Brian Clegg

Improving Tim's daughter's Christmas

I'm a big fan of the podcast Cautionary Tales by 'undercover economist' Tim Harford. In one episode, Tim tells us that his daughter prefers Halloween to Christmas because Halloween is more about community coming together, while Christmas is just for…

How Your Brain Works - Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo ***

As soon as you see the cover of this book, it feels like it's going to be light hearted and super fun (or at least it seems the authors want it to be this). In practice, it's not. It might have big, Joy of Sex style line drawings and an odd shape…

Escape from Model Land - Erica Thompson ***

Over the last few years a number of books, notably Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math, David Orrell's Economyths, Cathy O Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction and Tim Palmer's The Primacy of Doubt, have pointed out problems with the mathematical…

Bring on the onshore wind

Doing something about climate change is essential. And as recent bills have shown, doing something about being self-sufficient in energy production is also essential. So who wouldn't love something that helps with both? The government's MPs,…

Sentience - Nicholas Humphrey *****

The first seventy-odd pages of this book are absolutely phenomenal (pun intended, though still true). We start with a near-stream of consciousness prologue - very appropriate for a book on sentience - and then go on to have a description of the early…

The Magick of Matter - Felix Flicker ****

This is a book about condensed matter physics, surely a particularly boring-sounding name for one of the most interesting parts of the subject. It's about the physics of things we encounter. When you think about it, it's quite odd that most popular…

Engage, engage, engage!

At the weekend I had the pleasure of appearing on literary agent Peter Cox's internet TV show Litopia Pop Up Submissions. In this, five brave souls provide a title, a blurb and the first 700 words of a book for comments from three industry experts…

A Brief History of Black Holes - Becky Smethurst ***

Black holes are a perennially interesting topic, so anyone writing a book about them needs to provide a new angle - a USP, if you like. For this mostly interesting book, Becky Smethurst has gone for 'why everything you know about them is wrong.' This…

How the Victorians took us to the Moon - Iwan Rhys Morus ****

Despite beginning and ending his book with a tale of a Victorian moonshot, Iwan Rhys Morus is not writing steam punk fiction here, but rather exploring the nature of the Victorian scientific and engineering mentality, particularly in the UK, and how…

The great Twitter panic of 2022

A fair number of people on Twitter have informed their followers that they have also set up on Mastodon just in case the world ends or some such. I don't doubt that Elon Musk could mess the whole thing up - but chances are things will stay fine in…

Science Fiction - Glyn Morgan (Ed.) ***

There are two ways to write a non-fiction book on science fiction - for the fans, or for those who don't currently read SF. Being as big science fiction fan I’m not sure I’m the ideal audience for this book, which is very much aimed at persuading…

Celestial (SF) - M. D. Lachlan ***

An important point first - despite being labelled as such, this is not science fiction at all. It's science fantasy, a once-popular genre that has become relatively uncommon these days. Celestial is very much in the same category as Roger Zelazny's…

Tim Palmer - Five Way Interview

Tim Palmer is a Royal Society Research Professor in the department of physics at the University of Oxford. He spent much of his career working on the predictability and dynamics of weather and climate, developing probabilistic ensemble prediction…

The Capture (Series 2) - BBC iPlayer

I don't usually review two seasons of a TV show separately, but I'd like to follow up my review of the first series of The Capture, partly because the second series is better than the first (though like the first it had some credibility issues) and…

Venus - William Sheehan and Sanjay Shridhar Limaye ***

After reading this impressively illustrated book, you will know a lot about the planet Venus - almost too much. In terms of the volume of content and colour illustrations it's hard to fault, I just felt like I was being given too much information…

Impossible, Probable and Improbable - John Gribbin ****

This is a compendium volume, bringing together three short books by the man who Americans would probably term the dean of British science writers, John Gribbin. These were Six Impossible Things, Seven Pillars of Science and Eight Improbable…

Dario Floreano and Nicola Nosengo - Five Way Interview

Dario Floreano is Director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). He is the coauthor of Evolutionary Robotics and Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence (both published by the MIT Press).…

Has the BBC not heard of paragraphs?

The BBC is, of course, a broadcaster rather than a publisher - yet its website, and particularly its news website, should surely be treated as if it were a publication. That being the case, it's time they got someone involved who knows how to lay out…

Einstein: the man and his mind - Gary Berger and Michael DiRuggiero ****

Sometimes a book gets labelled a coffee table book as an insult, suggesting it's thin on content if visually attractive. Gary Berger and Michael DiRuggerio's photographic exploration of Einstein is a indubitably a coffee table book, but in its…

The Sandman - Netflix

Although I'm a big Neil Gaiman fan, I've never read The Sandman, as I just can't relate to comic books and graphic novels. I'm not a very visual person, and I like a story to contain (far) more words. Nonetheless, I was aware it was considered…