Previously best know for his quirky everyday science book  How to Dunk a Doughnut , Len Fisher brings together a disparate but linked set of seven areas where the challenge of beliefs has occurred in science. But this isn’t a “science challenged unfounded human beliefs” like Carl Sagan’s  The Demon Haunted World . Instead it’s a case of science’s own beliefs being challenged. The title of the book refers to the experiment in the early years of the 20th century where a doctor attempted to weigh human beings during death to see if he could see a weight loss corresponding to the departing soul (he did). But Fisher points out this man was no crank – he undertook a carefully performed experiment. It’s just that, like other observations that put scientific beliefs under stress (cold fusion, for instance) there have to be plenty of results, undertaken by different people and labs, before any sensible assessment can be made. In this case, the experiment has never been repeated...

By all our rule of thumb, judge-a-book-by-its-cover responses, this ought not to have been a good read. It’s too fat, appearing to display classic Brysonitis, and it’s a medical biography, and medicine is rather on the fringe when it comes to popular science (to be honest, early medicine was on the fringe of science full stop). And all those body parts can offend a delicate stomach. But just as Mutants was a delightful surprise, so this life of quite remarkable man dispels all the prejudices and wins through as a cracker of a book. Of course John Hunter himself, the subject of the book, is part of the reason it’s so good. This 18th century doctor and scientists was extreme enough to be the inspiration behind both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hide and Dr Doolittle. He was a frenetic dissector, not above obtaining material by dodgy means. But he wasn’t just a meddling quack – Hunter made a huge study of animal life too and made some impressive pre-Darwinian speculation on the origin of specie...

Click, whir, when I was a lad, in films and TV computers were always portrayed as banks of flashing lights and big rotating magnetic tape units. When I later saw computer rooms I understood the mag tapes (though they were much less in the foreground), but where were those flashing lights? This book delightfully takes us back to the days when computers were collections of valves (tubes), and it wasn’t unheard of to stick half ping-pong balls over the protruding heads of the valves to produce those entertaining banks of flashing lights. What’s amazing about the story is the strands of parallel development that never get mentioned. Most people, if asked, would assume the electronic computer started in the USA after the Second World war (probably made by IBM). In fact it’s arguable whether the US or the UK were first (depending on how you define an electronic computer), and Russia and Australia were both close behind. There are fascinating descriptions of ENIAC, the original US gi...

This is a wonderful book. My immediate reaction to my enthusiasm is concern. How sad is that, to be excited by a dictionary? But to be fair, this reviewer is a science writer, so in getting excited about the ODSQ I’m merely praising a superb tool of the trade. The fact remains, this is one of the few dictionaries I’ve felt a strong urge to sit down and read through from cover to cover. Of course, dictionaries of quotations are much more fun than the boring old definition variety, but somehow there’s something very special about a collection of science quotes. The sources are the expected ones, a mix of scientists and less obvious people talking about science (John Donne’s in there, for instance). The purist might argue that the chunks given to the ancient Greeks and the like are stretching a point, because they were talking about philosophy rather than science – but that’s a silly and unnecessary distinction. The book falls into the usual Oxford quotations format, arranged by au...

Science isn’t just about fundamentals like quantum theory or how DNA works – there’s plenty of science in the oddities of everyday life, and that’s what Jay Ingram sets out to put in front of us in this enjoyable book. How does honey flow, why does toast land butter side down, and why do trees put a lot of effort into turning leaves red, only to have them fall off soon after? These and many other questions are Ingram’s delightful areas of investigation. Some examples are rather better than others. Chapters about the way we “echo locate”, sensing the presence of objects in the dark by reflected sound like a poor cousin of a bat, and on what Ingram calls the “tourist illusion”, where a journey to a new place in a car always seems to take longer than the journey home, proved surprise hits. There’s also something particularly fascinating about the whole business of six degrees of separation – the idea that pretty well everyone on the planet is, on average, just a chain of six contac...

Some have argued that our tendency to think of a single universe demonstrates, like the medieval idea of the Earth being at the centre of the universe, an over-inflated sense of our own importance. Others suggest that, given we really know nothing, Occam’s Razor should keep the single universe theory central until any better evidence comes along. In this fat book, Michio Kaku explores the possibilities that, in universe terms, we are not alone – and ventures into some of the wildest cosmological speculation that billions of years from now, faced with the death of “our” universe, intelligent life may travel to another one. He starts very well with the WMAP satellite results of 2003, giving a remarkably accurate age for the universe, and with Alan Guth, the inventor of inflation theory, pointing out that if inflation is true, it’s very likely that the universe keeps blowing new bubbles, so different parts of the universe, well out of view, may be suddenly inflating into whole new ...

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...