Non-fiction: Popular Science
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The Arbonaut is a memoir by Meg Lowman, a pioneer in ecology who developed techniques for reaching and studying forest canopies. Meg covers her life as a scientist and the challenges of being a woman in science, including assault, dismissal, being underpaid and underrecognized. She also talks about the mentors she had along the way,…
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Writing popular science books is hard. Taking very complex topics and making them understandable to a lay person is a special skill. Carlo Rovelli is the best science writer I have ever read. Reality is not what it seems: the journey to quantum gravity is indeed a joy to read. Rovelli takes us on a…
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I have been a bit sporadic with posting to this blog for a while, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading. What I have now is a backlog. An evergrowing backlog that induces procrastination. Because I am lazy, I am doing a round up post of the non-fiction books I read this year that…
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I read Schrödinger’s Cat by John Gribbins quite a long time ago now and enjoyed it so much I immediately bought the sequel, Schrödinger’s Kittens. It has spent much of the intervening time sitting on my bookshelf looking tricky. Schrödinger’s Kittens brings the progress of quantum physics up to the mid-nineties. I was very conscious…
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I was killing time in WH Smith in Kings Cross and in the mood to buy a book. As I was having a bad bout of insomnia at the time, a book about sleeping and how to do it better struck me as a good choice. I certainly wasn’t disappointed by Matthew Walker’s Why We…
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The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli is a collection of very short essays exploring the many mistakes humans are prone to making when we think about things. There’s not much new in this book, but I find however often I read about confirmation bias and the sunk cost fallacy I find myself slipping…
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Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not by Robert N. McCauley is an exploration of how cognitive processes predispose us to religious thought and feeling, and make science very difficult for us. I picked up the book after visiting the excellent Living with Gods exhibition at the British Museum. I find the psychology of…
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Consciousness is a tricky subject and how we come to be aware of ourselves is something not well understood. In Consciousness Explained Daniel C. Dennett explores the idea that consciousness is not something extra in us, that it is, instead, a by product of how our brains work. First, Dennett dismantles the ghost in the…
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In Physics of the Impossible, Michio Kaku tackles some of our favourite technologies from science fiction and parapsychology to see whether they are actually possible. It includes chapters on force fields, telepathy, robots, time travel, perpetual motion machines and lots more. The chapter on robots was particularly interesting, because robots is something that we’re talking…
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Take the periodic table and make a book full of interesting facts and factoids about each of the elements. What a brilliant idea. How could that not be a great idea? I was so full of hope about Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersley-Williams. The concept seemed to be all things I love; random useless nuggets…
Boudica Marginalia 