Skip to main content

Authors - W

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

Frans de Waal

Peter Wadhams

John Waller

Ian Walmsley

Benjamin Wardhaugh

A. E. Warren

Ian Watson

James Watson

Nigel Watson

Stephen Webb

Gavin Weightman

Steven Weinberg

David Weintraub

Andy Weir

Michael Welland

Wellcome (Mosaic Science)

Gary Wenk

Brad Wetzler

Catherine Whitlock (with Nicola Temple)

Tom Whyntie (with Oliver Pugh)

Norbert Wiener

Marjorie Wieseman

Frank Wilczek

Stephen Wilk

Maurice Wilkins

Matt Wilkinson

J. B. Williams

Mark Williams (with Jan Zalasiewicz)

Paul Williams

Victoria Williamson

Jon Willis

Christopher Wills

Edward Wilson

Edward Wilson (with Bert Holldobler)

Robin Wilson

Ian Wilmut (with Roger Highfield)

Davey Winder

Nick Clark Windo

Laurie Winkless

Emily Winterburn

Richard Wiseman

Peter Woit

Maryanne Wolf

Gene Wolfe

Robert Wolke

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ancestral Night (SF) - Elizabeth Bear *****

Only a couple of weeks ago, reviewing a 1960s SF book, I bemoaned the fact that science fiction novels of ideas are less common now. Although it is correctly labelled a space opera, Ancestral Night delivers ideas with aplomb.

Let's deal with the space opera aspect first. Elizabeth Bear provides some excellent adventure scenes in space, and we've the usual mix of huge spaceships and interesting aliens. Main character Haimey Dz is an engineer on a ship that salvages wrecks - but, as we gradually discover - she also has a forgotten past. A major feature of the storyline (one that seems to link to the medieval idea of the lost wisdom of the past) is ancient technology from a long-dead race with capabilities, notably manipulating spacetime mentally (Bear has yet to point out that the travel technologies used here could manipulate time as well as space), which fit well with Arthur C. Clarke's magic definition.

I particularly liked the (surely intentional) nods to the much-misse…
Post a Comment
Read more

The Future of Fusion Energy - Jason Parisi and Justin Ball ***

There is no doubt that fusion, the power source of the Sun, has the potential to be a significant contributor to our future energy needs. It's clean, green and continuous, able to fill in the gaps where wind and solar simply can't deliver. It uses cheap fuel and doesn't produce much in the way of nasty waste. And it can't undergo any sort of runaway reaction. So it's certainly a worthy topic for a popular science title. This book covers one aspect of fusion power - tokamak reactors - in great depth for a relatively non-technical book. But as we will see, it will only really work for a limited audience.

You won't necessarily realise it from the cover, which I interpreted as emphasising that Homer Simpson will still have a job when Springfield Energy converts to fusion power, but Jason Parisi and Justin Ball have packed The Future of Fusion Energy with information on the detail of how fusion reactors work, and all the difficulties that are faced in getting a stabl…
Post a Comment
Read more

The Demon in the Machine - Paul Davies *****

Physicists have a habit of dabbling in biology and, perhaps surprisingly, biologists tend to be quite tolerant of it. (I find it hard to believe the reverse would be true if biologists tried to do physics.) Perhaps one reason for that tolerance is Schrödinger’s lecture series and book What is Life?, which had a huge impact on molecular biology and with a reference to which, not surprisingly, Paul Davies begins his fascinating book. 

At the heart of the The Demon in the Machine (we'll come back to that demon in a moment) is the relationship between life and information. In essence, Davies points out that if we try to reduce life to its simple physical components it is like trying to work with a computer that has no software. The equivalent of software here is information, not just in the best publicised aspect of the information stored in the DNA, but on a far broader scale, operating in networks across the organism.
This information and its processing gives life its emergent compl…
1 comment
Read more