Sixty years ago, books about astronomy for general readers were almost unheard of. There were books aimed at enthusiastic amateurs who wanted to explore the night sky with telescopes of their own, but genuine popular science books on the subject are a relatively recent invention. One reason for astronomy’s surge in popularity is a new class of ‘unsolved mysteries’ – always a sure-fire hit with readers – with intriguing names like black holes, dark matter and dark energy.  A second development is the arrival of gorgeously detailed photographs of astronomical objects – which most people will associate with NASA’s Hubble telescope, but can actually be traced back to a book that came out in 1979 called Catalogue of the Universe , which contained the very first true-colour astronomical photograph the general public ever saw. One of that book’s authors was Paul Murdin – co-discoverer of the first black hole, and now a prolific writer whose latest offering is reviewed here. It deals with ...

This is described as the definitive biography of Charles Darwin - and I really can't argue. It's a condensation of the original two-volume edition, but still a chunky 500+ pages before getting to the notes - as such it is, frankly, longer my preferred length, but though just occasionally there was too much detail, it remains highly readable and gives a brilliant insight into Darwin's family life as much as his work. We get, of course, his academic background, the voyage of the Beagle and the slow move towards Origin of Species , suddenly spurred on by competition. Then there's the later books, with the particularly contentious Descent of Man amongst them. And it's all excellent stuff. But I think the part that really captured me is Jane Browne's insight into Darwin as a person - an invalid for most of his life, and somewhat beset with doubts, especially as his religious beliefs ebbed away; a generally mild man, but capable of acerbic responses to criticism. And...

In the past I've found Steven Pinker's books hypnotic - I drift along enjoying the words and feeling I'm getting something deep from it without anything much sinking in. This one was different - it was sometimes a little harder to get your head around the underlying concept, descending as it tends to into infinite regression, but overall I did feel I'd gained a lot.  Pinker's focus here is 'common knowledge' which is when not only do we both/all know something, but we know that the other(s) know as well and the implications this has for human interactions. One entertaining thing to emerge from this is the ability to get into infinite loops of the 'I know that you know that I know that...' variety. Although we aren't mentally equipped to deal with more than a handful of iterations, we are told that a simple but limited interaction like a text exchange strictly needs the full infinite set to be definitive. For example, if you and a friend are tryin...

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...

I love popular science books, but it's a quiet sort of love: it's not often a book like this gets me really excited - but Meet the Neighbours (sorry, I know it's Neighbors, but it grates) does just that.  Once upon a time there was quite a market in books speculating about life on Mars, but of late most Martian titles have focused on getting to and colonising Mars (though often avoiding the 'c' word). Steven Benner drags us back to see the evidence for life having existed there, and does so with a vengeance. (Almost literally - he really lays into those who are dismissive of what evidence there is.) Do we have proof? Well, no - but proofs are for mathematicians. As Benner says 'science does not deal in proof... Rather, it relies on a 'preponderance of evidence' standard to shift the burden of proof.' Benner points out the weird reality that since the Viking landers, which arrived in the 1970s, there hasn't been a mission looking for organic sig...

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 ...

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 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...

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...

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...