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Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many
Recent posts

The Allure of the Multiverse - Paul Halpern *****

What with multiverses and metaverses, you just can't move for verses at the moment (amusingly, the 'verse' part essentially refers to a turn, which makes no sense in either case). 'Multiverse' as a concept was always going to be a trifle confusing, as 'universe' is supposed to refer to everything in existence, but as we will see, there are plenty of different ways, both philosophically and physically, that the term is applied to something beyond the familiar, four dimensional universe. Paul Halpern packs plenty into this book - in order to put the various kinds of multiverse concept into context he pretty much goes through quantum physics, Big Bang cosmology and string theory (plus a touch of loop quantum gravity) in a fair amount of detail. We see how the most straightforward multiverse concept of a series of bubble universes in the same normal spacetime has been used to explain the fine tuning of the universe or is put forward as a consequence of the conte

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur

Robots and Empire (SF) - Isaac Asimov ****

In the last of his six robot books (though at least one character from here would appear in the late additions to the Foundation series), Isaac Asimov gives us a far more substantial threat than the roboticide central to his other late robot title The Robots of Dawn .There's a double menace with both the need to uncover a plot against Earth and the mysterious disappearance of the inhabitants of Solaria (though the latter will be left to a later book to sort out). Because of this, Robots and Empire reads better than Robots of Dawn , though it suffers from the same problem of spending far too long over conversations with logical arguments dragged out for page after page, and ludicrously verbose explanations. Here, a character will say they know what has happened (or whatever) and then take five pages before they reveal what they think. It feels like famous author syndrome in action - Asimov’s editor should have been far firmer. Although the book follows on from the three books featu

The Milky Way - Moiya McTier ****

For some reason, our home galaxy has relatively light coverage in popular science, so it was good to read Moiya McTier's book last year (less good to have forgetten about it until now - this is probably due to the aversion mentioned at the end of the review). After an introductory chapter, we start by looking at early ideas and myths about the sky pattern referred to most often now as the Milky Way, long before it was realised that this was our galaxy. We are then taken through the Milky Way's formation (and along with that information on stars and other components that go together to make up a galaxy) and McTier goes on to do everything from pull apart Star Trek's dodgy navigational coordinates to what remain mysteries to current science. (Unusually for a simplifying popular science book, we do hear a bit about alternatives to dark matter, though McTier does dismiss MOND using arguments that are weaker than those that could be used to dismiss dark matter particles.) So far

Jo Lenaghan - Five Way Interview

Jo Callaghan works full time as a senior strategist, where she has carried out research into the impact of AI and genomics on the future workforce. After losing her husband to cancer in 2019 when she was just forty-nine, she started writing In the Blink of an Eye , her debut SF crime novel which explores learning to live with loss and what it means to be human. She lives with her two children in the Midlands and the second book in the series, Leave No Trace , is published in the UK on March 28th. Why police procedural? I’ve been writing fiction for 14 years, and although In the Blink of an Eye is my UK debut, before this I wrote five unpublished books for children and young adults. Partly this was because I wanted to write about time travel and other big ideas, but also because my children were young at the time, so that was what I was mostly reading. Then as they grew older, I returned to reading more adult books in general and crime fiction in particular. I’ve always loved big ideas

The Robots of Dawn (SF) - Isaac Asimov ***

There is no doubt that The Robots of Dawn is fascinating from the point of view of being able to examine Isaac Asimov's development of a writer - and how he deals with technological dead ends in his first two Elijah Baley books from the 1950s when he revisited the character and his robotic challenges in 1983. Quite how well it works as a novel is a different matter, which we will return to. In The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun , Baley, a detective from the warren-like city of New York faces up to the societies of Spacers - humans who have settled on new planets and have totally different cultures to his own, notably in their enthusiastic use of robots. In this addition to the series, Baley travels to Aurora, the oldest of the Spacer planets, to try to solve an apparently intractable case of roboticide. A human-like robot (one of only two in existence) has been 'murdered'. But the only person who it's claimed could have done this denies having done so - and Earth