At first sight I'm probably not the best person to review this book as I have never watched Breaking Bad (apart from repeatedly seeing bits of episode 2 when I played it more than 50 times while battery testing laptops) and have no desire to do so. However, I am very interested in how fiction portrays science and the claim this book makes is that Breaking Bad was uniquely impressive in the amount of real science it contained. The format of the book is more than a little odd. One of the contributors, Donna Nelson, is a chemistry professor who responded to a call for a science consultant to the show. Each chapter starts with a section of reminiscence from Nelson about the joys and tribulations of the role. That's fine and often gives interesting insights, but for some reason it's printed in tiny text, significantly smaller than the rest of the book. I think the idea is to make it look like an email, but it just makes it hard to read. I remember chatting to a physicist...

When a popular science writer takes on the science of Star Trek, the result is inevitably going to be held up against Lawrence Krauss's The Physics of Star Trek - an early popular science book and one of the first I ever read. I'm glad to say that Mark Lasbury manages to avoid the danger of rehashing Krauss's book. Where the earlier title took key Star Trek technologies and explored whether  they could be made possible with actual physics, Lasbury gives us the Star Trek explanations and some thoughts on their feasibility, but concentrates primarily on situations where real life technology can provide some of the features of the Star Trek equivalent. In doing this, unlike Krauss, he omits aspects such as the warp drive, instant communication and time travel where the technology doesn't have a real-world parallel. It quickly becomes clear that Lasbury really knows his stuff on what happens in different Star Trek episodes and the assorted 'techn...

When reading this book I was reminded of the H. G.  Wells horror/SF novel, The Island of Dr Moreau,  which features heavily in the TV science fiction show Orphan Black (far more impressive than most of the shows mentioned in the book). This is because, like the human/animals in Wells' story, Hollyweird Science is neither one thing nor another. It's as if two entirely different books have been merged, and the result is quite disconcerting. The first few chapters are a reasonably intense, media studies type exploration of the nature of science fiction films (and, somewhat randomly, TV). There's no attempt to put science and technology in science fiction alongside real world equivalents as in Ten Billion Tomorrows - this is much more about the nature of SF film making, the need in the end for story to overrule science quibbles and the role of science advisors. (As an aside I think movie science advisors are almost always a waste of time and money as, howe...

As someone who writes a lot about quantum physics, where systems can be in more than one state at a time, I want to give this book a superposition of star ratings: it's a beautiful book, excellently researched and painstakingly detailed, which gets it a solid four stars, but the nature of the contents makes it more like a mini-encyclopedia, rather than something that reads well from end to end, hence the three stars. The book has a lot of promise to hit the spot. If, like me, you are interested in both science and crime writing, a study of the poisons used in Agatha Christie's books seems a natural fascinator. Kathryn Harkup takes us through a whole range, from familiar favourites (as it were) like arsenic and strychnine to more unusual possibilities like nicotine, phosphorous and ricin. Each poison has its own section, where we learn how Christie used it, how the poison works, what's an antidote (if anything), real life examples of using the poison and then return to C...

There have been a number of books on the science of the long running family science fiction TV show Doctor Who, notably the unimaginatively titled The Science of Doctor Who , and it might be imagined that The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who is more of the same. But we are firmly told that  The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who isn't that kind of book in the introduction. The biggest difficulty following this is to say just what this book  is , and who it is aimed at. The format consists of alternating short stories featuring the Doctor (in all of his incarnations) and chapters that cover 'the science bit', sometimes vaguely related to the story, but often not. So, for instance, the first story features an intriguing, but frankly hard to scientifically justify, monster that is gaseous. However, the following science bit makes no attempt to explain how this could be possible. It also doesn't correct the error in the first story where the Doctor says...

Strictly speaking the term UFO refers to any ‘unidentified flying object’, but in the minds of almost everyone it means just one thing: an advanced spacecraft visiting the Earth from another planet. Despite the absence of unambiguous, objective evidence this notion has become a mainstay of popular culture, tabloid journalism and the internet. How did this extraordinary situation come about? That’s not a question for an astrobiologist or aerospace engineer, but for a social scientist like David Clarke – a senior lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, with a Ph.D. in cultural tradition and folklore. In this well reasoned and carefully researched book, Dr Clarke focuses on what he calls the UFO syndrome: ‘the entire human phenomenon of seeing UFOs, believing in them and communicating ideas about what they might be’. The phrase ‘I want to believe’ was popularised by the TV show The X-Files in the 1990s, and it encapsulates the very heart of the UFO phenomenon: people wa...

Updated for paperback edition Through the years we have had a whole slew of books dedicated to discovering the science or maths used in a fiction book, movie or TV show – think, for instance of  The Physics of Star Trek  or  The Science of Middle Earth .  And at first sight, Simon Singh’s new book (which he tells me has been brewing in his mind for a good few years) is more of the same, but in fact it takes rather a different approach. Where the other books look for the science etc. inherent in the world created in the storyline, Singh’s new title picks out the mathematics explicitly incorporated by the writers into the Simpsons (and in its companion show, Futurama, to which the final few chapters are dedicated). I confess I haven’t much time for Futurama, but despite having always enjoyed the Simpsons, I hadn’t spotted the unusually high level of mathematical content, the result of several of the writers having maths, science or computer science backgrounds...

For me,  2001  was the first (and still one of the only) science fiction films that comes close to being accurate in its science. And without doubt, the movie-stealing character (certainly the most emotionally ranging character) was the computer, HAL. This is an old book, dating back to the late 1990s, but still fascinating in the way that it uses the different aspects of HAL to look at how the real technologies have developed in comparison with the way they were envisaged in the 1960s film. It’s in the format of a series of articles by different authors. Amongst my favourites was the AI overview by Marvin Minsky, who was on set part of the time (and nearly killed by a flying spanner) and the discussion of HAL’s game of chess, reflecting on the way he plays chess like a person, rather than in the manner of a chess-playing computer like IBM’s Deep Blue. Inevitably it’s a bit dated in places – but surprisingly little, considering how computer technology has moved on ...

Subtitled ‘physics and maths in fantasy and science fiction’, this is one for the hardcore science fan. In fact the best reader may well be a scientist who likes a bit of science fiction and wants to play around with how likely all the science in the stories really is. Strangely, the most readable part is the first section, where Charles Adler deals with the goings on of fantasy, rather than science fiction. I think this is because we don’t really expect the science to work in fantasy, and we can enjoy laughing at distortion of the conservation of energy, or the second law of thermodynamics, and thinking about the physics of dragons. But when the book starts to pull apart basics like space travel, it feels like something of a betrayal. Once we got onto science fiction, Adler shows us that practically every major theme of space-based science fiction from the basics of space travel being possible to constructing vast space stations and ring worlds and the like is all extremely unlik...

We aren’t in the habit of putting quirky music videos on this site, but this description of string theory and quantum gravity to the strains of Bohemian Rhapsody is so well done – it must have taken weeks – and so brilliant – we felt it was worth including. It’s entirely possible that string theory won’t survive the attempts to develop a theory of quantum gravity, but even if it doesn’t, it will be worth its existence for this video alone.

I’m a fan of Sherlock Holmes in every form from the original stories to the modern day TV version  Sherlock , so it was with some enthusiasm that I came to  The Scientific Sherlock Holmes . What I hoped for was something along the lines of one of the better ‘the science of’ type books – but in reality this is something quite different. As the understated cover suggests, this feels like more of an academic book that a popular title. This comes through in a number of ways. James O’Brien is too interested in cataloguing every instance of something, rather than giving an interesting narrative. He also uses an infuriating approach, apparently common in academic writing about the Holmes stories, of using a four letter code to represent each story. So after a first reference to, say,  The Hound of the Baskervilles , it is thereafter designated as HOUN. Similarly,  A Study in Scarlet  is STUD and so on. Unless you are a devotee, this makes the text rather impene...

Science fiction is the flirty, flighty, naughty cousin of popular science. Although purists will tell you the only decent SF is in books, there have been some exceptions on TV, and two shows stand out like beacons. One is Star Trek, for the way it has become an integral part of modern culture. The other is Doctor Who. This British programme has driven its way ahead of the rest both because of its longevity – in 2006 it was about to start a new season 43 years after the first episode, which was broadcast the day after Kennedy’s assassination – and because of its refreshing originality. This hasn’t always been evident in its long run, but was clearly there when it captured audiences back in 1963 as something new and different, and has been evident again in its latest incarnation, started in 2005, where it took on not only modern production values, but has also inherited the slick wit of  Buffy the Vampire Slayer  – as is obvious from the delightful quotes in Paul Parson’s ...