Books that are designed to entice people, especially young people, to appreciate science are generally a Good Thing, given the general indifference and ignorance that depletes our culture. Bernstein’s chatty style bustles us straightaway into spacetime and relativity in the very first chapter, ending with a section of bonus materials including a bit of mass-energy arithmetic yielding an energy equivalent, for a 68 kg person, of 417 years of US energy production.

Relativity dealt with, we’re ready to dive into the enchanted, entangled realm of quantum mechanics in Chapter Two. This is followed by the first interlude, a touch of atomic theory. We then strum through string theory before getting the measure of the universe.

Doctor Who pops in now and again, and there’s the odd whoosh of Starship Enterprise but more science fiction references begin to appear in the chapters on parallel worlds and powering up our civilizations, which considers the Kardashev scale of civilizations and Barrow’s alternative, inward-looking scale.

Whizzing around black holes, we hurtle through evolution, DNA and Douglas Adams before reaching genetic modification and zombies. Then it’s cyborgs, Star Wars and global warming. A large tardigrade floats past and we achieve artificial intelligence and robotics, with Roger Clarke’s extended set of Asimov’s Laws. Bonus materials: a list of celebrity science fiction robots.

With The Day the Earth Stood Still, we pause to look at extra-terrestrials and a world protocol for alien contact before embarking on interstellar travels and dwelling on dark matter. After superconductors, cloaking and sundry gadgets, we face realities and blink at the end of the world.

This very handy book also offers a glossary, notes, a reading/movie/song list and an index. Those who enjoy science fiction may well enjoy its science a lot more after reading Blockbuster Science and, for many of us, enjoying science is a way of enjoying life.

The History of Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction
William H. Brock
OUP
ISBN: 9780198716488

This may be a short history, but it offers fascinating insights into the development of a very hard-won field of knowledge.

The first chapter, nicely entitled On the Nature of Stuff, outlines the early days of chemistry and considers its relationship with alchemy. It used to be assumed that these fields had been clearly distinguished from each other at least since the 16th century. Recent research, however, shows that alchemists often thought in corpuscular terms and measured quantities in reactions, as chemists do. “Alchemy” and “chemistry” were interchangeable terms in the 17th century, so it is suggested that the old word “chymistry” be used for both fields up until the century’s end. By the 18th century, chymistry became chemistry, and alchemy was put in its non-scientific place, especially by French chemists in the Académie des Sciences.

In the same century came the professional separation between pharmaceutical chemists and philosophical chemists, who disdained the former yet, despite their own appellation, applied chemistry to agriculture, mining and other technics. In the same chapter, Gases and Atoms, Brock discusses chemistry’s relationship to physics: chemists reject any reduction of chemistry to physics.

In Types and hexagons, we meet paper chemistry, the manipulation of chemical symbols on paper, and see the withering away of vitalism with the advent of synthetic organic chemistry. In Reactivity, a new area emerges – physical chemistry – and becomes the foundation of the whole field. In the 20th century, chemistry comes to be seen, at least by some, as “becoming the fundamental basis – the central science – for the study of nature”.

This view has persisted into this century, despite the proliferation of cross-disciplinary science and technology, so that Brock concludes his brief but rich history by noting that “practising chemists prefer to see chemistry as the central science that underpins the physical and biological sciences”, such that, as Leibig said, “everything is chemistry”.

This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress
John Brockman
ISBN-10: 0062374346

Every year, John Brockman flings a question at hundreds of scientists, philosophers and others, and edits their answers into a book. These books become great resources: collections of ideas and insights that are variously provocative, inspiring or illuminating. There are exceptions to the general quality control, but these are swamped by the huge amount of worthwhile essays, each only about a couple of pages long.

For this collection, Brockman was on the hunt for scientific ideas that ought to be retired.

Kai Krause would be glad to see the back of the uncertainty principle, suggesting that Heisenberg’s idea lost something in translation from Unschärferelation – literally, “unsharpness relationship” – to uncertainty principle, possibly due to Eddington’s influence.

As sometimes happens in Brockman’s compilations, consecutive essays may have the same title and target. Pascal Boyer and Laura Betzig both give the thumbs-down to Culture as an item. For Boyer, the notion of culture is no more useful than the idea of phlogiston. Betzig rejects the idea that there is something superzoological called “culture” that directs the course of events, on the grounds that “the laws that apply to animals apply to us”. For John Tooby, dumping the culture concept isn’t enough: learning must go too: “Like protoplasm, culture and learning are black boxes, imputed to have impossible properties and masquerading as explanations.”

Douglas Rushkoff lowers the tone somewhat, with The Atheism Prerequisite. Bemoaning materialism, he seems to think that our sense of purpose straightforwardly indicates that human consciousness itself has a purpose. Oblivious of Occam’s Razor, he imagines that scientists have godlessness as “a foundational principle of scientific reasoning”.

Charles Seife argues that the use of statistical significance has degenerated to become “a quantitative justification for dressing nonsense up in the mantle of respectability… it’s the single biggest reason that most of the scientific and medical literature isn’t worth the paper it’s written on”.

Gerd Gigerenzer, in Scientific inference via statistical rituals, delivers a scathing critique of the ritual use of p-values in scientific papers: “The number “5 percent” is held sacred, allegedly telling us the difference between a real effect and random noise… The delusions are striking. If psychiatrists had any appreciation of statistics, they would have entered these aberrations into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”

Some of this may be discomforting reading for those of us who are supporters or advocates of science, but of course criticism is part of the whole process, is it not?

Alex Holcombe’s proposal of an idea for the chop is: Science is self-correcting.

Paul Taylor

Prometheus Books
ISBN-10: 1633880648

Many books have been written about how to think, ranging from the technical to the superficial, not to mention the supercilious. Harrison’s approach must be the most amiable and helpful this reviewer has ever encountered.

But why do we need a book like this?

“Bad thinking is our invisible pandemic, the plague popular culture ignores.” p.15

Harrison outlines what this amounts to:

“Irrational beliefs hurt us collectively by acting as a massive drag on society, slowing human progress every moment, everywhere. Indifference about billions of people trusting their health to medical quackery, squandering their money on lies, and looking to superstition for motivation and meaning in their lives equates to not caring about humanity.” p.37

If we do care, a solution is readily available:

“Good thinking is an umbrella term for understanding the human brain and using it in ways that enable one to make rational decisions, identify deception, and avoid or discard delusions as often as possible.” p.16

For Harrison, good thinking should be on the short list of humanity’s basic needs and values, along with nutrition, sleep, sanitation, healthcare, education and security.

Harrison includes a useful overview of current knowledge of brain functions, to help readers understand how memory works and fails us, how we perceive the world, how we take decisive short cuts.

Illuminating, honest and compassionate, this book is warmly recommended, and would be a useful book to suggest or offer to anyone who may be in the grip of exploitative or debilitating ideas and habits.

Paul Taylor

The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy
Princeton University Press
ISBN 9780691168692

Any cartoon-loving philosopher will be sympathetic to a book such as this, a handsomely-produced romp through the lives and thoughts of major thinkers from Bacon to Voltaire. This is obviously not the first time that philosophical ideas have been presented in graphic format, but neither is it the first time that this reviewer has wondered if anyone who feels motivated to explore philosophy would also feel the need for a relentless comic strip of chirpy cultural history and biography.

A life without cartoons would be a poor business, and philosophy can be fairly valuable too, but the combination is a dubious enterprise, particularly when the cartooning style makes all the faces so similar that, throughout the book, the main characters seem to be the same bloke with different wigs. If you doubt this, have a peep at the ill-advised group portrait at the end of the book.

So this is turning out to be a disappointed review, despite the fascinations of Spinoza and Leibniz. Perhaps it was not meant for the likes of me. The thing to do, then, is to leave this review unfinished, and offer the book to a bright 12-year old, and see what he thinks.

We’ll get back to you.

Paul Taylor