This is a handsome little hardback (or a good value ebook) - significantly smaller than I thought it would be from the cover photo. In the grand scheme of things I am not a fan of picture books for grown-ups, which this kind of is. But, if you are going to do something like this, it is one of the better ones I've seen. This is an introduction to quantum physics for beginners (I suppose that's what 'cracking it' is about). It's not something to go for if you've already absorbed the contents of a more substantial quantum title, such as the author's own The Quantum Age , but if the whole business currently leaves you mystified, this would be an excellent way to get started. It fills in a lot of the background, going right back to ancient Greek ideas on what matter is and taking you in around 300 pages to quantum gravity and M-theory. The whole thing is divided into short sections, often just two pages, which tend to have a lot of illustration. Some of thi...

There's a twilight border of science fiction, sometimes known as lab lit. It features science/scientists, but the science is more current than speculative - and one aspect of The Naturalist falls into this category. Its protagonist, Professor Theo Cray, is a computational biologist, who gets sucked into a murder enquiry and uses the tools of his trade to crack the case. You could argue that Dan Brown's Robert Langdon books fit in the same category, but unfortunately Brown gets so much of the science so horribly wrong that it would be an insult to link it with science fiction. That apart, there is one other good reason for mentioning Brown - his writing isn't exactly high quality, but he knows how to produce a book you can't put down, and Andrew Mayne uses similar page turning techniques (including very short chapters) to keep the reader wanting more. Thankfully, though, he does this with a better writing style than Brown. With a clever twist at the beginning we...

Tyson's new book I am delighted that one of our reviewers has been able to give a five star review to Neil deGrasse Tyson's latest book . The astrophysicist has taken over Carl Sagan's old post as the number one science populariser in the US, but his written output in the past has been patchy, to say the least. There have been at least two significant problems. One is dubious history of science. For example, in the cases of both Galileo and Bruno he has passed on undiluted the comic book version of history where Galileo is persecuted for mentioned heliocentricity (rather than his disastrous political handling of the  pope) and mutters 'Eppur si muove!' at his trial, and Bruno is burned at the stake for his advanced scientific ideas (both misrepresentations). Some argue that it getting history of science accurate doesn't matter if we get the right message about science across - but if we are prepared to distort historical data, why should anyone take scient...

Two thirds of the excellent science performance group Festival of the Spoken Nerd  have produced an extremely entertaining 'find out more about science by messing around with stuff' book. (The remaining member of the group, Matt Parker, has his own book .) This is a fun, rambling, joy of a title - Helen Arney and Steve Mould are present as distinct characters, writing individual segments (they even have their own, differently labelled footnotes) which take us through everyday experiences of science in our lives, from the mystery of noodles turning turmeric red, to optical illusions, to a whole host of experiments you can do yourself, including their infamous (and risky) rotating wastebasket vortex inferno. Although not specifically a book for teenagers, it will certainly go down well with that market as well as adults who like science as entertainment. If it had been too heavily 'Gee, whiz, wow, BANG!' - always a danger with a science show approach to writing book...

Having recently been somewhat underwhelmed by a science/art crossover book , I was expecting to be equally unimpressed by  The Seduction of Curves , which promises to cover 'the lines of beauty that connect mathematics, art and the nude' - but the result is, in truth, stunning (in a good way). Using both examples from art and impressive original photography by Helena Weightman, Allan McRobie introduces us to the significant shapes that form the 'alphabet' of catastrophe theory. This sounds like something dealing with sudden and drastic failures of systems - and certainly it can be involved in them. But at its heart, it's about mathematical functions where a small change in a parameter makes a sudden and distinctive shift in the output - from example when a curve suddenly takes a totally different direction (as it often does on the contours of the human body). What makes this very different from the other title I mentioned is that this is not just a coffee...

When I reviewed James Binney’s Astrophysics: A Very Short Introduction  earlier this year, I observed that the very word ‘astrophysics’ in a book’s title is liable to deter many readers from buying it. As a former astrophysicist myself, I’ve never really understood why it’s considered such a scary word, but that’s the way it is. So I was pleasantly surprised to learn, from Wikipedia , that this new book by Neil deGrasse Tyson ‘topped The New York Times non-fiction bestseller list for four weeks in the middle of 2017’. Like James Binney, Tyson is a professional astrophysicist with a string of research papers to his name – but he’s also one of America’s top science popularisers, and that’s the hat he’s wearing in this book. While Binney addresses an already-physics-literate audience, Tyson sets his sights on a much wider readership. It’s actually very brave – and honest – of him to give physics such prominent billing; the book could easily have been given a more reader-friendly t...

Between the ages of 14 and 26 (circa 1972 to 1984, if you must know) I read a lot of science fiction. Being quite naïve in those days, I assumed that the shared vision of the near-future common to many of those stories was the way things really would turn out. Now, several decades later, I find myself living in that future – and, for the most part, it’s not what I expected. I’m endlessly fascinated by the way SF got a few things right and a lot of things wrong – and so, it seems, is Stephen Webb. That’s what this book is all about; in his own words, its aim is ‘to compare the default future of old-time science fiction with how things are turning out’. Webb’s background is similar to my own (reading between the lines, he must have got his PhD from Manchester University a year or two after I got mine from the same place), and like me he discovered SF when its centre-of-gravity was still firmly in the written domain. In consequence, the science-fictional focus of his book is very much...