I was surprised recently by something Simon Singh put on X about Sabine Hossenfelder. I have huge admiration for Simon, but I also have a lot of respect for Sabine. She has written two excellent books and has been helpful to me with a number of physics queries - she also had a really interesting blog, and has now become particularly successful with her science videos. This is where I'm afraid she lost me as audience, as I find video a very unsatisfactory medium to take in information - but I know it has mass appeal. This meant I was concerned by Simon's tweet (or whatever we are supposed to call posts on X) saying 'The Problem With Sabine Hossenfelder: if you are a fan of SH... then this is worth watching.' He was referencing a video from 'Professor Dave Explains' - I'm not familiar with Professor Dave (aka Dave Farina, who apparently isn't a professor, which is perhaps a bit unfortunate for someone calling out fakes), but his videos are popular and he...

My latest book, Interstellar Tours , is set on a tour starship of the twenty-second century. Clearly the context is fictional, to give what can sometimes seem the rather remote sciences of astrophysics and cosmology a more hands-on feel. But the science itself is based on our best current knowledge. This does, however, raise a wider question - how to deal with the relationship between speculation and science. Given that the book is set in the future, I have to occasionally speculate about how our scientific knowledge will progress. As much as possible, I describe phenomena as we believe them to be now, but inevitably there are some circumstances where things are currently uncertain and I need to come down on one side or another. So, for example, despite visiting many planets, in my future life has yet to be discovered for certain beyond our solar system. To make sure readers don't confuse my speculation with 'real science' I have a number of speculation alerts - boxes that ...

As a science writer, I'm aware of the need to present information in a way that grabs people's attention. But sometimes articles go too far.  I admit 'A very slight improvement in our measurement of a constant' or 'A new theory with no particular reason to think it's true' is not likely  to have crowds rushing to read your latest output. And to be fair to other science writers, we rarely get to write our own headlines. Yet sometimes what's put at the top of an article is sufficiently egregious that there's a need to fight back. The August/September edition of Popular Mechanics magazine (I always think that is such a wonderfully Victorian-sounding magazine) carried the blaring A Warp Drive Breakthrough That Could Make Interstellar Travel Possible . Eyebrow raising in itself, though the tagline beneath was arguably worse in saying 'Scientists now know how we can travel faster than the speed of light.' Let's unpack those. First to note is t...

In recent days there has been a surge in interest in quantum computing - computers that use quantum particles as the equivalent of bits. Out of the blue, I've received several invitations to talk to people about quantum computing as a result of my my book, imaginatively named Quantum Computing , which provides an introduction to the field. I suspect this upsurge is because of the recent announcement that the BBC dramatically headlined Quantum breakthrough could revolutionise computing .  This is a topic that has suffered from considerable hype in the past - so is this breakthrough (which there certainly has been) transformative or an incremental step towards what is still a fairly distant proposition? The reason quantum computers are of huge interest is that for certain applications they can, in principle, carry out calculations that would take conventional computers the lifetime of the universe to churn through. The reason that they can do this is that instead of using bits that c...

Image from Unsplash There may not be any reviews here now until January 2023 as we like to take a break - but our reviews will be back again in January. Topics come and go in the popular science world - looking back over 2022, brains/consciousness, climate change, AI and space/cosmology have been the most dominant in terms of review titles. As someone with a particular interest in physics and maths, I'd love to see a few more of those next year. And chemistry remains the least covered of the core science subjects.  A few years ago I speculated on why this was the case . Back then (2017) this site had 22 books under 'chemistry' as opposed to 97 maths, 126 biology and 182 physics. Admittedly, there is always a danger of editorial bias, but I have certainly never avoided chemistry titles if publishers sent them my way. They simply don't arrive. Publishers I spoke to at the time suggested that chemistry was, perhaps not 'sexy' enough. Meanwhile we have seen some top...

Image by Nick Morrison from Unsplash As both a science writer and editor of www.popularscience.co.uk I get quite a few emails asking about writing science books, wondering if self-publishing is a good idea and asking if it's possible to get a review on the popularscience.co.uk site. Writing a book - typically in the region of 80,000 to 100,000 words - is not a trivial task, but it can be very fulfilling. There are a handful of essential questions to ask yourself before going any further, which add up to 'Why am I the right person to write about this topic?' and 'Why would other people want to read it?'  As far as being the right person goes, you don't have to be a working scientist to write a good popular science book, but you do need to have a strong understanding of the subject and to be able to present it in a way that others will find accessible. It should be a subject that excites you - if it doesn't, it's very unlikely that you will be able to exci...

Thank you to the over 1300 of you who currently subscribe to  popularscience.co.uk . I'm trying out a new way to subscribe (still for free) to all my online writing - I'd be grateful if you could give it a try and see if it works for you.  Just go to  authory.com/BrianClegg  and sign up with your email address. You will then get notifications when I publish new pieces online, not only in this blog but also in a range of other places from  Nature  and  Chemistry World  to my  personal blog Now Appearing . You can also take a look at anything I've published previously there. If you like the new approach (which provides a digest if there's more than one post, rather than separate emails for each article) it's best to unsubscribe from my mailing list at  popularscience.co.uk if you are already signed up to avoid duplication. But if you'd prefer to stick with your current subscription, that's fine - it won't be going away. Feature b...

Those of you who come to this site looking only for reviews of popular science books might be feeling there has been too much science fiction of late. I try to provide a balance of the two, but I confess that during the pandemic, I have found fiction more something I've looked forward to reading than non-fiction - so please forgive me! While not a review, this feature is inspired by a book - a non-fiction title - but science fiction is, admittedly, its topic. Over the years, the number of science fiction books and short stories I've read runs into four figures - and I've even had a few SF stories published. I've also read quite widely on the history of science fiction, but a book title I spotted the other day totally threw me. It's the first time I've ever rushed to buy a book without having the slightest clue what it was about. The title was The Reading Protocols of Science Fiction: discourses on reading SF . To make it more intriguing, the book's blurb, a ...

More like a similar number of bacteria One of my favourite things about being a science writer is getting emails from readers. Some say nice things about a book, others ask questions about science or writing which I do my best to respond to helpfully. However, every now and then there is an email that's pointing out an error in one of my books - and I have to admit that those are distinctly depressing. Let's be clear, I can say with reasonable confidence that every book I've ever written has a mistake or two in it. This isn't because I know what all the mistakes are - if I did, I would have corrected them before publication - but rather because pretty well every book I've ever read, fiction or non-fiction, has mistakes in it. It's just a fact of life. A book typically has between 60,000 and 120,000 words in it - the chances of an error slipping through is pretty high. Many of these are typos. Spelling mistakes, words missing, something that should be spotted in ...

Louise Carey is author of the science fiction thriller Inscape . she has co-written two novels for Gollancz, The City of Silk and Steel and The House of War and Witness, as well as a graphic novel, Confessions of a Blabbermouth for DC Comics. She co-runs the Dungeons and Dragons blog Tabletop Tales. Louise lives in Welwyn Garden City with her partner. When I started writing Inscape , I was studying Psychology at Oxford Brookes University. Some of the theories I was learning about—especially theories about child development and the bond between parent and child—made their way into the book in various shapes and forms. Attachment Theory and Bowlby’s Maternal Deprivation Hypothesis Attachment theory is an area of psychology that focuses on infant development, and what young children need in order to grow up into emotionally and psychologically healthy adults. Attachment theory holds that children develop best when they have a secure, stable attachment to their caregiver/s. An attachment i...

For some time we've been aware that not everyone loves Amazon, and so decided to experiment with offering a link to a site offering an independent bookshop as well. Back in November 2019 we started offering links to the UK bookseller Foyles. No one bought a book from them, so mid-2020 we switched to Hive. This also did not result in much interest, so we've now moved onto a third and better publicised option, Bookshop.org , which is getting some positive response. As a result, for more recent reviews you will see a link to Bookshop.org (just click the link under the icon). This will take you to a list of a handful of books reviewed around the same time, which will include the title you are interested in. You are still very welcome to use Amazon if you prefer, of course.

The Popular Science site specialises in reviews of popular science and science fiction books, but with the gift-buying season upon us, we wanted a chance to let you know about a book by our editor, Brian Clegg, that makes an idea present for the kind of person who reads the books reviewed here.  The ultimate trial of knowledge and cunning, Conundrum features 200 cryptic puzzles and ciphers. The solutions link throughout the book – so you need to solve them all to get to the final round. With a focus on ciphers and codebreaking, Conundrum contains twenty sections, each built around a specific subject from music to literature, physics to politics. To take on Conundrum you need good general knowledge and the ability to think laterally. But if you need help, there are plenty of hints to point you in the right direction.  Whether you attempt to crack it alone or work in a team, Conundrum will challenge you to the extreme. Can you take on Conundrum and win? There’s ...

For many years we have provided links to Amazon to make it easy to buy copies of the books reviewed here. We receive a small affiliate fee for this, with no extra cost for the buyer. We are continuing to do this, but we have moved UK sales to one of Britain's best-known bookshops, Foyles. There are a number of reasons for this, but from the buyer's viewpoint, you will be supporting a UK business and there's free shipping on all books. You can find out more about Foyles on their website .

The German academic publisher Springer has for some time been using automated editing software (with mixed results) - but recently has brought out a whole book written by a piece of AI software called Beta Writer. The book, Lithium-Ion Batteries: a machine generated summary of current research , can be downloaded free of charge as a PDF. But is this a serious  challenge for science writers? It's certainly interesting. If I'm honest, this is hardly a book at all - it's more the output of an automated abstract generator pulled together in book form, where frankly this information would be far better just as a web page. However, there's no doubt that there is some interesting work going on here, particularly in the introduction and conclusion sections of the 'book'. The whole thing starts with a (human written) preface explaining the technology - by far the most readable part of the text.  We then get four 'chapters' of machine-generated content, whi...

Personally, I think stars are underrated. Not the ones in the sky – if it weren’t for one of them, the Sun, the Earth wouldn’t exist (and even if there was an Earth, there would be no life on it because it would be far too cold). For that matter, if it weren’t for stars in general there would be no atoms other than hydrogen, helium and a touch of lithium – making the whole concept of a planet (or a person) inconceivable. So the stars of the cosmos are seriously rated. Nor am I talking about the stars of stage and screen. Because, let’s face it, most of them are seriously overrated. I refer instead to stars in reviews. A good while ago I wrote to the journal  Nature , complaining about some of the book reviews they carried. I pointed out that the (long) reviews said nothing about whether the book was any good – they merely gave the reviewer a chance to do his or her potted version of the theme of the book. They said what the book was about, but not if it was any good or wheth...

Apparent perpetual motion machine on the cover of a 1920 issue of Popular Science magazine (image from Wikipedia ) Physicists dismiss perpetual motion machines and 'free energy' devices out of hand. Some consider this a lack of open-mindedness, but in reality it's just that the physicists understand the second law of thermodynamics. The second law is often stated as 'in a closed system, heat moves from a hot to a cold body' (there's another definition using entropy, we'll come onto in a moment). That's the basis at some point in the chain of every way we source energy, from a clean, green wind turbine to a dirty diesel. And, for that matter, it applies to the way your body uses energy too. Such is the respect for the second law that one of the UK's top astrophysicists of the first half of the twentieth century, Arthur Eddington, wrote: If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equati...