Popular Science Titles

  • Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

    A really interesting and at the same time disturbing book by a medical doctor - although he minimises his qualifications. He dismantles the various supposedly scientific claims of the homeopathy and nutrition industries, explores the tricks used by the big pharmaceutical companies and looks at the role of the media in propagating bad science. Some of this might not matter - other than the way it influences individuals and governments to make some very dodgy decisions and policies. What is even more depressing is how the science journalists who actually understand the scientific process don't get to write the "big" stories - instead they are handed to the populist style writers who, well...just read a Daily Mail science "story" and you'll know what I mean. Goldacre also writes in the Guardian and maintains his own Bad Science Blog at Badscience.net.

  • Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland

    • This slim volume explores the topic of why we behave irrationally so much of the time. Some of us are more irrational than others! In some cases it's depressing how innumeracy and frankly stupidity drive so much human behavior - in others it's merely entertaining and in yet others some of the results appear counter-intuitive. A lot of the material in the book is covered elsewhere, but this is one of those books that I wish every journalist and politician would read.

  • Genome by Matt Ridley

    • An exploration of the development of understanding of the human genome as it has been mapped over the last few years. This is a fascinating book. Ridley is an excellent writer and raises all sorts of interesting points and questions about what we should allow to be done with this data. Frankly it all strikes a chord with me - it's my DNA and I'll decide what's done with it thankyou - not some government or other big brother style organisation.

  • Nature via Nurture by Matt Ridley

    • Just when you thought the nature versus nurture debate was close to being sorted out it turns out that there's a whole different twist to it. In this book Ridly explains how things like hox genes work to differentiate cells and create different organs and shows how nurture actually affects genetic expression. He also shows how difficult it is to figure certain things out - such as is Multiple Sclerosis caused by genes or environment? He advances 5 different hypotheses - all of which hold some water, but none of which completely explains the cause.

  • The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century by Robert Lomas

    This is a biography of Nikola Tesla, a Serbian genius who moved to America where he was exploited by Edison and others. A classic case of the guy with the scientific and engineering brain, but not the business one to complement it. He invented the AC generator and motor and a host of other electrical devices. He was also posthumously recognised in the US as the inventor of radio, rather than Marconi. A true genius and pioneer. Highly recommended.

  • Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air by David MacKay

    A book that everyone in the UK and probably the western world should read. MacKay does the numbers on our current, primarily fossil fuel based, energy consumption and how much energy we could realistically generate using renewable sources. It's very readable with the technical chapters set apart. For the most part simple arithmetic is enough to follow the argument. This is a call to action.

  • The Seven Daughters of Eve by Brian Sykes

    A fascinating book that shows the use of mitochondrial DNA and mutation rates to trace our female lineage. In all cases the DNA contained within our mitochondria (organelles within the cell responsible for energy generation) is inherited solely from our mothers. The premise of the book is that Europeans are all descended from one of seven women who lived in the last few ten's of thousands of years. Towards the end of the book the project is widened to include other parts of the world.

  • Adam's Curse by Brian Sykes

    A sequel to the above that uses the Y-chromosome to trace male lineage - and points to the rather disturbing result that men may be dying out...

  • The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
  • The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins
  • The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

    • I enjoy listening to and reading Richard Dawkins. I guess I find he strikes a chord with me. The God Delusion was an interesting read - although he goes off on a bit of a rant at times. I've seen him speak a couple of times.

  • Chaos by James Gleick

    • This almost falls into the maths and numbers category, since a lot of chaos theory is pretty mathematical. It also generates beautiful patterns, which curiously but perhaps not too surprisingly appear all over the natural world. The book also has a bit on the founder of a lot of this stuff, Mitchell Feigenbaum and the number, known as Feigenbaum's number that appears throughout chaos theory. This is fascinating stuff, fairly well presented by Gleick - who incidentally was seriously hurt and killed his own son when he crashed an experimental plane in 1997.

  • The Newtonian Casino by Thomas Bass

    • This book, which was also published under another title that I have forgotten but originally bought, tells the story of Doyne Farmer, Norman Packard (Dave Packard's nephew) and a group of others in California who attempted to beat the casinos at roulette by embedding KIM-1 microcomputers (6502 based machines that I remember using at University!) in their shoes and timing the speed of the wheel and the speed of the ball as it was released. A fun story - supposedly they chucked it all in when the law was changed to ban computing or similar devices from casinos, although I remain sceptical. Farmer subsequently moved onto trying to beat the stock market through studies of chaos theory.

  • The Man Who Found Time by Jack Repcheck

    • This is a biography of James Hutton - the Scotsman who in the 18th century at the time of the Scottish enlightenment challenged the conventional wisdom that the earth was only 6500 years old. He did this by showing geological features that suggested the earth must be "immeasurably old". Well worth reading.

  • The Man Who Changed Everything by Basil Mahon

    A biography of one of science's greatest unsung heroes, James Clerk Maxwell. His equations lie at the heart of all electrical and electronic devices. He also was the first person to take a colour photograph. Einstein and others built on his work to produce the major breakthroughs that they are credited with.

  • The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler

    • Arthur Koestler was an interesting character in his own right. A prolific author and political activist he wrote a number of books, of which this and the next two on my list form a trilogy. This particular text explores the history of astronomy and cosmology by looking in particular at the contributions of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton. His premise is that scientific discovery is not a steady activity as we sometimes like to think, but involves sudden (perhaps intuitive) leaps by people who are able to disregard the current thinking and interpret the available information in new ways. This is a small print text, but full of fascinating information. That said, some of his claims, such as the fact that nobody read Copernicus' Revolutionibus have been exposed to scrutiny (see The Book that Nobody Read by Gingerich) and found wanting. Koestler committed suicide with his wife in 1983 and left a bequest asking that it be used to create a chair of Parapsychology, a subject that interested him. Such a chair was eventually created at Edinburgh University. He was known as a philanderer and was even accused after his death of raping Jill Craigie, Michael Foot's wife, although this is disputed. There is a recent article from The Sunday Times describing a forthcoming book by Michael Scammell that touches on this.

  • The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler

    • In this book Koestler explains that humans are most creative when rational thought is abandoned during dreams and trances. It is a theme that Edward De Bono picks up in many of his books on how to generate creativity and encourage lateral thinking.

  • The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler

    • An interesting book - but more challenging to me than the other two.

  • The Book Nobody Read by Owen Gingerich

    • Gingerich read Koestler's Sleepwalkers and was challenged by his contention that nobody ready Copernicus' Revolutionibus. He made it his project to track down all the remaining copies of Copernicus' work and put this assertion to the test. This fascinating book is the story of that undertaking - and the disproving of Koestler's claim. The story actually starts in Edinburgh Observatory's Crawford Collection where the original, heavily annotated copy there has the initials ER, for Erasmus Rheinhold inscribed on it.

  • Phantoms in the Brain by Ramachandran

    This is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. It's written in a refreshing no bullshit style. Ramachandran describes observations on patients who have suffered brain damage and how such observations have furthered our understanding of the inner workings of the brain. For example the story of the lady who suffered brain damage from carbon monoxide poisoning and became blind. She was able however to post letters through a slot held at any angle - demonstrating that she could still "see" with her subconscious - but couldn't connect what her visual pathways were processing with her conscious mind. He describes various experiments that anyone can do - hypothesising that the brain builds up a statistical model of the real world from our conscious and sub-conscious processing of stimuli received by our senses.

  • Longitude by Dava Sobel

    • The story of John Harrison and his attempts to solve the problem of accurate navigation by developing a clock that would keep accurate time on board a ship. A fascinating story of engineering genius, persistence and politics that ultimately saw him rewarded. This has also been made into a two part television mini-series.

  • Brain Sex by Moir and Jessel

    • An out of print volume that explores the difference between male and female brains - a must read for anyone even remotely interested in what makes men and women tick and the fundamental differences between them.

  • The Hype About Hydrogen by Joseph Rolm

    A very interesting exploration of the role of hydrogen in a future low carbon environment. The book looks at fuel cells and the challenges of developing and deploying them along with the necessary supporting infrastructure. The conclusion is that hydrogen will not be part of an economically viable low carbon environment any time soon. Well worth reading.

  • The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav

    • This is a pretty old text now, but still a good introduction to the weird physics of quantum mechanics, albeit with a bit of Eastern mysticism thrown in for good measure.

  • A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
  • Mr Tompkins in Paperback by George Gamow

    • An excellent and fun text that scales relativity and quantum mechanics to a size that is understandable to us human beings.

  • The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene

    • An introduction? to string theory and Calabi-Yau spaces! This book starts off relatively simple and then gets somewhat more esoteric as string theory is introduced and explored. This is an attempt to bring together the physics of the very large and the very small - something that has defeated many of the best physics minds to date - although there is absolutely no scientific proof of such a theory yet and it has been largely abandoned for the time being at least by mainstream physicists. Apparently if we live in an 11 dimensional space, all the maths works out. A bit of a mind bender, but an entertaining read.

  • The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker

    • An interesting study of how the mind creates language which addresses such questions as do we think in words. Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard, has written a number of books, but this is the only one I have read to date. I saw him give a talk at the Royal Scottish Museum many years ago. An interesting guy.

Richard Feynman Section

Richard Feynman, one of my all time science heroes, deserves a section to himself. In fact he deserves a whole website to himself - which funnily enough he has - more than one in fact, including one sponsored by Microsoft where he can be seen lecturing. He was a theoretical physicist who came to the public's attention as part of the investigation into the Challenger space shuttle disaster. He was involved in the Manhattan project at Los Alamos. He also had a tremendous zest for life and fun - and poking fun at the establishment. He had that rare ability to see things for what they were - I liken it to the mind of a child where the filters that we put in place as we get older don't yet exist. His ability to reduce things to basic principles and explain them to ordinary mortals was fantastic - and something that we should all seek to emulate.
  • Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman

    • One of two lighter hearted volumes telling the stories which Feynman himself liked to tell.

  • What do You Care What Other People Think

    • The second of two lighter hearted volumes, although the last section of this book details his work on the Challenger disaster investigation. The lesson to take away is that managers should listen to engineers, for nature will not be fooled.

  • Lectures on Physics (3 Volumes)

    • These volumes are the collected and edited (by Ralph Leighton) lectures that Feynman gave at Caltech in 1962. Despite their age they are still one of the best introductions to physics available. They start off relatively simple and straightforward and get a whole lot more complex, but if you have any interest in the subject at all I rank them as a must have!

  • Tuva or Bust by Ralph Leighton

    • This is described as Feynman's last journey - a journey he never actually took, although he spent 20 years trying to get there, since he became seriously ill. It's more of a tribute to him and his sense of fun that started with a stamp and became an endeavour to reach the country of Tuva without using his position or any other out of the ordinary influence. After Feynman died Ralph Leighton started a Friends of Tuva society which ran for a few years as a memorial to the great man. I was a member and received regular newsletters for a while. His daughter Michelle eventually took the trip in 2009.

  • The Meaning of it All
  • Six Easy Pieces

    • This is a CD with a book of 6 of the recorded lectures that Feynman gave (see Lectures on Physics above). If you want to hear the great man speak there is no better way :-). There is a sequel - 6 Not So Easy Pieces, which I don't own yet.

  • QED - The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
  • The Character of Physical Law
  • Genius - Richard Feynman and modern physics by James Gleick
  • Feynman's Lost Lecture by Goodstein and Goodstein

    • Space

    I have always been inspired by the Apollo moon landings and space in general - I remember being got up early in the morning on 21st July 1969 (it was after midnight in the UK) and sitting in my parents' bed as the grainy black and white pictures of Armstrong stepping onto the surface of the moon came in. This is top of my list of mankind's achievements. The following are a few interesting books written by astronauts or those close to them and astronomers.

  • Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins
  • For All Mankind
  • Two Sides of the Moon by David Scott and Alexei Leonov

    • This book is written by an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut, each outlining their part in the space race. It's a fascinating story and really interesting to get the different perspectives. Leonov was the first man to walk in space - an adventure in itself as he had real problems getting back into the capsule. I was incredibly frustrated when I learned that Leonov had visited my children's high school in pretty much their first week there. The school "management" had only had him talk to the upper years. What an opportunity missed to have the kids meet someone associated with such an amazing piece of history.

  • The Story of Astronomy in Edinburgh by Hermann Bruck.

    • A rare volume that does exactly what it says on the cover! My interest in this book was stimulated by trying to learn more about Ralph Copeland. Bruck was Astronomer Royal for Scotland until his retirement in 1975. He died a few years ago, although I was fortunate enough to meet his wife, also an astronomer as part of my research. They made no money out of the book - the publisher gave most of them away - but it wasn't really a goal to do so. My copy, which I bought through a second hand book website, is signed by the author.

  • Practical Astronomy with Your Calculator by Peter Duffett-Smith

    • A great text that explains how to do some of the maths to figure out where planets and other celestial objects will be when, when the sun and moon will rise and set and so on. A really good introduction to the topic.

  • Easy PC Astronomy by Peter Duffett-Smith

    • Similar to the above title, but adapted to the PC. It used to come with a floppy disk with a language for doing the calculations. When I first installed it it didn't work, but direct contact with the author sorted out the problems. I haven't used it for a long time and it may well not work on newer versions of Windows.