This is an absolutely fascinating book for anyone interested in the way that science really works, bearing in mind the difficulties of having to base our models and theories on induction. Andrew Jaffe introduces the difficulties we face when trying to take a scientific view because largely we are dependent on induction: predicting the future from what has previously been observed. He explores what probability is, the two key ways of looking at it (frequentist and Bayesian) and how scientists use (or misuse it) to work out the implications of their experiments for hypotheses. This is then expanded into looking at the nature of scientific models and the philosophy of science before heading out to entropy, quantum randomness and attempting to achieve meaningful cosmology with its potential dearth of evidence.  The topic might sound a little dry, but in fact Jaffe does it with good humour and a very readable style. For example, he uses measuring his daughter's height by making marks on...

Bill McGuire is Professor Emeritus of  Geophysical and Climate Hazards at  University College London, a co-director of the  New Weather Institute, and a patron of Scientists  for Global Responsibility. He was a member of  SAGE, the Science Advisory Group in  Emergencies. He was also a member of the UK  Government Natural Hazard Working Group. He  lives in the Peak District. His latest book is The Fate of the World . Why look back at past climates? Modelling can take us only so far in terms of trying to figure out what our future climate be like. Looking back in time, however, allows us to see both the causes of rapid climate change and the consequences. All the evidence is laid out for us in the rocks, sediments, ice cores and the remains of ancient life, helping us to build a picture of where our climate is headed. The Pliocene, for example, was an epoch when the temperature was up to 4°C higher than during pre-industrial times, and sea levels 15...

It can be difficult to come up with a new and different way to look at basic science - but Trisha Muro manages this by using the applications of a whole list of satellites and probes to illustrate basics of physics. This could have got messy, but Muro keeps the reader on an even keel as we travel from topic to topic.  Sometimes the spaceflight missions are fairly obscure - readers may not have come across, for instance, the very first mentioned (TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), which is linked into the geometry of orbits. I thought this would be one of the weaker points, as exoplanets didn't strike me as a great link into the topic of orbits, but it worked surprisingly well. Others include the familiar favourites from the James Webb Space Telescope to the Voyager probe. Mostly the topics are managed without much dipping into mathematics - the odd equation, but nothing scary. There are two 'interludes' that do include more mathematical physics, but there...

Having recently re-read a classic in Neuromancer , a friend asked if I'd come across Macroscope (which I hadn't). Dating back to 1969, it's very much a period piece. It reinforces my view of Piers Anthony as capable of coming up with interesting and different ideas but not being a great writer in terms of style. The macroscope in question is a kind of super-telescope that instead of using photons makes use of macrons (as opposed to macarons) - which travel at the speed of light but don't follow an inverse power law, making it possible to observe in detail what happens at any location in the galaxy. But it can also act as a kind of super-educator with a catch. Central characters initially are two mid-twenties individuals: Brad who is super-intelligent and Ivo who is super-intuitive. They have a mysterious past which is only hinted at - Brad brings in Ivo to try to deal with the aforementioned catch that the macroscope wrecks the brains of intelligent people when trying ...

It's a truism that we now live in a 'me' world, where many people have a toxic inward-looking attitude that is all about self-fulfilment and 'my truth' rather rather than worrying to much about facts, reality and making things happen. Climate books come in a wide range of types, some of which, like Bill McGuire's excellent The Fate of the World , explore the scientific reality and help us to work through its implications. But the environmental lobby has always had a branch that had no time for science and was, instead about how the environment makes us feel . And this book fits comfortably into that world. In itself, this isn't a problem if all you want to do is appreciate the joys of nature. But if, as this book's publicity suggests, you want to 'transform the deep ache and overwhelm many feel into a journey of purposeful action' we need both guidance on that action and a scientific basis to underpin that action.  Unfortunately, there is not an...

Of all the big name IT people, none is revered in quite the same way as Steve Jobs was by Apple fans. But it's easy to forget that for a formative period in his career, Jobs was pushed out of Apple, starting NeXT, a startup to produce high power workstations. Taking a handful of top people with him, Jobs faced a legal onslaught for a few months from Apple - but given they had no product, not even a design, he was able to continue with the production of one of the most remarkably brilliant failures in IT history. The NeXT box solidified what was great and awful about Jobs - his far sighted ideas and his obsession with detail that led, for instance, to spending $100,000 on the logo design alone, something no startup could afford. Although the final product was brilliant, it was too expensive and too different from everything else to succeed. Geoffrey Cain gives us excellent chapter and verse on the whole episode that is often brushed over in Jobs' history. It's a reminder, ap...

Helen Pearson is an award-winning journalist and editor for Nature in London. Named European Science Journalist of the Year 2025, she is an honorary professor at University College London, where she teaches science writing. Her first book, The Life Project, was named best science book of the year by The Observer and was a book of the year for The Economist. Her new book is Beyond Belief: How Evidence Shows What Really Works . Why science? At school, I could’ve specialised in art and writing, or science and maths. I enjoyed both. I chose science — I think because it helps make sense of people and the wider world. I became fascinated by DNA and human biology, and that’s never gone away.  However, the hankering to write never went away either, and now as a science journalist I get to combine both: the endless fascination of science and the craft of writing. At Nature, I often think of questions I’d like to know answers to and then I get to call up the world’s experts to find those ans...

Sometimes it's good to revisit the classics - in this case not H. G. Wells or Asimov, say, but the archetypal cyberpunk novel. William Gibson did not invent the genre, but this 1984 contribution is standout. (Interesting side note: Gibson makes use of the term 'matrix' for an immersive virtual reality world, admittedly 8 years after it was used on Dr Who , but well ahead of the movie.) Even the opening line has a certain fame. There are some such lines that resonate whether for their quality, such as Austen's 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,' or for different reasons with 'It was a dark and stormy night,' made infamous by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and beloved by Snoopy. Neuromancer gives us an opener that immediately establishes that cyberpunk feel: 'The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.' The central character Case is a former...

The science behind climate change has been well covered, including in Bill McGuire's own Hothouse Earth , but I've not before seen a book that doesn't just use model predictions, but looks back at what we know about the state of the climate in different periods of the past, and what caused it, to help get a feel for the reality of the impact likely occur from various levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. McGuire starts with an exploration of solar variation - something that climate change deniers frequently bring up as an alternative explanation for global warming - pointing out that it definitely has an effect, but that's irrelevant to the clear and massive impact of our greenhouse gas emissions. He then takes us through various aspects of past climate variation, from ice ages to huge sea level rises, with a clear warning on the ease with which the climate can undergo relatively sudden changes when a tipping point is reached. Along the way, McGuire is dismissiv...

There have been plenty of good books on black holes, such as Marcus Chown's A Crack in Everything but it's a subject that will always benefit from a different take, and Jonas Enander manages to bring in some new viewpoints as well as exploring the basics of the concept well. After a journey into a black hole described (with the observer's inevitable destruction), we jump back to Michell's dark stars, then start to get the theoretical basis from Einstein and Schwarzschild alongside observational work. This starts, interestingly, with supermassive black holes before getting onto the common or garden variety. Enander's writing style is light and conversational - no danger here of being overwhelmed with technicalities. It's good, readable stuff. In some ways the most interesting part of the book is the final section that addresses the subtitle 'black holes and our place on Earth'. This (admittedly sometimes at quite a stretch) tries to link the study of bla...

Ever since computers became useful tools, mathematicians have had mixed opinions about using the technology to solve mathematical problems. Obviously this is particularly topical when we look at what AI can (and can't) do - but there are plenty of opportunities for the brute force of computing to deal with a tricky mathematical road block, and that's what Paul Nahin sets out to cover here. I'll say straight up front that I think this book would have been better and would have had a wider audience if it had not made excessive assumptions of what a reader knows. In his introductory chapter, Nahin says 'There is nothing in this book that attentive high school students who have taken an AP-calculus or AP-statistics class will find beyond them. This assumption lets me, for example write (as I do in the first chapter) the symbol X without explanation with the expectation that a reader will instantly recognise it as denoting the binomial coefficient...' (I have written X h...