The Great Silence – Milan Cirkovic ****
The great 20th century physicist Enrico Fermi didn’t say a lot about extraterrestrial life, but his one utterance on the subject has gone...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
The great 20th century physicist Enrico Fermi didn’t say a lot about extraterrestrial life, but his one utterance on the subject has gone...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
The popular science and science fiction book review site| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Even as someone who rarely gets on with 'bitty' books, I was captivated by this collection of articles based primarily on objects in or relating to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. After some introductory material introducing the observatory, the Astronomers Royal and the search for means to identify longitude that was instrumental in the setting up of the Royal Observatory in the 1670s, Louise Devoy splits her history across the first ten Astronomers Royal, taking the reader from 1675 to ...| Popular Science Books
Michael Banks is a science writer and author and is currently news editor of Physics World magazine. As well as Physics World, he has written for Nature, BBC Focus and Science Uncovered as well as appeared on BBC Radio 4 and at science festivals. His first book The Secret Science of Baby was published in 2022 and his new book is Physics Around the Clock.Why science?| Popular Science Books
This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment).In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue th...| Popular Science Books
At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier. It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the sa...| Popular Science Books
Sarah Bearchell is a science writer and educator who has created educational activities for charities, learned societies and science centres, and who writes regularly for Aquila. The Future of Agriculture is her first book. Why science?| Popular Science Books
In his subtitle, Tim Lenton makes a daring claim: this book is going to tell us how to fix the climate crisis. This is surely very timely wh...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Without doubt, I, Robot is a classic of science fiction. Dating back to 1950 it collects Asimov's early short stories about robots in the s...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
The popular science and science fiction book review site| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
The popular science and science fiction book review site| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
The title of Furry Logic doesn't give much away. With nothing more to go on, I would have guessed that this play on the IT/OR concept ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
I found this book hard to rate as it's a really good idea, but one where I'm not sure who the natural audience is. The authors (an astrophysicist and an astronomer) are responding in part to an artist friend who said that she didn't know what scientists do, and also to the zeitgeist where a reasonable proportion of the population don't trust science and scientists, particularly on subjects such as global warming and vaccines.Alan Lightman and Martin Rees, in an introduction that almost makes ...| Popular Science Books
Originally trained in maths and art, Sönke Johnsen has studied optics in biology for the last 35 years, the last 24 of which have been at Duke University. He is particularly interested in vision and light in the open ocean, but has also worked on coastal, freshwater, and terrestrial species, animal navigation, vision at night, and human cataracts. His field work mostly involves open-ocean research cruises that use SCUBA and deep-sea manned or robotic submersibles. In addition to explorin...| Popular Science Books
Most people are familiar with energy, both in its everyday sense as a resource used for things like heating and powering electrical equipment, and – if they were paying attention in school – as a fundamental property of the physical world that can be converted from one form into another, but never created or destroyed. Entropy, the subject of this book, is a similar but much less well known fundamental physical property. As James Binney says in the first chapter, ‘most people without a ...| Popular Science Books
Ten years after it first appeared, we have an anniversary hardback edition of Carlo Rovelli's bestseller. It's probably the best-known popular science title since A Brief History of Time - probably more readable, but with far less content. As mentioned in my review below from 2015, it's very much a tasting menu: I'm afraid I can't agree with the Guardian's assertion, but I hope it has led readers on to some high quality popular science.| Popular Science Books
Liz Kalaugher is a science journalist and campaigner, based in Bristol, who has written for the New Scientist, BBC Wildlife, the Guardian, B...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
The popular science and science fiction book review site| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Anyone who has friends in the US probably has at least one who could be described as a science denier. Lee McIntyre offers us the intriguing...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
The popular science and science fiction book review site| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
I felt a touch misled by the subtitle of this book - it refers to 'the film factory'. While technically accurate, I think most people think of 'the film factory' as a term for Hollywood, where in fact what's meant here are the two photochemical giants of the era, Kodak and AGFA. Admittedly, Hollywood gets plenty of mentions, but the movie studios' use of materials from these companies is totally dwarfed by their wider use.At the heart of the book is the chemistry necessary to make film - firs...| Popular Science Books
This book was described to me as a 'gripping technological thriller'. It's not that at all - it's a book driven by ideas and politics which for structural reasons entirely fails to thrill, but is interesting nonetheless.Ray Nayler portrays a grim future - the West has replaced democracy with AI benevolent dictators as permanent 'Prime Ministers', while 'the Federation', essentially Russia, has an eternal non-benevolent dictator as its President, able to move from body to body. While both of t...| Popular Science Books
Michael Grunwald is an award-winning journalist and best-selling author who is now a contributor to the New York Times opinion section. His new book, We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, is already transforming the debate over how to feed the world without frying it. Mike is a former staff writer for The Washington Post, Time, and Politico Magazine, and the critically acclaimed author of The Swamp (about the Eveglades and Florida) and The New New Deal...| Popular Science Books
One of the easiest ways to make science accessible is to tie it to everyday life - and this is something Michael Banks does well in his exploration of physical goings on from breakfast to bedtime. Each of twelve chapters focuses on an aspect of our non-working/sleeping time. We begin with the morning coffee, take on the physics of breakfast food and so on, travelling through the day to end up in front of the TV show or film. I was impressed by just how much Banks could get from the simple (o...| Popular Science Books
It's hard to believe that there could be anything more that could usefully be written about Einstein - and then this impressive little book comes along. ('Little' is not a negative here - I love short books that cram a lot in, and this one delivers impressively.) Rather than present us with the classic scientific biography, Diana Kormos Buchwald and Michael Gordin take six different cuts through Einstein's life and work, examining the process that produced his views and beliefs.After a prolog...| Popular Science Books
Luigi Vacca holds a doctorate in Nuclear Engineering from MIT and has spent decades working at the intersections of science, finance, and AI...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
The popular science and science fiction book review site| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
The popular science and science fiction book review site| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This is the latest in MIT Press's Radium Age series, which aims to fill in the largely ignored proto-SF work that was produced between the end of the nineteenth century and the flourishing of science fiction of the 1930s and 40s. These have ranged from the direTheodore Savage to the interesting opening book of the series Voices from the Radium Age.The idea of this volume is to give us stories with characters who are more than human, with distinctly mixed results. A lot of what we get are actu...| Popular Science Books
Popular science topics are fairly evenly divided between those that are of pure intellectual interest, such as astronomy or relativity, and those with a direct impact on our lives - such as climate change or quantum physics. There's often a danger with the 'direct impact' that they can be a little worthy and try too hard to be deeply meaningful. For some reason this often seems to be the case with anything food related. But thankfully agriculture is a topic that is both rarely examined and ha...| Popular Science Books
Apparently the biogeochemist (who even knew there was such a thing) Karsten Pedersen 'coined the term "intraterrestrials" to describe the ab...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Having recently been hugely impressed by Machine Vendetta , the closing part of Alastair Reynolds' Prefect Dreyfus trilogy, I was delighted ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Dete Meserve leads Silver Creek Falls Entertainment, a production company that has produced everything from big-budget dramas and mysteries to star-studded comedies and animated series, including the animated PBS Kids STEM series, Ready, Jet, Go!, a science-based series for children centered on astronomy and featuring live-action interstitials with NASA Jet Propulsion Lab astronomer Dr. Amy Mainzer. Dete’s Silver Creek Falls Entertainment has two major new kids’ series coming up this yea...| Popular Science Books
When a book is a classic of the field it can be easy to forget to review it. Richard Feynman's 1985 QED is one of the best-thumbed books on my shelves, and still in print - so it seemed sensible to cover it. Because Feynman has a number of books with his name on the cover from his remarkable anecdotes in Surely You are Joking Mister Feynman? to the anything-but-popular-science Red Book (The Feynman Lectures on Physics), it can be a surprise to realise that he never wrote a book per se. What ...| Popular Science Books
I'm always a little wary of popular science books that start with a personal story, but I'll make an exception for Madeleine Beekman's excellent book, which sets out a possible explanation of our ability to speak, because the approach fits in with a well-balanced combination of storytelling and scientific information. There have been a good number of books that either set out to explain some of our species' physical oddities or abilities that seem to set us apart from other animals. Twenty y...| Popular Science Books
Frank Close is Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford. He was one time head of theory at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and head of communications and public education at CERN. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and winner of their Michael Faraday Prize for excellence in science communication in 2013. He is the only professional scientist to have won the Association of British Science Writers Prize on 3 occasions. Author of 22 books on science including The Cos...| Popular Science Books
I’ll get onto the details of this specific book a bit further down, but first it’s worth taking a more general look at the series of which it’s the latest instalment. Coming from Reaktion Books, the series is called Kosmos and several of the previous titles have already been reviewed on this site – on Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and Asteroids. Looking back at those reviews, there’s a clear common theme. They’re all nice-looking, lavishly illustrated books th...| Popular Science Books
As the title suggests, this new book from Kate Kelly is a kind of mirror-image counterpart to her earlier novel, The Arid Lands , from 2023....| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Astrobiology is an unusual science in that there’s no clear, undisputed evidence that its subject of study – extraterrestrial life – even ex...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This is by no means a jolly read - with vivid stories, Liz Kalaugher takes us into the world of zoonotic diseases, both where humans are inf...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Summer is the ideal time to take a dive into popular science - until 18 August 2025 there is 50% off all Brian Clegg signed books, as long a...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
If we are to believe the media we are bombarded with misinformation and disinformation - there's certainly a lot of it out there and Alex Ed...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Niayesh Afshordi (left) is professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and associate faculty at the P...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
I've a huge amount of time for Peter Forbes as a writer. Both his The Gecko's Foot on the science behind some of nature's most remarkable ab...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
It may be a cliché that many scientists are bad communicators - but that doesn't make it untrue. All too often, scientists either don't want...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
I'm giving this dive into a dystopian AI-dominated future four stars despite some significant flaws because I enjoyed it. Mark Gomes likens ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Joe Tidy is the BBC’s first Cyber Correspondent and the author of Ctrl+ Alt+ Chaos: How Teenage Hackers Hijack the Internet . Joe has built ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the u...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
At first glance at the title you might assume that this book is another Oppenheimer biography - and of course he features - but it's far mor...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content ve...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This 2024 novel is the first of Adrian Tchaikovsky's books I've read - I can certainly see what the fuss is about, though there were a coupl...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Networks are of huge significance to life and technology, so it was refreshing to read a popular maths title on the subject. I was a little ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
As a big fan of Alastair Reynolds’ Prefect Dreyfus books I have struggled with some of his earlier novels set in the same universe, and was ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Govert Schilling is an acclaimed and prize-winning freelance astronomy writer and broadcaster in the Netherlands. His articles appear in Dut...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
There's a real shortage of popular chemistry titles, which made this book seem very appealing, but unfortunately that's not what it is. Ther...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Usually a mystery novel is based on a straightforward puzzle - whodunnit (or occasionally howdunnit). But now and again you get a mystery th...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of peop...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Mary and John Gribbin are bestselling authors and science writers. As a pair, they have written several science books, including Being Human...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Free will is one of those subjects that you have to be brave to take on: Kevin Mitchell makes an impressive job of defending a concept that ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic to...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This seemed to be a book that had a lot going for it. The topic of 'the science of certainty' appealed to a reader like me who is fascinated...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This wasn't the book I expected it to be from the subtitle 'exploring classic Sci-Fi stories through the lens of modern science'. For me, to...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that th...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This is an extremely engaging read on a subject that everyone is aware of, but few of us know much detail about. Usually, if I'm honest, geo...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
For a particular audience, this is an interesting book. Specifically, popular science readers who want to get their hands a little dirty - t...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
The number of women working in STEM subjects has expanded dramatically, but as John and Mary Gribbin make clear, in the history of science t...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
I'm reviewing this book at the suggestion of one of my Buy me a Coffee supporters. I put off reading it for quite a while due to a perverse...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly h...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Jason Steffen is associate professor of physics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A longtime science team member of NASA’s Kepler miss...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Having recently looked into the way we use story to inform, influence and manipulate others , I was interested to see how Mara Einstein woul...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Bruce Sterling is one of the key figures from the cyberpunk phase of SF. In a way, that term is misleading - unlike punk music, cyberpunk is...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This introduction to the relatively short-lasting Kepler space telescope's search for exoplanets from a researcher on the team opens with th...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
There are many interpretations of the word 'classic' - in the context of science fiction many would assume this referred to the 'golden age'...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
I was surprised recently by something Simon Singh put on X about Sabine Hossenfelder. I have huge admiration for Simon, but I also have a lo...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This is an odd one. I'm reviewing it because it's science fiction, but while it is very weak as an SF novel, if you totally ignore the techn...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Every author is allowed a title that isn't up to their usual quality, and for me this book is a low point in the output of the usually relia...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Brian Clegg's Brainjacking is a captivating exploration of the subtle and pervasive ways our minds are manipulated in today’s world, offeri...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
There's been something of a trend for 'big picture' books that trace a feature of life, the universe or whatever from billions of years ago ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This is long-time Mars enthusiast Robert Zubrin's paean to the red planet. It's fascinating in two ways. One is the detail of what it would ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Philosophy at the Uni...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Every now and then we get a graphic novel designed to put across some aspect of science and technology while simultaneously entertaining the...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Two of the best ever fantasy writers - Alan Garner and Gene Wolfe - both wrote books that over the years got more sophisticated and harder t...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
It's not often you start reading a book and within a few pages are thinking 'this is something special.' Peter Lamont writes with a distinct...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Neil Lawrence is the DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge where he leads the university-wide initiative on ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
There's no doubt that Matt Parker can make practically anything interesting - this is one of the few books I've ever read where I genuinely ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Some titles tell you nothing about the book itself - but The AI Mirror puts Shannon Vallor's central argument front and centre: that artifi...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Popular mathematics can be hard to make engaging. Though some topics (such as infinity or zero) can be made interesting in isolation, usuall...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This is a real curate’s egg of a book. Let’s start with the title - it feels totally wrong for what the book’s about. ‘The Atomic Human’ con...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
It is easy to suspect that a biographical book from highly-illustrated publisher Dorling Kindersley would be mostly high level fluff, so I w...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
