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...

A whole generation of astronomy enthusiasts in the UK (me included) were engaged in the subject by Patrick Moore's TV show The Sky at Night . In this 2005 autobiography, Moore concentrates on his career from writing his first book in 1953, skipping over his youth and experiences as a pilot in the Second World War in a handful of pages. It is often fascinating stuff. A starting point that is remarkable is that Moore had no scientific qualifications. (This comes across particularly in his dislike of the metric system.) He missed university due to the war and decided not to take up a place after. Astronomy is arguably the science where more contributions have been made by amateurs than any other, but few amateurs have enjoyed the respect of professionals felt for Moore. His speciality was the Moon in observing terms, but inevitably his most important contribution was in popularising astronomy. A lot of the book is dedicated to the various topics covered by his TV show, but I hadn'...

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...

It's hard to believe that there could be anything more that could usefully be written about Einstein - and then this impressive little book comes along. ('Little' is not a negative here - I love short books that cram a lot in, and this one delivers impressively.) Rather than present us with the classic scientific biography, Diana Kormos Buchwald and Michael Gordin take six different cuts through Einstein's life and work, examining the process that produced his views and beliefs. After a prologue that brings together Einstein's interests and the challenges he faced we get six chapters. The first contrasts his life and work in Bern (where he had his wonder year of 1905) and Princeton as the 'sage' of the Institute for Advanced Study. We then get sections on relativity (both special and general), on quantum theory, on his sense of place and belonging (whether it be a lack of nationalism or his support for a Jewish state), on war and peace (given Einstein's ...

It is easy to suspect that a biographical book from highly-illustrated publisher Dorling Kindersley would be mostly high level fluff, so I was pleasantly surprised at the depth Roger Highfield has worked into this large-format title. Yes, we get some of the ephemera so beloved of such books, such as a whole page dedicated to Hawking's coxing blazer - but there is plenty on Hawking's scientific life and particularly on his many scientific ideas. I've read a couple of biographies of Hawking, but I still came across aspects of his lesser fields here that I didn't remember, as well as the inevitable topics, ranging from Hawking radiation to his attempts to quell the out-of-control nature of the possible string theory universes. We also get plenty of coverage of what could be classified as Hawking the celebrity, whether it be a photograph with the Obamas in the White House, his appearances on Star Trek TNG and The Big Bang Theory or representations of him in the Simpsons. Ha...

There are a good number of books out now celebrating female scientists - in Her Space, Her Time , Shohini Ghose, a physics professor at Wilfred Laurier University in Ontario, takes in a range of astronomy and astrophysics-related areas covering major contributions made by women since Victorian times. Once upon a time, the only name in here that would probably have rung a bell is Marie Curie. To be honest, this is probably still true for most of the public (though, to be fair, they would equally be hard pressed to name male physicists other than Newton and Einstein). However, thanks to the seismic shift in recent years, if you read popular science, you will also be familiar with the likes of Annie Jump Cannon, Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin, Henrietta Leavitt and Lise Meitner at the very least. What's good about Ghose's book is that it also brings in a range of others who are less well known from Anna Draper to Wu Chien-Shiung. Each of those mentioned has made a significant contributi...

This is a second edition of a scientific biography of the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, first published in 1999. This edition adds in the remaining 20 years of Gell-Mann's life. Like most scientists, his contributions may not have been as outstanding in his later years, but it gives the complete picture - and he certainly continued to be interesting as a person. George Johnson (who clearly like a touch of scientific beauty, having previously written The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments ) does a good job of taking us into both the world and work of Gell-Mann. Not a household name, but one of the greats of twentieth century physics. Part of the problem, compared with the science that came before - even most of Einstein's - was that, as Johnson puts it, Gell-Mann's 'discoveries were not of things but of patterns - mathematical symmetries that seemed to reflect, in some ultimately mysterious way, the manner in which subatomic particles behaved.' Unlike most biograp...

This book is pure marmite (for non-UK audiences, this implies you'll either love it or hate it). It takes a radically different view to building a biographical picture of Albert Einstein, which is just as well, because it's easy to imagine with the number of books on him there are out there that the man has been covered from every possible (and several improbable) angles already. Rather than produce a straightforward linear work, Samuel Graydon gives us '99 particles' - short articles ranging from a page to around six pages long. The articles are chronological, but each acts as a separate entity, commenting on some event or aspect of Einstein's life. Graydon describes it as a 'mosaic biography', basing the approach on Craig Brown's 'Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret.' The result is a mix than can both delight and occasionally feel bewildering. We get a 'particle', for example, that consists solely of a picture of Einstein's ha...

There are some individuals in the history of science who everyone with a vague interest in the subject knows existed, but who remain shadowy figures, known for what they did but with little more to go on. One such was Carl von Linné, the Swedish scientist known far better by his Latinised surname Linnaeus. This is no lightweight study at 410 pages with another 44 pages of notes and sources. It's arguable it does go into rather more detail than the typical popular science reader would want - but it is generally readable and certainly puts Linnaeus into an appropriate context. In fact, I was surprised just how much I wanted to come back and read more, as I often find in biographies that after a while I get fed up and would prefer to have more of the science and less of the life. It might seem a little surprising that the one thing Linnaeus is universally known for gets relatively scant coverage. His binomial nomenclature - the species names such as Homo sapiens or Solanum tuberosum ...

It's always interesting to see something new in popular science, and without doubt plants (and, in this case, trees) tend not to get enough of a slice of the biology market (I don't really count 'nature' as popular science as there's very little science in it). So I had considerable hopes for Tree Stories.  But in practice, although there are some genuinely interesting little snippets of information around the way that trees interact with each other through their root networks, the book was problematic. One issue I had was that each 'story' - each chapter in effect - is continuous, without any section breaks. There is no substructure it just goes on and on, which was quite wearing. Worse, though, was that despite this book being labelled popular science, the science content was extremely thin on the ground. Take the opening story. It comes across as a typical literary tale in which nothing much happens. Two academics become acquaintances after battling over ...