Time travel is an absolutely fascinating aspect of physics, if only because few people realize that it’s not fantasy – not only does time travel fail to break the laws of physics, we even have to deal with (very small scale) time travel on the part of GPS satellites to make them work properly. Paul Nahin doesn’t point this out, quite possibly because this is a surprisingly old book – although reissued in 2011 with a new preface, it dates back to 1997. GPS might not have been part of everyday life back then, but most of the time travel science has survived pretty well unchanged. There are a few time-based omissions. No mention of superluminal tunnelling experiments or laser-based frame dragging, for instance. But the biggest omission in the science due to the age of the book has nothing much to do with time travel – it’s the casual dismissal of the cosmological constant, showing a predating of the discovery of dark energy. But luckily this is more a side-comment than of any great...

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing …  series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as  … for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. It is easy for the reader to get a little confused about which book to go for here as you can also choose  Introducing Evolutionary Psychology  and  Introducing Darwin , the latter of which has significant overlaps with the current book. Of the two, I’d say this was probably the better choice for getting the basics of evolution – although both feature Darwin’s life and work, this covers the science better and makes better use of the illustrated ‘Introducing’ format. The text flows nicely and the bo...

A long time ago, the archaeological world was turned on its head by  Stonehenge Decoded , a book by an astronomer that suggested Stonehenge was a complex astronomical calculator. The archaeologists didn’t seem too pleased at the intervention of an outsider, but they did eventually take on some of the ideas from the book (it seems to be accepted that other of the ideas were taking astronomical alignments too far). The same thing seems to have happened with some aspects of Robert Bauval’s theories, excellently laid out in the highly readable  The Egypt Code . In that book, Bauval put forward astronomical explanations for the positions and alignments of many Egyptian structures (including the great pyramids), and even for special shafts in the structures that allowed for certain sightings to be taken. Once again, the initial reaction was dismissal, but since then the Egyptologists seem to have grudgingly accepted some of the astronomical data, while still leaving some of ...

This book presents the reader with a rather nice concept slightly strangled by a format. The idea is to look at factors that can add or subtract to your brainpower. This could make for an interesting book if presented the right way, perhaps looking at the pros and cons (and there certainly are some cons in this business) of intelligence enhancement – but the format requires it to be in the format of 100 snippets each of which is given + or – points as a score in the way it influences your intelligence. This makes for a rather bumpy ride of a read. The book doesn’t really flow, and there is little connection between the individual mini-articles. It can’t really decide if it’s a self-help book (eat more fish to be more brainy) or an analysis of the status quo which you can’t do anything about (if you are born this way, you will be more or less intelligent). To be fair to the author, Stephen Pincock does do his best to take a good, analytical approach to the various factors, as t...

Sometimes great books on a particular subject are like busses – you can wait for ages, then two come along together. In this case it’s Curt Stager’s  Deep Future  and Tim Flannery’s  Here on Earth . After reading  Deep Future  I was feeling surprisingly positive about global warming. Not in a ‘no need to bother’ sense. But Stager points out that in the long term, the global warming we’ve had so far will have some beneficial effects, and if we can cut back on emissions, we should be able to cope with what it will throw at us. Now Tim Flannery has given me a reality check by pointing out that it still could be fairly horrendous. Don’t get the idea, though, that this is just a ‘woe, woe, and thrice woe!’ climate change misery memoir. Flannery starts with an absolutely brilliant introduction to evolution, the development of Earth and life on Earth, and the development of human civilization. Taken on its own this would be a superb (if rather short) five star ...

This is a most remarkable book. For one thing, it’s a book about global warming that in some senses leaves you feeling optimistic – which surely is pretty well unique in the history of publishing. I’m feeling better about climate change after reading this than I have for years. It’s not that Curt Stager denies the impact of global warming, nor does he doubt that man-made global warming is happening, but instead he takes the big picture, something no one else has really done. By looking back at what happened in the past, both in terms of warming and cooling, and the impact it had on life at the time, he points out that predictions of doom are probably not realistic. After all, human beings survived the last ice age, a climate change event on a bigger scale than anything man made global warming can hit us with – there is no reason to think that we are going to be wiped out by the upcoming change. Of course, this doesn’t mean there won’t be an impact, which Stager points out in t...

Whereas you might think of science as the opposite of art or literature – perhaps just as a collection of matter-of-fact observations and laws, lacking in emotion – there is just as much expression, imagination and beauty in our physical theories as there is in any poem or painting, physicist Giovanni Vignale argues here. It is fundamental limits to our understanding that allow us to be imaginative, the book conveys. Reality is, at a deep level, inaccessible and unknowable, so we can only hope to describe it indirectly. We are forced to think creatively, to come up with stories and analogies, and to understand through metaphor and abstraction: scientific theories, the author says, “lie at the interface between the fictional and the real world.” This may seem most obvious in the quantum mechanical world, where observations and experimental results don’t make intuitive sense, so we have to think outside the box when coming up with theories to make sense of them. But it is the sa...