Popular Science Children's Review - Frightening Light + Sounds Dreadful

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Review - Frightening Light + Sounds Dreadful - Nick Arnold

The new edition of the combined Frightening Light and Sounds Dreadful is a good value way to get these titles on essential aspects of science. Neither are our favourite Horrible Science books, but both are the usual readable fun. We've upped the rating by one star from the individual reviews, in part because it's good value, and in part because there have been some small improvements. Here's the detail on Frightening Light:

The good news is there's lots of good stuff about light, and unlike many other "popular science" books for younger readers, it does have quite a lot about the people involved in discovering what's going on in light - the sort of context that can be very helpful.

There was rather too much on the eye, which in the end isn't light, just a light receptor. There were also one or two oddities - for instance a photon is described as zig-zagging along, which is misleading, and the explanation of a mirror would seem to imply it should invert top/bottom as well as left/right.

Mostly, though the complaint is about missed opportunities. The book mentions fluorescent lights, but not what fluorescence is (did you know, for instance, that sheep fluoresce?). There's quite a lot of fun stuff about colours, but it doesn't point out the fascinating fact that until Newton's day orange wasn't a colour, just the name of a fruit. And there's a section at the end on amazing future light possibilities that misses out almost every major possibility from slow light to holographic storage and superluminal experiments. Similarly, the book misses the opportunity, when describing Maxwell's first colour photo, of pointing out that he made a booboo - his colour picture didn't actually register red, but it looked like it did because it registered infra-red instead.

Speaking of Maxwell, the biggest omission is a good description of what light actually is. It's described as "just a blip of energy" - nowhere do you get a feel for the wonderful, by-its-own-bootstraps dance of magnetism producing electricity producing magnetism... nor is QED (Quantum Electrodynamics) properly touched upon. It might seem that Feynman's description of the interaction of light and matter is too complex, but other books in the series manage equally complex topics like general relativity - and QED is one of the most fundamental pieces of science around.

So what the book does, it mostly does quite well, as always ably assisted by the excellent cartoons... but it could have done much more.

And on Sounds Dreadful:

Sound is something we take for granted, and Nick Arnold's lively introduction in the Horrible Science series is a great way to open our eyes (or rather ears) to what's going on.

Like many books aimed at younger readers, it's not 100% popular science, as it is too bitty, lacking the narrative flow of true popular science - but this is expected and not too much of a problem. There's also a little less about people than perhaps is desirable - there are few biographical diversions like Helen Keller and Alexander Graham Bell, but not quite enough putting the science into the context of the people who discovered it.

To offset that, though, there's plenty of putting the science into the everyday context of the reader, which is great, and the copious cartoon illustrations work very well. A couple of quibbles - not only is the explanation of some technical words up front a bit off putting, some of the definitions really don't help a lot. Take harmonics for instance: "All sounds are made up of harmonics. As long as the harmonics are working on the same frequency, things sound OK and keep your music teacher happy. If not, you're left with a very unpleasant noise. Harmonics are the basis of most music." Yes, but what ARE harmonics? It just doesn't say - they could be simply notes, or even small purple bacteria for all this definition tells you.

I also felt that some of the basics don't really come across very well. How sound waves propagate and how sound causes pressure in the ear, for instance. Oh, and though it's fine to have interactive bits, it's really irritating having the answers printed upside down - I don't think this realistically reflects how most people read books.

Don't let these negatives put you off, though. It's fun, informative and comes at sound in a number of different ways (hearing, music, natural world etc.) to open up the subject without being off putting. And that can't be bad.

Only in paperback

Reviewed by Jo Reed

* Our age range recommendation is an estimated guide, but individual readers outside the range could still enjoy the book!

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