Every once in a while you come across a book that really makes you think, because it presents a theory that’s a surprise, yet the more you read the text, the more it seems to make sense.  The Chilling Stars  is just such an book. In it, science journalist Calder and scientist Svensmark put forward a striking case for the argument that cosmic rays – high speed particles from outside the solar system – have a huge impact on our global temperature. At first sight this seems crazy, and Svensmark and his colleagues had to put up with a huge amount of resistance when they initially came up with their theory, but with time, many observations have raised the likeliness of this theory to something like that of dark matter – one that we aren’t certain of, but has a lot in its favour. The idea is that these high energy particles (or more precisely the secondary particles that are generated when the cosmic rays impact the atmosphere) act as triggers for cloud formation. When the...

I have to be honest, I started reading this book in a negative frame of mind. It’s yet another book of collections of answers to puzzling, and often slightly strange, science questions, a type of book that is highly enjoyable, so why the negativity? In part it’s the same feeling I had many moons ago when the original  Star Wars  movie first came out – I didn’t want to like it because it was so hyped. This book was splashed all over the bookshops at Christmas 2006 as a great gift, and that immediately put up the defence antennae. Was this because it was dumbed down, or just over-marketed? No – luckily I was wrong. It’s a collection from the  Last Word  section of  New Scientist  magazine, and works wonderfully well. The questions are interesting, the answers a mix of the erudite and amusing, and only occasionally stray into dull pedantry. The format is a question posed by a reader followed by one or more (sometimes two or three) answers from other re...

Chaos theory is one of those subjects that pretty well everyone has a vague idea about, but few understand what it really does. Most of us will think “butterfly flaps wings and causes storm the other side of the world” or “Jeff Goldblum as crazy mathematician in Jurassic Park watching water ripples caused by T. Rex stomping”… but don’t really have a good picture of what chaos is all about. It’s great to see this book because it really fills in the final segment of a four part jigsaw of the understanding of chaos theory for beginners (as far as I’m concerned). If you are a chaos virgin and want to find out more, I’d recommend the following path to enlightenment. First read the weird and wonderful  Introducing Chaos . You won’t get any great insights from this book, but it will lay a little groundwork and acts as a brilliant teaser for reading further. Then read  Chaos  by James Gleick. This is a biography of the opening up of chaos theory with a brilliant portrayal...

There’s something deeply satisfying about the title of Marcus Chown’s book – it really catches the attention. This isn’t one of those collections of little scientific snippets – you know the sort of thing, the type of book that asks if penguins’ feet freeze – though it could be mistaken for one thanks to the look of the cover. Although it is a collection of different scientific theories, it is both a much deeper and more mind-boggling book than the “questions answered” type. It is subtitled “dispatches from the frontline of science”, and that frontline is the interface between scientific ideas and the deepest questions of the universe. For Douglas Adams fans, this is real Deep Thought territory. Chown takes off with the relatively familiar but still mind boggling concept that our universe could be but a single bubble amid a myriad variant universes, so many in fact that there’s one out there where Elvis lives, and another identical to this, except you aren’t reading this review ...

  I have something of an embarrassing confession to make. When I titled my book on quantum entanglement  The God Effect , not only had I not read Leon Lederman and Dick Teresi’s book, I had never even heard of it. I had, however, seen the hypothetical particle the Higgs boson referred to as ‘the god particle’ in the press, and it was this term that inspired my title. The hook that  The God Particle  hangs on is this yet-to-be-confirmed particle that may be responsible for the mass of the other, more familiar particles, and it does give some information about it at the end, but this book is much, much more. Actually almost too much more. It is densely packed with information – you come out of the end feeling like you’ve been on an undergraduate course without the equations, though to be fair, it’s a very good undergraduate course, one of those where you think you are really lucky because the lecturer is witty and fun to listen to, even when you don’t quite fo...

To be honest, the thought of a science book entirely in rhyme filled me with dread – it seemed like a cross breed between William McGonagall and John Gribbin, a terrifying thought. In practice the reality is much better.  The Cosmic Verses  is a charming read in which James Muirden manages to pack a surprisingly broad view of the history of our ideas on the universe into verse form. The style is a loose rhyming structure, though occasionally he has a little section in a different form, such as limerick. There are also short side notes where a point needs a little more explanation – where these are more than a couple of words, they too rhyme. The book is largely chronological, only having major hiccups by ignoring the timing of the Judeo-Christian inputs to ideas on creation and slotting them in to later interpretations, and in a decidedly unbalanced portrayal of religious impact on science that conveniently forgets, for example, who was responsible for the final destru...

It’s not often someone manages to write a book on the topic of maths and makes it light, easy going and fun – yet Edward Burger and Michael Starbird have done just that. In a relatively slim volume, the authors manage to cover a whole host of topics, without ever becoming terrifying. It’s not just the probability and chaos theory suggested by the title – though of course they make an appearance – but much more. Often, without resorting to formulae, there are simple, clear examples – for example, when dealing with chaos there is a demonstration of how easily number sequences can deviate that uses Excel as the generator of the chaotic sequence. Again, series are illustrated using a wonderful physical example involving stacking playing cards that seems absolutely impossible if seen through the eyes of common sense – as often is the case with good popular maths, common sense, which is hopeless at maths, takes a battering. There’s a good section on topology too, a subject that is rarel...