Category Archives: Rating ***

The Serpent’s Promise – Steve Jones ***

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There are broadly two ways to write a popular science book. One is, like my book Gravity, to pick a specific aspect of science and really dig into it. The other is to use a theme that allows Screenshot_16_05_2013_17_07you to explore a whole range of different scientific topics. I confess I’ve done this as well with the likes of Inflight Science and The Universe Inside You and the approach can be very effective. But there has to be a reason for choosing the framework – and I find Steve Jones’ hook in this particular book – the Bible – a little odd.

The bumf for the book says ‘The Bible was the first scientific textbook of all; and it got some things right (and plenty more wrong).’ I’m really not sure about that premise – I don’t think anyone sensibly would regard the Bible as a scientific textbook. The whole reason, for instance, that Genesis gets away with having two scientifically incompatible versions of the creation story is that it isn’t intended to be a literal, scientific explanation, but rather a contextual, spiritual description. (Which is why those who take the Bible as literal truth have an uphill struggle.) This is a bit like thinking that people thought the Earth was flat in the Middle Ages, because the likes of the Mappa Mundi look like a flat Earth – again, this was a symbolic representation, never intended as a projection of the real world.

In his introduction, Jones takes a slightly dubious path, saying he isn’t attacking religious belief per se, and then setting out to do just that. I’ve nothing against scientists attacking religious beliefs, there is plenty of reason to do so – but they shouldn’t try to weasel out of what they are doing. However, in the book proper he moves away from this (until the last chapter) and gets down to some more interesting stuff.

Rather strangely, and perhaps reflecting Jones’ background in biology, he starts not with the creation, but with humans and the endless lists of descent that are found in the Bible, using this to explore the real genetic, DNA-based possibilities, including the ‘real’ Adam and Eve, separated unfortunately by about 100,000 years, so not exactly on the best of terms. These lists in the Bible are rather dull, and unfortunately the endless seeming discussions of different lines of descent in Jones’ modern-day telling also gets a little tedious.

We then jump back to the creation and some fairly straightforward big bang description – adequate, though rather skimpy compared with the depth he went to on inheritance and DNA. It’s a shame, given Jones makes a big thing of one of the distinctions between religion and science is that religion has a ‘what’s in the book is true’ stance, where science goes on data and method that he doesn’t point out that the big bang is not ‘truth’ but the best accepted current theory, but we’ve all slipped into that kind of easy science writing – it gets a bit boring to keep pointing out the limitations of our knowledge, but it would probably have been worth doing it at the start, just to emphasize this is real science, not the unquestionable word of the science oracle.

Although there is a touch of physics there, even that single chapter soon jumps to a much longer discourse on where life came from. For me there was far too much biology here, fine for a single topic book, but over-emphasised for a book based on such a broad concept. In writing terms, it’s a mixed book. Some of the content has Jones’ trademark storytelling but a lot of it is plonking facts with little flow. Some parts read well, others (often where there’s a lot of mention of DNA) get a touch boring.

In the final chapter Jones comes back to religion itself and does a fair demolishing job, though there is one glaring non-sequitur. He is commenting on wars driven by religion and concludes with a sort of rosy picture of a peaceful harmonious world without religious divides. Yet one of his principle lines seems to run counter to this. He comments ‘For civil wars, like those between nations, there was a striking fit between how long they lasted and how ethnically (and often religiously) divided the nation had become.’ He concludes that Pascal was right to ascribe evil to a religious conviction. Yet look what he has done. Take away the religion and the ethnicity is still there. Is there any reason to suppose that wouldn’t still be an issue, especially bearing in mind that ‘and often’? That’s not science, Dr Jones.

Overall, then, this is the classic curates egg of a book, not really doing what it sets out to do and rambling (I like a good diversion, but this jumps all over) too much for good storytelling, but with some undoubted good bits. It’s not a bad book, but not great either.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Network Geeks – Brian E. Carpenter ***

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There is a series of TV adverts in the UK that have managed to embed their tagline into common usage. The ads are for a type of varnish, and that tagline is ‘It does what it says Screenshot_13_05_2013_10_05on the tin.’ There is a real problem when a book doesn’t do what it says on the tin – you get cognitive dissonance, expecting one thing and discovering another. That’s what happened when I opened up Network Geeks.

The subtitle promises ‘how they built the internet.’ Now this is a topic I’m fascinated by. I really enjoyed the book Where Wizards Stay Up Late, which details the story of the origins of the internet, but that’s quite old now, and I assumed this would give a modern day take from the viewpoint of an internet dominated society. What you get inside is totally different, and that’s a shock.

In trendy music terms, this book is a mashup. It really has three separate themes, only linked by the author, Brian Carpenter. One is an autobiography – so we get a fair amount of Carpenter’s family history, going back a good few generations. It’s not badly written, but probably of limited interest to anyone outside Carpenter’s family. Secondly – and this is the best bit – we have a considerable account of Carpenter’s work at CERN. He worked there twice and if you are into the developed of distributed computing (as I am) there is some really interesting material here, as CERN was both groundbreaking and yet isolated from the mainstream. Apart from anything else in this technical memoir part of the book I had distinct tugs of nostalgia as I had a great time working on DEC equipment, which regularly rears its head, while in the OR department of British Airways.

So far, so good – but we are yet to encounter anything that really has to do with the supposed topic of the book. This comes into the third part of the mashup, featured in the introductory section (which is part of the reason it is such a shock when the book suddenly goes into autobiographical mode) and towards the end. But this isn’t really about ‘how the built the Internet’ at all. It is about ‘how their committees made endless bureaucratic decisions about the architecture and protocols of the internet and how the architecture and protocols developed.’ To be honest, that is a rather less exciting, and certainly a lot more specialist field.

The problem is, unless you are really into the nitty gritty of how the committees that control the internet work, this probably isn’t for you. Carpenter falls into a few writing traps in naming far too many people we aren’t really interested in, using endless acronyms we don’t really care about and giving much too much detail on the minutiae to the extent that we lose the big picture. Here’s a not atypical snippet to get a feel: ‘Internet standards, originally endorsed by DARPA, came from the IETF by 1991, and certainly not from the ITU or the ISO, the twin homes of CLNP. On the other hand, CLNP was officially defined and had already been picked up for the next version of DECnet, a significant factor in the minicomputer market then served by the Internet.’

It’s not that this is a bad book – it just doesn’t do what it says on the tin, and I can only recommend it for the rather narrow audience for whom this kind of thing is meat and drink.

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Review by Brian Clegg

The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible – Lance Fortnow ***

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There is good and bad news early on in this book about the P versus NP problem that haunts computing. The good news is that on the description I expected this to be a dull, heavy Screenshot_04_05_2013_11_02going book, and it’s not at all. Lance Fortnow makes what could be a fairly impenetrable and technical maths/computing issue light and accessible.

The bad news is that frustratingly he doesn’t actually tell you what P and NP mean for a long time, just gives rather sideways definitions of the problem along the lines of ‘P refers to the problems we can solve quickly using computers. NP refers to the problems to which we would like to find the best solution’, and also that he makes a couple of major errors early on, which make it difficult to be one hundred percent confident about the rest of the book.

The errors come in a section where he imagines a future where P=NP has been proved. This would mean you could write an algorithm to very efficiently match things and select from data. Fortnow suggests that our lives would be transformed. This is slightly cringe-making as fictional future histories often are, but the real problem is that he tells us that the algorithm would make it possible to do two things that I think just aren’t true.

First he says that from DNA you would be able to identify what a person looks like and their personality. Unfortunately, these are both strongly influenced by epigenetic/environmental issues. Anyone who knows adult identical twins (with the same basic DNA) will know that they can look quite different and certainly have very different personalities. And they will usually have been brought up in the same environment. Fortnow is forgetting one of the oldest essentials of computing – it doesn’t matter how good your algorithm is, GIGO – garbage in; garbage out.

The other, arguably worse error is that he says that it will be possible to have accurate weather forecasts going forward X days. This is so horribly wrong. He should have read my book Dice World. The reason you can’t predict the weather at all beyond about 10 days is nothing to do with the quality of the model/algorithm, it is because the system is chaotic. Firstly we just don’t know, and never can know, the initial conditions to enough decimal places not to deviate from the real world. When Lorenz first discovered chaos it was because he entered the starting values in his model to 4 decimal places rather than the 6 to which the model actually worked. It soon deviated from the previous run. We can’t measure things accurately enough. The other problem is that the weather system is so complex – hence the slightly misleading title of Lorenz’s famous paper Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? – that we can’t possible take into account enough inputs to ever have so good a model as to go forwards that far. Sorry, Lance, it ain’t going to happen.

For the rest, the first half or so of the book goes along pretty well, gradually opening up the nature of P and NP, the problems that are of interest and the ‘hardest’ NP complete problems. I found the main example, used throughout, a hypothetical world called Frenemy where everyone is either a friend or enemy of everyone else confusing and not particularly useful, but Fortnow gets plenty of good stuff in. After that it’s as if he rather runs out of material and it gets a bit repetitious or has rather tangential chapters.

Overall, despite the flaws, a much better and more readable book than I thought it was going to be – but probably best for maths/computing buffs rather than the general popular science audience.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Mariposa Road – Robert Michael Pyle ***

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If there is one quotation all physicists love more than any other it is Rutherford’s magnificent put down ‘All science is either physics or stamp collecting.’ And frankly, mariposawhen it comes to science, Mariposa Road sits firmly in the stamp collecting class. To be fair, Rutherford’s remark was not quite as negative as it seems – ‘stamp collecting’ in the sense of collecting and collating information as is typical of natural history is an essential part of science – but to make for something to get your teeth into it helps to have the other bits too.

The trouble, then with this book, which according to the subtitle is ‘the first butterfly big year’ (if that is as meaningless to you as it is to me, I think the idea is that it is the account of year spent trying to spot as many different butterflies as possible within the United States), is that unless you are deeply interested in butterflies (and I am afraid I only have a passing interest), the excitement palls after about the fifth species. Don’t get me wrong. There is really interesting science in butterflies – just read the excellent book Metamorphosis – but not in cataloguing butterflies someone else has seen.

You might wonder why I bothered at all. It’s because I love the right kind of personal travel narrative. Pretty well any of Bill Bryson’s travel books, for instance (all better than his popular science book, for all its sales), or even something more quirky like Stuart Maconie’s Pies and Prejudice. But sadly not the approach taken by Robert Pyle. It’s not bad, but it is simply too gentle, too much a personal journal than an entertaining narrative. I just wasn’t that interested, I’m afraid.

Not one for me then. If you love butterflies, you may find it makes all the difference… but otherwise a less than exciting read.

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Review by Brian Clegg

An Introduction to the Physics of Sport – Vassilios McInnes Spathopoulos ***

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This short title may have been self published, but it has been well edited and comes across as a professional piece of writing. The only issue I physsporthave with it is whether or not it manages to cross the divide from textbook to popular science.

The topic is an interesting one – looking a how physics comes into play (see what I did there – ‘into play’) in sport. Personally I have zero interest in sport itself – I would rather watch paint dry than be a spectator at a sporting event or watch it on TV – yet there still is some interesting stuff to be had here.

It is, as some sporting commentator once nearly said, a book of three halves. It opens very strongly, with some excellent material on the way people accelerate, comparing a runner with a car or a plane (people do better for a very short while). Similarly, as I had no idea about the Magnus force that enables a spinning ball to curve (although I had used it often enough in table tennis, and inevitably heard of it a la ‘Bend it like Beckham’), it was fascinating to find out more about this.

In the centre section of the book, which has a lot of detail about rotating objects and flying objects, frankly my attention wained. It was a bit snooze inducing. But then things picked up again a lot at the end with another truly fascinating section on how environmental conditions can influence performance. I had no idea, for example, that wind speed is very tightly restricted in running races, but in, say, discus where it has potentially much more effect, it isn’t taken into consideration. This was both of interest and strongly confirmed my view that all competitive sport is totally arbitrary and meaningless.

As far as the way the book is written, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. The author clearly intends to make the subject approachable, but can’t help but fall into classic academic writing mode, often flinging out a collection of facts rather than presenting us with a narrative that makes the topic approachable.

Although some of the equations are useful, there are too many – and where they are used we also have the other typical error of the academic of using clumsy notation because it is the convention. The very first example makes this plain. We are told that speed is given by the equation V=S/t which to the general reader is baffling. It would have been much better to have said s=d/t so the letters correspond properly to the words ‘speed’, ‘distance’ and ‘time’ (and were all in the same case). I know there are reasons why in the physics big picture the particular letters in the book are used, but as popular science readers we don’t give a damn about that. Make it readable, not conventional!

Overall then, if you are interested in the physics that lies behind sport, this  short book will give you plenty of information – and if the topic interests you it is definitely worth getting hold of a copy – but I’d see it working best as an introductory primer for someone going into sports science rather than a true popular science book.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Henri Poincaré – Jeremy Gray ***

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My first sight of this book filled me with a certain unease. It would be polite to call it chunky – in truth, at 542 pages plus appendices, it is obese. This initial feeling was not poincarehelped by a bizarre statement the author makes in the introduction. ‘This is a scientific biography of Henri Poincaré,’ he says. ‘It is confined entirely to his public life: his contributions to mathematics, to many branches of physics, technology, to philosophy and to public life. It presents him as a public figure in his intellectual and social world; it leaves the private man alone apart from a deliberately brief account of his childhood and education.’

No, no, no! This is a bizarre distortion of what a scientific biography should be. I am comfortable with keeping coverage of his childhood and education brief, as they are usually dull and not particularly illuminating. There are clear counter-examples, for example, with Newton’s formative years, which are absolutely crucial in understanding the scientist, but for many, these aspects are fairly irrelevant. But the point of a scientific biography, as opposed to a book about a person’s science pure and simple is that it puts the science into context – and that context must include the private life. Can you imagine a biography of Richard Feynman without his private life coming into it? This is a crazy viewpoint.

Even so I persevered, as I have always had Poincaré in my mind as one of those mathematicians beloved by other mathematicians but of little interest to the real world, so I wanted to find out more about the man (as much as Jeremy Gray would allow me) and his impact on science and technology. It was hard work. There’s an awful lot (some of it truly awful) about the subtleties of philosophy that gets in the way of much of the more interesting content. This is supposed to be a scientific biography, remember, not a philosophical one.

When there is a section that is more of interest (and the way the book is organized does not make it easy to find your way around), frankly it can verge on the unreadable. This is the worst kind of dry academic writing, combined with an approach to the science that is strongly mathematical in flavour and the author lacks any skill in actually explaining the science for anyone who doesn’t know the maths already.

There is always a danger in reading an academic tone and complaining that it’s not popular science because it was never intended to be. And this book is published by Princeton University Press. But I was told it was suitable for a general readership, and this is usually the case with scientific biographies. But I am afraid this is really only suitable for a very narrow audience with a purely academic interest in pure and applied mathematics and the philosophy behind it. Disappointing.

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Review by Brian Clegg

The Universe Within – Neil Shubin ***

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Having written a book called The Universe Inside You, which uses your body as a way of exploring wider science, I was rather intrigued to come across a book called The shubinUniverse Within, which ‘reveals the deep connections between the cosmos and the human body.’

As it happens, any worries about plagiarism were unfounded as this is a very different type of book. Neil Shubin doesn’t really say anything about our bodies, merely observes that the atoms that make them up came from outside and then spends the rest of the book considering the more recent source of those atoms, the Earth (and hence geology/palaeontology) and its impact on different living forms, and in the longer term origins when the atoms were forged in stars.

Along the way, the book lurches from topic to topic – sometimes in what feels a very random fashion, though sometimes making a neat excursion to find out more that is very enjoyable. It’s an episodic book, with some sections far less appealing than others. The bits I really disliked were the parts describing Shubin’s own fossil hunting expeditions, which seemed decidedly self-indulgent. By contrast, he can wax enjoyably lyrical when describing some aspect of the universe.

It’s not a bad book by any means, and many will enjoy it, but I found the way it repeatedly jumps back and forth chronologically with no obvious structure mildly irritating and confusing. Bits of it are superb, but we are in real curate’s egg territory.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Neils Bohr and the Quantum Atom – Helge Kragh ***

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This is a bit of specialist one. If you don’t have a physics degree, don’t bother to read any further. Neils Bohr and the Quantum Atom is not intended to be popular science (if you want a more approachable book, try Abraham Pais’s Niels Bohr’s Times), quantbohrbut I was very interested to read it as it’s a subject that is close to my heart.

Bohr himself tends to be underrated – he tended to come across rather badly when public speaking, and some of his quasi-philosophical pronouncements on the nature of quantum physics were painfully obscure. But we must not forget the huge contribution he made to kick-starting quantum theory, starting with his key development of the quantum model of the atom.

Although the book does plunge into equations on a number of occasions it is primarily a historical narrative of the development of Bohr’s model of the atom, including a fair amount of biography, from his early thoughts at Manchester in 1912 to its full fruition and subsequent transformation by the new quantum mechanics in the 1920s. I would be lying if I said that reading it wasn’t quite hard work – but if you really want to get a feel for the detailed process of the development of one of the key foundations of twentieth century physics, the book is unparalleled. There is a lot of detail – but this is about real science, not the sanitised version.

Overall, if you are the right reader (and I was), very satisfying.

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Review by Brian Clegg

The Visioneers – W. Patrick McCray ***

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It may sound like a job at a Walt Disney theme park (where designers are called imagineers), but ‘visioneer’ is Patrick McCray’s portmanteau word combining ‘visionary’ visioneerand ‘engineer’ – not a hand-waving futurologist, but a scientist or engineer who is coming up with blue sky ideas that are, nonetheless, based on the projection of solid science and engineering.

The two key figures here are physicist Gerard O’Neill, who devised space colonies, and engineer Eric Drexler who was at the forefront of the nanotechnology movement, both dating back to the heady days of the 1970s. Their ideas are put in the contrasting context of limits – an influential group, the Club of Rome had recently published dire warnings of the limited resources available to human beings, and arguably both these threads were about ways to escape the limits, either by reaching outside the Earth, or into the microcosm.

The opening of the book promised a lot – it looked as if it was going to be really exciting and engaging. But overall McCray doesn’t really deliver. The problem is that this is essentially a social history rather than a piece of popular science writing. Historian McCray makes it clear early on he isn’t going to be dealing much with the actual science and technology (which is perhaps just as well when one the few mentions he has of actual science is a distinct blooper in saying ‘Unlike time travel, designing a space colony violated no obvious physical laws’ – if the author would care to take a look at How to Build a Time Machine, he’d discover time travel violates no physical laws either). And that is a big shame.

While what we read provides interesting context (if spending far too long on, for instance, Omni magazine) there really is very little about the actual ideas and the science behind them – just glancing references that intrigue but never clarify. I appreciate this was what McCray was setting out to do, but it is frustrating as the book would have been so much better if had been significantly beefed up on the science side.

If you are looking for a social history of these two big ideas that still seem as far away as they did in the 1970s (and a book with the longest index I’ve ever seen), go for it. But don’t expect to have any detailed grasp of what the ideas actually were.

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Review by Brian Clegg

The Quantum Divide – Christopher C. Gerry & Kimberley M. Bruno ***

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Broadly speaking, science books are either popular science or textbooks. The popular science book is aimed at a general audience with little or no science background required and fills in the basics in a far more interesting way than science was every taught at school. The textbook does the business of educating with the theories, while not worrying too much about the historical context, with readability always coming a distant second. It assumes the reader has science and maths education to the required level. But The Quantum Divide, perhaps in keeping with the concept of quantum superposition, manages to be a bit of both at the same time.

What we have here is an exploration of quantum physics and the divide between the world of quantum particles and the macro universe. It is pitched in a way that I have simply never seen before. For a very narrow band of readers this book is absolutely superb. If you have been fascinated by a book on a quantum subject, like my own The God Effect on quantum entanglement, but want to dig into more depth about what is actually going on, and what was really undertaken in some of the experiments you usually have to either read a textbook or go to an academic paper. But both of these are pretty impenetrable and too maths-heavy for the general reader. Gerry and Bruno give that extra meat without requiring heavy duty mathematical support. There are equations in here, but they are used as shorthand, not to do maths. The result is quite extraordinary – it really expands on anything you can get from a popular science book without being too heavy to cope with, and for that, the authors need a huge pat on the back.

To be honest, though, I don’t think most popular science readers actually want this extra detail. On the other hand, university level physics students will find it too basic and not mathematical enough (though it could provide a good introduction before a course). This is a great book for, say, science journalists and those with a similar level of semi-professional interest – but probably not for many others.

The other slight problem is that the authors can occasionally be quite prissy and negative about guess who… science writers. Their audience in all probability. Take this quote:

Quantum theory does not predict that an object can be in two or more places at once. The false notion to the contrary often appears in the popular press, but is due to a naïve interpretation of quantum mechanics.

The problem with this attitude is that it entirely misses the point. All descriptive models of something as counter-intuitive as quantum theory are inevitably approximations – what they are really doing here is not liking someone else’s language, even though it gets the basic point across better than their version. I don’t think this is any more a problem than when physicists speak of the big bang or dark matter as if it they are facts, rather than our current best accepted theories.

There’s a similar cringe-worthy section where the authors attack the suggestion that light is a particle in the true sense, which again seems nit-picking. Their argument seems to make little sense and given Richard Feynman was happy to say ‘I want to emphasize that light does come in this form – particles’ I find their position hard to justify. So there are a couple of places where a particular slant of interpretation gets in the way of what otherwise is excellent explanation – but I think that can be forgiven.

Overall, then, a worthy and fascinating book but one that I suspect will only ever have a very limited audience.

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Review by Brian Clegg