. Strictly the title doesn't accurately fit the starting point we get regularly reiterated in the text, which is that there are basically two sciences. The first science is physics, and the other is evolution.  The idea here is that physics is based on natural laws, fundamental constants and the like and is effectively unchanging (hence my doubt about the title). This then drives chemistry and biology, which as all physicists will agree (but probably not many chemists and biologists) are just more messy applications of physical principles. The second science, though, Mark Vellend argues is all about change and explains many things that physics-based science can never deal with. I could really enjoy a book of this kind if it gave us lots of detail about evolution in those application areas like economics and languages wh...

Mystery novels have become one of the best sub-genres of science fiction. Think, for example, of the classic Asimov The Caves of Steel, Alastair Reynolds' own Prefect Dreyfus books , or Adam Roberts' Real Town Murders . We've also had the gritty gumshoe noir version, arguably kicked off by Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and hence Blade Runner , but also superbly done in Nick Harkaway's Titanium Noir.   Now, Alastair Reynolds has also embraced gumshoe noir, but with some characteristically clever twists. Here, the put-upon detective (who almost inevitably gets beaten up early on in the narrative) is Yuri Gagarin. Yes, that Yuri Gagarin (sort of). He may not be familiar to younger readers, but to anyone of a certain age, the first man in space was a big name. However, the story is not set in the early 60s Soviet Union, but rather on a generation starship called Halcyon, seemingly around 400 years in the future. Gagarin has not only to work out what has happened in ...

The title tells you exactly what this book is about, if a little cryptically. The ‘pale blue dot’ is our own planet Earth, seen from a cosmic viewpoint – and, as far as astrobiology is concerned, it’s actually the only data point we have, counterbalancing centuries of theorising, speculation and fantasy. The book’s scope is summarised in less poetic terms in the subtitle: ‘An Earth-Based Perspective on the Search for Alien Life’. Over the years we’ve reviewed quite a few books about astrobiology on this site, but while many of these have made the point that useful things can be learned about the subject by studying our own planet, it’s generally only been a few tantalising comments in passing. So a whole book on this topic is long overdue and very welcome. Having been interested in space and astronomy for over 50 years now, it irritates me how some misconceptions just refuse to go away, generation after generation. One example is the notion that the Earth and space are two completely s...