Popular Science Children's Review - Science Magic in the Living Room

Home Authors Books Subjects Events Software Features Links Newsletter Gifts Blog Write Review What's New

Review - Science Magic in the Living Room - Richard Robinson

Everyone knows - but not every book recognizes - that the best way to get children interested in something is hands-on activity, which makes the Science Magic series a great idea, as the whole content is built around doing things. Even better, those activities are presented by Richard Robinson as magic tricks, but tricks that are science powered, with a good deal of learning built in along the way.

As is often the case with the these books, the connection with the room in question is rather tenuous, but who cares - it's still a fun collection of tricks that teach about science in a painless way. In fact one of the main themes here is gravity - but, hey, it works in your living room, so why not.

Gravity rather neatly segues in to centres of gravity and balancing, an ideal subject for the clever little tricks that Robinson uses as a way to explain science to his audience. We go on to find out about inertia, friction etc - so this is very much painless mechanics with lots of fun (surely it would have been better, given it's mechanics, to site this book in the garage?)

The second theme is mathematical tricks, the link being Newton and his invention of calculus (more precisely, Leibnitz invented calculus, but Robinson overlooks the opportunity for a great little story there). Finally (yes it's Newton again) we've got some trickery around light and colour. There's a very doubtful explanation of why Newton put 7 colours in the rainbow - because 6 is "diabolical" but 7 was "holy", so was better. In fact it was because he expected it to be like the 7 notes that make up a musical octave - nothing to do with holiness.

One other little moan is that the myth that Galileo dropped balls off the tower of Pisa is sustained here - all the evidence is that this never happened, it was just a nice story dreamed up by Galileo's assistant. It's fine to describe it, but even a young audience deserves the respect of pointing out it's more story than reality.

But these are small matters - like the other books in the series, it's both entertaining and educational, which can't be bad.

Paperback. Also in school/library binding:

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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

DISCLAIMERS

This site has no connection with Popular Science magazine or other sites and publications with a similar name.

Much of the content of this site is written by popular science writers or friends of popular science writers. Inevitably many of the reviews in such a small community are written by or about someone we know. We always aim to be impartial in our reviews, but there is a connection which we need make clear, as there is no intention to deceive. The content of any review or article is solely the opinion of the author and should not be read or understood on any other basis. The site exists to promote popular science writing and popular science authors and for this reason should be considered promotional material, just as the editorial reviews in an online bookshop or the blurb on the back of a book should be considered promotional.

The website should not be eaten or used where it can come into contact with water.

Disagree with our review? Want to comment on a feature? Contact us at info@ popularscience.co.uk - have your say!

Part of the site