If there's one big gap in the science writing sphere, it's popular engineering (you can quibble over whether engineering is science, but where else would you put popular engineering?). Alex Davies does the field a real service with this insightful introduction to the world of test engineering. The concept is simple. If we build something and sell it, we need to test it to make sure that it won't fail in a way that's dangerous to the consumer. The most obvious example is airliners, which feature at some length, but this applies to everything from cuddly toys to hair straighteners: someone needs to predict what could go wrong and to put the product through its paces to see if it will survive under any reasonable circumstances. When Davies is telling a story of test engineering in action, the book is a delight. He opens with the way that real bears are used to test if bears can get into coolers and trash cans - and the impressive ways these animals can  circumvent human in...

There's no doubt that Matt Parker can make practically anything interesting - this is one of the few books I've ever read where I genuinely enjoyed the introduction. But there was a real challenge here. In a review of a recent book about maps and mathematics I said 'I always found [geometry and trigonometry] the most tedious aspect of maths.' Take a look at the subtitle here: 'the life-changing magic of trigonometry'. It's no surprise that the 'trig' word turns up - it literally means triangle measuring (trigon is an obsolete term for a triangle). But it inevitably raises a shudder for many. Parker does acknowledge this in his pure trigonometry section, suggesting it's primarily because it's a pain remembering what tan and cos and sin refer to, but pointing out convincingly how useful and powerful trigonometry is. I confess, however, it was still my least-favourite chapter in the book. Thankfully there's a lot more, introduced with Parke...

Despite beginning and ending his book with a tale of a Victorian moonshot, Iwan Rhys Morus is not writing steam punk fiction here, but rather exploring the nature of the Victorian scientific and engineering mentality, particularly in the UK, and how that made a huge transformation possible and has continued to influence the way we do some things, up to and including the Apollo programme. Rhys Morus goes on give us stories of the development of everything from steam railways to the telegraph, from the transformation of electricity into the power source of the world to powered flight. Many of the characters we meet will be familiar - names such as Brunel, Stephenson, Faraday (anything but typical in personality of the kind of inventor Rhys Morus is focussing on), Babbage, Edison (less than I'd perhaps expect), the Wright brothers and many more. But there are also the less familiar, for example those involved in developing and laying the transatlantic cable, an epic boys-own story of ...

There were two reasons I wasn't expecting much from this book. Firstly, there have been so many titles on the Apollo programme and the space race. And secondly, a book that focusses on the engineering involved would surely be far too much at the nut and bolt level (literally), missing out on the overarching drama that makes the story live. Also there were so many people involved - 400,000 is mentioned - that we couldn't have much human interest because we would be bombarded with lists of names. Instead, I was charmed by Brandon Brown's account. His father was one of the engineers, but he isn't given undue prominence - Brown picks out a handful of characters and follows them through, bringing in others as necessary, but never overwhelming us with names. And while it's true that there is a lot of nitty gritty engineering detail, it rarely becomes dull. Somehow, Brown pulls off the feat of making the day-to-day, hectic engineering work engaging. I think in pa...

Nikola Tesla divides the world into three. Those who haven't a clue who he was, those who think he was a genius scientist, thwarted by the industrial/military complex, and those who think he was a brilliant electrical engineer who became a fantasist as he got older. Presumably because it makes the best story, existing biographies of Tesla tend to support the second viewpoint: they lap up every fantastical suggestion Tesla made and give examples of what were nothing more than science fiction as an example of his 'ahead of his time' genius. So, for example, they claim he invented the mobile phone, because he said his (totally unworkable) project for transmitting energy through the Earth would mean you could have a device in your pocket that enabled communication anywhere in the world. This is a bit like saying Cyrano de Bergerac invented the Apollo space vehicles because he said you could get into space using rockets. Compared with earlier biographers, Iran Rhys Mor...

The problem with doing a book about the Apollo programme is that it's hard to find something that hasn't been said before - but with the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing just weeks away, the publication of this elegant book is extremely timely, and science-reporting veteran David Whitehouse manages to make the story feel fresh, even if you're one of the just 20 per cent of the world population who were alive on the remarkable day in 1969. Although he has worked a lot with New Scientist , Whitehouse was for many years a TV journalist, and that comes through in his impressively engaging prose as he takes us back to the origins of the US/USSR space race that would lead to the moon landing. He passes through the wartime aspects relatively quickly, but once the two superpowers are flexing their space technology muscles, Whitehouse achieves a near perfect balance between the far less-heard USSR side of the story and the US. This is probably the best bit of the w...

When you read a politician's memoirs you know that, nine times out of ten, it won't really quite work, because the message can't carry a whole book. It's reminiscent of the old literary agent's cry of 'Is it a book, or is it an article?' It's not that there aren't a lot of words in such tomes. It's almost obligatory for these books to be quite chunky. But it's a fair amount of work getting through them, and you don't feel entirely satisfied afterwards. Unfortunately, that's rather how John Browne (former head of oil giant BP)'s book comes across. It's not that the central thread is unimportant. It used to be the case, certainly in the UK, that science, with its roots in philosophy and the pursuit of knowledge, was considered far loftier than engineering, growing out of mechanical work and the pursuit of profit. There is, perhaps, still a whiff of this around in some circles - so Browne's message that engineering ha...

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 gettin...

While the memoirs of many scientists are probably best kept for family consumption, there are some breakthroughs where the story is sufficiently engaging that it can be fascinating to get an inside view on what really happened. Although Theodore Maiman's autobiographical book is not a slick, journalist-polished account, it is very effective at highlighting two significant narratives - how Maiman was able to construct the first ever laser, despite having far fewer resources than many of his competitors, and how 'establishment' academic physicists, particularly in the US, tried to minimise his achievement. On the straight autobiographical side, we get some early background and discover how Maiman combined degrees in electrical engineering and physics to have an unusually strong mix of the practical and the theoretical. Rather than go into academia after his doctorate, he went into industry - which seems to have been responsible for the backlash against his invention, whic...

With the Paris summit on climate change just concluded, it's hard to imagine a better time for a new book on the subject, and the subtitle of Tim Flannery's chunky little volume is very encouraging: 'solutions to the climate crisis.' In fact it is just as well he is offering solutions. Not only are the shelves pretty full of titles telling how terrible the impact of climate change is going to be, but (misery memoirs apart) there is quite a strong feeling that doom and gloom books don't sell. It's not that Flannery begins in cheerful mood. He takes us through the increasingly indisputable evidence that climate change is not just happening but is already having impact on everyday lives, from bush fires in Australia to flooding in the UK. After presenting a picture of increasingly disastrous implications if we choose to carry on as normal, Flannery takes us through the various key means of producing energy, their impact on the climate and where we need t...