Skip to main content

Authors - L

A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z

M. D. Lachlan

Anna Lachowska (with Apoorva Khare)

R. A. Lafferty

Alex Lamb

Peter Lamont

Nick Lane

Philippa Lang

Charles Langmuir (with Wally Broecker)

  • How to Build a Planet ***
  • Graham Lappin

    Rich Larson

    Mark Lasbury

    Robert Laughlin

    J. L. Lawrence

    Neil Lawrence

    Eric Lax

    Cathy Lazere (with Dennis Shasha)

    James Le Fanu

    Ursula Le Guin

    Hervé Le Tellier (Trans. Adriana Hunter)

    Tom Lean

    Ann Leckie

    Leon Lederman (with Christopher Hill)

    Leon Lederman (with Dick Teresi)

    Jonah Lehrer

    Fritz Leiber

    Stanislaw Lem

    Michael Lemonick

    Tim Lenton

    Armand Leroi

    Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon (with Will Rood and Ralph Edney)

    Richard Lester

    Hector Levesque

    Mark Levi

    Frank Levin

    Janna Levin

    Yasha Levine

    Dan Levitt

    Steven Levitt (with Stephen Dubner)

    Tim Lewens

    Mark Leyner (with Billy Goldberg)

    Gideon Lichfield (Ed.)

    Alan Lightman (with Martin Rees)

  • The Shape of Wonder: how scientists think, work, and live ****
  • Thomas Lin

    David Linden

    Grace Lindsay

    Martin Lindstrom

    Chris Lintott

    Chris Lintott (with Patrick Moore, Brian May)

    Lewis Little

    Cixin Liu

    David Livingston

    Mario Livio

    Helen Lloyd

    Charles Lockwood

    William Bryant Logan

    Jack Lohmann

    Mun Keat Looi (with Colin Stuart)

    Jonathan Losos

    Rosaly Lopes (with Michael Carroll)

    Karen Lord

    David Love

    Catherine Loveday

    Alice Lovejoy

    James Lovelock

    George Loewenstein (with Nick Chater)

    Pete Lunn

    Mark Lynas

    Comments

    Popular posts from this blog

    Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

    Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...

    Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

    It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

    On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

    By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...