Skip to main content

Authors - V

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


Luigi Vacca

Shannon Valor

Borin van Loon (with Jonathan Miller)

Borin van Loon (with Nigel Benson)

Tony Veale (with Mike Cook)

Vlatko Vedral

Mark Vellend

Nieske Vergunst (with Bennie Mols)

Surendra Verma

Alice Vernon

  • Ghosted: a history of ghost hunting and why we keep looking ****

    • Frank Verstraete (with Céline Broeckaert)

  • Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics (and everyone needs to know something about it) **

    • Timothy Verstynen (with Bradley Voytek)

    Giovanni Vignale

    Alex Vilenkin (with Delia Perlov)

    Gaia Vince

  • Nomad Century: how to survive the climate upheaval *****

    • James Vincent

  • Beyond Measure: the hidden history of measurement from cubits to quantum constants *****

    • Andrew Viner

  • Venn that Tune ****

    • Sherryl Vint

    Claudio Vita-Finzi

    Ron Voller

    Mark Vonhoenacker

    Bradley Voytek (with Timothy Verstynen)

    Comments

    Post a Comment

    Popular posts from this blog

    The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

    It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
    Post a Comment
    Read more

    Beyond Belief - Helen Pearson *****

    Apparently it comes as a surprise to many that medicine was not particularly scientific until the end of the twentieth century (to be honest, it's no surprise to me - we had a GP who used homeopathy in the 90s). Instead it was based on anecdotal guidance - the kind of thing that appeared to work. Evidence-based medicine has since improved the field, trying where possible to base decisions on evidence, ideally based on randomised controlled trials. The first part of Helen Pearson's book covers this well - though I think it's by far the least interesting part of what we discover. Instead what's truly fascinating is the rest of it, looking at a wide range of other fields where evidence was rarely properly used and that are only now starting to dip a toe in the water. These include social policy, policing, conservation, business and education. The main part of the book gives us examples of how bad these areas have been in terms of basing decisions on what's always been ...
    Post a Comment
    Read more

    In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

    It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting.  Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...
    Post a Comment
    Read more