Apparently it comes as a surprise to many that medicine was not particularly scientific until the end of the twentieth century (to be honest, it's no surprise to me - we had a GP who used homeopathy in the 90s). Instead it was based on anecdotal guidance - the kind of thing that appeared to work. Evidence-based medicine has since improved the field, trying where possible to base decisions on evidence, ideally based on randomised controlled trials. The first part of Helen Pearson's book covers this well - though I think it's by far the least interesting part of what we discover. Instead what's truly fascinating is the rest of it, looking at a wide range of other fields where evidence was rarely properly used and that are only now starting to dip a toe in the water. These include social policy, policing, conservation, business and education. The main part of the book gives us examples of how bad these areas have been in terms of basing decisions on what's always been ...

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This is surely Caleb Scharf's most personal work - and certainly quite different from some of his earlier output, such as his excellent Gravity's Engines.   In part this is a technological exploration of space travel, not unlike Final Frontier , but it is also about the future of humanity, more reminiscent of The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire , but with a more positive outlook. Overall, it was fascinating reading. Let's take those two aspects separately. As always, Scharf gives us plenty of meat in an approachable fashion, whether it's delving into the rocket equation, considering the pros and considerable limitations of Mars as a destination for humans (the chapter is pointedly called The Red Siren), or taking on the possibilities of asteroids. And even in the semi-technical aspect of the first Moon landing we get some more personal detail - I hadn't realised until reading this that Scharf was English by birth (being bathed in a sink at a key moment). Althou...

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...

I found this book hard to rate as it's a really good idea, but one where I'm not sure who the natural audience is. The authors (an astrophysicist and an astronomer) are responding in part to an artist friend who said that she didn't know what scientists do, and also to the zeitgeist where a reasonable proportion of the population don't trust science and scientists, particularly on subjects such as global warming and vaccines. Alan Lightman and Martin Rees, in an introduction that almost makes it sound as if they live together Morecambe and Wise style, rightly emphasise the dangers of the population having a negative view of science when we live in a society that both has been hugely enhanced by science and where our very existence is now so tied into technology that is based on science. They give science the label 'disciplined wonder', an approach echoing Richard Feynman's famous contradiction of Keats' suggestion that Newton's 'destroyed all the...

One of the easiest ways to make science accessible is to tie it to everyday life - and this is something Michael Banks does well in his exploration of physical goings on from breakfast to bedtime.  Each of twelve chapters focuses on an aspect of our non-working/sleeping time. We begin with the morning coffee, take on the physics of breakfast food and so on, travelling through the day to end up in front of the TV show or film. I was impressed by just how much Banks could get from the simple (or, rather, anything but simple) extraction of a cup of coffee from ground coffee beans. One of the very first topics covered here was a fascinating surprise - how static electricity developed during the grinding process (a phenomenon not unlike the lightning produced by volcanoes) causes grounds to clump, and how baristas use a drop of water to overcome this. There were plenty of such revelations, whether it was the optics of a fishbowl that can make fish disappear or the scientific complexitie...

This was a difficult review to write. The idea is a good one - sixteen innovative scientists whose ideas were first doubted but came to be mainstream thinking. Donald Kirsch does a good job of making their work accessible. The focus is heavily biased towards medical science (reflecting the author's background) with the likes McClintock, Semmelweis, Rous, Prusiner, Cushman and Ondetti, Sehgal and Warren and Marshall. If most of these names are unfamiliar, I'd also suggest that most aren't as transformative as the likes of Galileo, Planck, and Wegener, but they still provide interesting stories. I'm not sure I would have included Rachel Carson, who despite being a scientist isn't well known for visionary science (and whose advocacy resulted in the abandonment of DDT, even in controlled fashion that could have saved many lives). But my big concern about the book is the result of two others names already mentioned above. These are the ones I know a significant amount ab...

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...

This wasn't the book I expected it to be from the subtitle 'exploring classic Sci-Fi stories through the lens of modern science'. For me, to be 'classic' something has to be both relatively old and high quality. Without the quality part, 'dated' might be a better word - and that's primarily what we get here. I had the same problem with the recent book Classic Science Fiction Stories , so I can't really blame Stephen Webb, but I had in mind a kind of 'science of' book for Golden Age SF. Instead we get end of the nineteenth/early twentieth century proto-SF, often with very little science to be 'science of' with. The problem with this approach, for me, is illustrated by the best story (as a pure story) in the collection, G. K. Chesterton's The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown,  which first appeared in 1903. This is part of Chesterton's entertaining 'Club of Queer Trades' series of stories, using a Sherlock Holmes-ish ...

For a particular audience, this is an interesting book. Specifically, popular science readers who want to get their hands a little dirty - to dig in a little more to what is happening in the science than a high level overview. Antonino del Popolo (an Italian physics professor) addresses a range of 'big questions', though apart from one about life it would have been more accurate to call this The Big Questions of Physics . The topics covered include big picture items, such as 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' and 'Are there other universes?' and more focused questions such as 'What is a black hole?' and 'Can we travel through time?' These queries (strictly, one section 'What the World Looks Like Seen From a Ray of Light' isn't a question - and is really more 'What's the special theory of relativity about?') get about 20 pages each - enough to give an effective overview and sometimes to dig in with some alacrity....

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...