At first glance a book about imaging technology sounds like one of those promotional titles that technology companies make about themselves that no one will ever read - but with a light, approachable touch, Daniel Sodickson takes us from the imaging mechanisms of nature, through the early technology to the present and the potential future - featuring both benefits and risks - with aplomb. It wouldn't have struck me to include eyes in a history of imaging, but Sodickson successfully does so, going back even further to the first biological cells developing. As he asks in his opening '"OK, wait just a second!" I hear you cry. "What does imaging have to do with the first cells?"' - this chatty approach pulls the reader in very effectively. (You'll have to read the book to get the answer.) We then get on to the first augmentation of nature, using lenses to modify the flow of light.  As always there's the potential for a non-historian to distort histor...

Embarrassingly, I read and reviewed this book back when it came out in 2022, but forgot I had when I wanted to read more about the simulation hypothesis and virtual reality as it's a topic that comes up when considering multiverses  - but originally I focused more on it as a piece on VR, where this time I was more focused on the simulation hypothesis. I've written a new review, but in case you want to see if my opinion has changed (it hasn't much) I've included the old review below. David Chalmers uses the idea that we might be living in a computer simulation, rather than a real universe, to explore a number of philosophical queries. Initially I was really enjoying his approach, bringing in pop cultural references (the inevitable Matrix but various others too), though the cartoon illustrations are somewhat painful. However, after a while we seemed to lose sight of the deeper philosophical applications to provide a heavy going manifesto for our digital existence. Chalme...

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...

We've all got a favourite bit of technology that has been 'coming soon' for decades. Nicole Kobie takes us through the historical journey to the present for a range of such technologies from flying cars to robots (more detail in a moment). In each case these technologies seemed achievable many decades earlier, but the reality has been that making the dream real proved much harder than most envisaged (especially the inventors and investors). Kobie takes us through driverless cars, AI, robots, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), cyborgs and brain interfaces, flying cars, Hyperloops and smart cities. Many of these topics are much discussed, but it's really helpful seeing them all pulled together to get an overview of the way that we repeatedly get drawn into failed investments of time and money into a science fictional future without thinking enough about the practicalities of making it happen. My least favourite section was smart cities - I think most people (once Hype...

I very much enjoyed Lucy Jane Santos' previous title Half Lives , which covered 'the unlikely history of radium'. Her enthusiasm for the topic shone through (in true radium fashion). As well as the straight history of the discovery and deployment of radium, we got lots on its use in commercial products - initially in quack medicine, but later in every type of product imaginable, with Boots even selling radiated soda syphon cartridges. In this follow-up Santos takes on what might seem a quite similar topic: the history of our discovery and use of uranium. There is obviously a degree of overlap between the topics, particularly in the quack medicine usage - particularly delightful were some of the more wacky US attempts to monetise atomic appeal by, for instance, setting up treatment barns where you could be immersed in allegedly (though often not actually) radioactive soil in a process that felt more like going to Lourdes than a true medical treatment. But in practice both be...

Ever since A Brief History of Time there have been regular outbursts of brief histories in popular science writing (even though A Brief History of Infinity should perhaps have been the end of it). The latest such offering features stuff. It's a neat topic for the illustrated Dorling Kindersley style with a total of 50 articles, typically four to six pages long on subjects ranging from electric taxis to hot water bottles via the likes of roller skates, PCs and scissors. Strictly it's about objects rather than stuff (which I would think of as concerning material science) - but I suspect calling them objects would be too close to the history of the world in 100 objects. Most of the items here are everyday, with a mix of high and low tech. This includes an odd mix of the very general (plastic and tinned food, for instance) and the strangely specific such as the Rover safety bicycle, the AXBT microphone and the Kenwood A700 (no, me neither). With the bewildering array of authors (...

Sadly deceased in 2023, Karen Bakker combined geographical, environmental and technology interests, a crossover that she presented in her last book, Gaia’s Web . The idea here is to make use of the abilities of modern information technology, from machine learning to specialist sensors and satellite data to monitor both the state of the environment and those who are misusing it. As such there is some fascinating material here. Bakker  shows the power of digital eco-surveillance to protect the environment from everything from overfishing to forest fires, but emphasises rightly the accompanying danger that the same technologies can be used for surveillance by states. But Bakker sometimes undermines her own powerful arguments by taking a simplistic academic’s ‘capitalism bad’ approach that fails to recognise that without capitalism we wouldn’t have all this wonderful technology. There’s hypocrisy here.  This leads to the (highly confusing) sentence: ‘Researchers have raised concer...

Nuclear fusion, as this book reminds us, has been on the cards as a potential safe, clean, green energy source for around 60 years - but still isn't a practical solution. Even so, we're a lot closer now to making it a reality, so it's helpful to have a technical backgrounder on what has happened so far and how far we have to go. This book sits on the borderline between popular science and textbook lite. So, for example, although it has no maths in it, in the first section on plasma physics we are plunged into fairly sophisticated detail. Page 5, for example, features a graph showing the 'Comparison of the strong nuclear force between two nucleons and the electrostatic repulsion (Coulomb's inverse square law) between two protons'. It's hard to see how this diagram betters a sentence explaining it, adding visual complexity where none is required. A little later in the same section, we get what's described as a 'deep dive into plasma models', starti...

Nuclear fusion should, in principle, be the perfect addition to renewables as we move away from greenhouse gas generating energy sources. Yet, more than 60 years after it was first suggested, we still don't have a single working nuclear fusion power station. (If, as the subtitle suggests, this has been a race, it has been a walking backwards three-legged race.) Sharon Ann Holgate provides a compact introduction to what nuclear fusion is, the various steps along the road that have been made so far, and why it has taken so long. Starting with fusion as the power source of the stars, we discover the difficulty of keeping the tricky, twisty ultra hot material in the fusion reactor under control when using magnetic confinement, look at the two main technical approaches (and variants), the sheer scale of the engineering challenge, what is underway with ITER and more, along with the potential for the future. Although this is an area beset with disappointments, one where we always seems to...

Surely there must be publishers kicking themselves that they didn’t republish Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of the future from 33 years earlier when 2019 came around. Of course, plenty of SF authors (and futurologists) have tried to imagine the future, but arguably Clarke was doubly qualified. Firstly, he had a big success in predicting geostationary satellites before they existed. And secondly his  2001, A Space Odyssey proved entertainingly far from the real world of the first year of the new millennium. Would an attempt at futurology rather than SF have the clarity of his satellite idea or the overreach of 2001 ? As this book was long out of print, I ended up buying a used copy - from the cover photo I assumed it was a paperback, but in reality it's a large format hardback with colour photos throughout. In a sense this remains more science fiction than anything else. As Clarke himself admits in his introduction, any attempt at futurology can only ever be an 'inquiry into the lim...