As a particle that has been around the lifetime of the universe and is central to electricity, chemistry and the existence of matter we owe a lot to the electron - but most of us know little about it. Brian Clegg’s biography skims over the first 13.7 or so billion years of its existence to concentrate on the period when humans have been aware of what it does and have gradually come to realise how it acts and what it is. After some mind boggling facts about electrons, the biography starts with lightning - the most noticeable example of electrons at work before we realised they existed. Clegg takes us through fascinating historical steps in our interactions with electricity, from Franklin’s kite and The Electrical Boy to Aldini electrifying a criminal’s corpse in 1803 causing Mr Pass the Beadle to ‘die of fright soon after he returned home’.  In the mid-nineteenth century we see how the electric telegraph enabled The Times newspaper o be on the street in London 40 minutes after the ...

Reading Victorian fiction can be difficult without context - in some cases, an annotated version can work wonders. The best remains Martin Gardner's wonderful annotation of the Alice books and The Hunting of the Snark , but while the annotation of Jules Verne's moonshot tale lacks Gardner's light touch it still delivers plenty of useful background. I started devouring science fiction when I was around 11 and worked my way through both Verne and H. G. Wells alongside more contemporary books. I found Verne stodgy and slow compared with the dramatic power of War of the Worlds or the humour of The First Men in the Moon , but it was still interesting, and Walter James Miller's 1995 translation works better than the version I came across way back then. What I doubt pre-teen me picked up was the way Verne pokes fun at America where the book is set, though even then I was doubtful about the concept of sending men to the Moon in a projectile from a huge cannon. Surely, I though...

Geoffrey Cain is an award-winning author and correspondent who sits  down with world leaders, tech founders, and dissidents. His book  Samsung Rising was longlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey  Business Book of the Year, and The Perfect Police State was named  NPR's Book of the Day. His work has appeared in The Wall Street  Journal, Time, The Economist, and Wired and has been featured on CNN  and Bloomberg TV. He also advises executives and government officials  on innovation. His latest book is Steve Jobs in Exile . Why this book? For years I covered Apple, Samsung, Sony, and the rest, and the people who knew Steve kept telling me the same story. They said his middle chapter at NeXT was missing -- few people were really looking into it. Everyone knows the young founder and everyone knows about his triumphant return, when he saved Apple from bankruptcy. But during the part in between, he wasn't wandering aimlessly - he was in his crucible, t...

If there was an A to Z of SF greats, while even younger science fiction readers could probably come up with A for Asimov, far fewer are likely to make Z for Zelazny - which is a shame. Unusually, Zelazny spanned science fiction and fantasy - although a touch pulpy, his Princes in Amber series of books were a genuinely different fantasy series - but he was also, without doubt one of the leading SF writers of the twentieth century. Here we get collected what should be some of his greatest short stories and novellas, starting with the classic and poignant A Rose for Ecclesiastes. For some reason in the intro we are told about a story that's not included that should be - 24 Views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai - why isn't it here, then? In some ways, the experience of reading the book was a disappointment, because I think I prefer the lowbrow version of Zelazny's writing in those Amber books, rather than his new wave, more intellectual work, which mostly features here. I did enjoy...

There have been some excellent books on the origins of life, notably Philip Ball's How Life Works and Henry Gee's A Very Short History of Life on Earth , taking distinctive approaches. The field might feel overcrowded - except Christophe Galfard managed to come along with a whole new, highly entertaining take on the project with a physicist's-eye-view. We begin with evolution. An excellent example of Galfard's sideways take on the topic is the short chapter entitled 'Why alien fish don't fly'. This starts with the reader picturing themselves lying by a river in a forest clearing. A fish jumps out of the river... but doesn't swim towards the clouds, it drops back in. We then pivot to Aristotle dividing the universe into the bit with the Earth and the bit outside the Moon's orbit - and giving us the concept of natural laws (including that a jumping fish will drop back). Then Newton breaks Aristotle's barrier between Earthly things and the heavens,...

This is an odd one. Ignore the title that sounds like it describes what goes on in a household repair shop - Gwen Ottinger makes an important point about the way that the attempt to use science to support social justice - such as when a community is blighted by pollution from an oil well - can be both positive and negative. While it's true that science can be used to identify pollutants and risks, scientists' natural tendency to caution may make a risk seem less significant than it is - and there is a danger that only the science viewpoint prevails, where the experience of those living in bad conditions is important too. All too often, scientists can dismiss local knowledge.  My old literary agent's first question when approached with a book idea was always 'is it a book or a magazine article?' I think this would be well applied here. Ottinger's point could have been well-made in a feature-length article, but there was an awful lot of repetition required to stre...

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...