Subtitled ‘the story of noise’ this is a book about noise as nuisance, noise as literal discord and just what noise is – through the ages. When I started the book I was thrilled – there really hasn’t been a good book about sound that I’ve come across, and inevitably this book puts in place a lot of the science of sound, as well as what turns it into noise. The early part is truly fascinating. It’s very interesting in terms of noise as nuisance just how far the concept goes back, and also a delight to see the various early legal and scientific attempts to quantify it and control it. Overall, though, the plodding historical approach, almost decade by decade, does become horribly repetitive as the book continues and this really makes what would otherwise have been a truly excellent book a bit of a chore to read. My other sadness is that there isn’t more about discordant music. As far as I have spotted there are only two references to this, first in the classical era and then 20th...

Gravity is a subject that sneaks around the senses. It’s all pervasive. It gets everywhere in your life, but on the whole you ignore it, except when it intrudes in the form of a fall. It is, of course, much more than the thing that sticks you to the surface of the planet, as it tends to be presented in children’s non-fiction books. It’s why the Earth stays in orbit. It’s why the Earth and the Sun formed in the first place. And all this from a force that is billions upon billions of times weaker than electromagnetism. In the same way, gravity tends to be sidelined in popular science books. It creeps into books about relativity, or basic physics. But I’m not aware that it has been treated head on until now. To be honest, when presented with it, I was worried that there wouldn’t be enough material to fill a book, but Brian Clegg has defied that possibility by giving us both a historical journey through humanity’s gradual understanding that gravity existed at all (I love that...

I really enjoyed Kathleen Taylor’s previous book  Brainwashing , commenting that it was that rarest of species, a book that was both academic and readable, so I picked up her new title,  The Brain Supremacy , with some enthusiasm. That enthusiasm proved to be partially justified. The good news is that there is a whole lot in here we ought to know about our current best knowledge of the brain and the various fascinating bits of technology that are used to study it. If you read any human science/brain books these days you can expect to come across fMRI, but not only is Taylor one of the first to explain to me what the point of the ‘f’ is, she also takes in PET, MEG and more. Unfortunately, though, this isn’t a book I could enthuse over as much as  Brainwashing , for a couple of reasons. Firstly it’s far too long. At 368 pages it doesn’t sound enormous, but it really did seem to go on for ever. This isn’t helped by rather too much description of bits of the brain...

The Ig Nobel Prize has become something of an institution in the science world. Year after year, respected scientists turn up to have their leg pulled about the topic of an academic paper they have had published (or occasionally a patent application). The man behind the Ig Nobels, Marc Abrahams, writes a column on ‘improbable research’ and this book is a collection of these articles, though often enhanced for the book form. The tag line of the Ig Nobels is that it is for research that makes you laugh… then makes you think. This is true, although you often think ‘I don’t know how they ever managed to get funding for that research,’ or ‘How could they have the front to present that as science?’ A classic example of the latter is a piece where the incidence of wearing high heeled shoes is correlated with the rise of schizophrenia. It’s hard to start on what’s wrong with this paper – particularly the Science 101 error of confusing correlation with causality. It really is excruciatin...

Nanotechnology, like genetically modified food or nuclear power, often produces a knee-jerk reaction. It’s somehow ‘not natural’ and so is considered scary and dangerous. This is primarily a reaction to words, the same way that it easy for advertisers to push emotional buttons with ‘natural’ as good and ‘artificial’ as bad. This is a silly distinction. There is a lot in nature that is very dangerous indeed – and much that is artificial protects us from that. If you doubt this, try removing everything artificial when you are flying in a plane over shark infested waters. For that matter, many of the most virulent poisons like ricin and botulinus toxin are natural. Water crammed with bacteria and faecal matter is natural. Clean, safe drinking water from a tap is artificial. Yet we can’t help reacting like puppets when the advertisers use those magic words. What we’re not talking about – nano machines Some concerns about nanotechnology are down to what is at best futurology and a...

Benoit Mandelbrot was the poster-boy of chaos and fractals, in a sense literally as the graphic version of his Mandelbrot set occupied many an arty poster in its time. There’s no doubt Mandelbrot himself did lots of marvellous work from his analysis of cotton production to his ‘how far is at around the coastline of the UK’ and, yes, his remarkable set. But the trouble with the arty associations of that image means he tends to get dragged into a lot of stuff that is peripheral and verges on pseudo-science. The antennae were raised by the subtitle of this book: ‘Fractals, chaos and the materiality of thinking.’ Is ‘materiality’ even a word? It also doesn’t help that this book is a collection of articles. There is no narrative thrust – it’s not going anywhere. Allegedly the book shows how ‘images actually further knowledge.’ There is an element of truth in that idea, though it sounds rather like wishful thinking on the part of arty people who want to be scientific. But the appr...

It is fashionable to play down the importance of the ancient Greeks, noting that other civilizations – China, for instance – we also cradles of scientific thought. But that misses the point. Modern science has a clear ancestry: ancient Greeks, Arab world, Europe, Worldwide. There is no doubt that amazing work was done elsewhere, and to some extent (e.g. with Indian mathematics) has been a side feed to this process, but most of the early development of science that occurred in parallel with the ancient Greeks proved to be evolutionary dead ends. The fact is, tracing back where our modern science came from, the ancient Greeks were the first in that family tree to shift from what they called the work of theologi (theologians) to physikoi (physicists) – from a worldview where things happened because the gods willed it, to one of natural explanations for the world around us. And so we really ought to be better acquainted with what went on back then. Like most popular science writer...