Published by: Picador, 2024
I really enjoyed Natalie's Pandora's Jar (2020) and I've been lucky enough to see her talks at several Cosmic Shambles events over the past few years. In fact, I picked up this signed copy of Divine Might at the Nine Lessons show at Kings Place last December, where she entertained us with the tale of Aphrodite's pursuit of the mortal Anchises (that particular story features in this book, and you ought to go into it spoiler-free, because Natalie's rendition of it is hilarious so I'm not going to go into details).
The book casts a critical and extremely well-informed eye over the legends of Aphrodite as well as other goddesses from Greek history (so we meet Hera and Athene as well as the Muses and the Furies) examining them from a modern perspective and placing them in a context that takes in witty nods to everything from Father Ted to the Internet Movie Database. Look, any author who includes a nod to Ray Harryhausen is going to be very much in my wheelhouse. I was in nerd heaven, and found myself chuckling from start to finish.
When I wasn't gasping in outrage, that is; if reading about the woeful behaviour of the male gods of the time back then doesn't instil in you a strong desire to smash the Patriarchy, then you and I probably aren't going to be friends. This book is a treasure.
Published by: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986
I first read Lyall Watson's classic work about parapsychology and fringe science Supernature: A Natural History of the Supernatural when I was a teenager (and I still have the Coronet paperback I bought back then). I've collected a fair few books of his over the years, and when I saw this one in a charity shop and didn't recognise the title, I grabbed it—even though the cover has a nauseatingly twee painting on it which features a unicorn, butterflies, and what appears to be a badly rendered Star Trek villain (I think it's supposed to be an example of Boskop Man but he has been portrayed as a Caucasian male, which seems improbable, to say the least). I should have checked the contents page; as soon as I started reading it, I realised that I already had a copy. The book was reissued several years later as Dreams of Dragons. And the copy I already have of that book has a much better cover, with a dragon on it. Ah well.
But the improbable artwork is a useful metaphor for what's in the book. I loved Supernature when I was a teenager because Watson could spin an engaging tale, but now that I'm older I recognise his strong tendency to embellish and distort his accounts in order to make them more lyrical and satisfying (and hey, it totally worked on teenage me). The most polite way of describing many of the things that Watson writes about in this book would be to say that they are ignored by mainstream academics (explicitly so in the case of the aquatic ape theory or Rupert Sheldrake's formative causation theory, both of which get their own chapters). Other chapters seem to be at odds with current knowledge (such as Watson's bucolic description of Papua's Asmat people, for example; Watson might extol cannibalism as being an environmentally sound strategy in isolated, resource-poor communities, but he omits any mention of major drawbacks to the practice such as kuru, the prion disease which afflicts members of the Fore tribe on Papua to this day).
Watson was at his best when he toned down the pseudoscience and focused more on plausibility. The chapter that was subsequently chosen for the book's new title, about his encounters with the giant monitor lizards known as Komodo dragons, is proper boy's-own-adventure stuff (if rather grisly). Then again, I'd pick the account of such things by Sir David Attenborough over Watson's on any day of the week.
Published by: Headline Publishing Group, 2014
This is a history of the Large Hadron Collider up to the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012 (and its immediate aftermath) which is written by someone who was deeply involved in what was going on. Professor Jon Butterworth is based at University College London but—as he describes in this fascinating account—he commutes to Geneva every week to work on leading-edge research into particle physics. Not just atoms, but all the less-familiar things which exist inside them—and which fly out of them, if you smash things in to them fast enough. At 27 km in diameter, the LHC is the largest experiment ever built on Earth in order to do just this (although out there in the rest of the universe, there are things going on at much higher energies, and particles from such events slam into Earth's atmosphere every day. Jon explains that this is one reason why physicists weren't worried that their machine was going to cause the end of the world when it was first powered up back in 2008). In this book, he gives his account of taking part in the search for the "massive scalar boson" that Peter Higgs realised should exist if the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism (which was first proposed back in 1964) actually existed.
As you might have already gathered, this history is described in a very nuts-and-bolts fashion and there are plenty of clear explanations of the science involved. It's also entertainingly funny (full disclosure: I've met Jon at science events organized by Robin Ince, and can confirm that he is like that in real life, too). He's also a passionate campaigner against government science funding cuts, and presents plenty of economic benefits which result from such seemingly exotic research. There's even an explanation of the deeper significance of CERN's adoption of the comic sans typeface in communications with the media several times during the course of the project.
The book expertly conveys the thrill of the chase as hints that the elusive particle actually existed became stronger and stronger. Jon also managed to make me understand a little bit about why the Higgs's existence is such a big deal for physics. It's a great read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Published by: Icon Books, 2012
Lacking in etymological fun but crammed full of bad dad jokes and casual racism. It might be cool for the Daily Mail crowd, but I'm out. I'll be dropping off all three of the books by Mr Forsyth which I bought recently at the local charity shop, soonest.
Published by: Icon Books, 2011
This is an amiable romp through the origins of some of the more eclectic words which have become part of the English language. In deciding which words are worthy of note, the author focuses on whether a word has a good story behind it or not and this serves him well for the most part—although I found myself thinking, "Well, maybe, but..." more than once, and that's not really a reaction you want to get from readers of your non-fiction book, even if it did get into the Christmas bestseller lists. I was disappointed to discover that Mr Forsyth skipped an opportunity to include one of my favourite anecdotes from the history of computing when he discusses the modern usage of the word bug (but as Mr Forsyth points out, the word was being used in that context back in the 19th Century, long before computers were invented).
My inner pedant was rubbing his hands with glee to learn that one does not keep to the "straight and narrow" but to the "strait and narrow" but that's about the only thing that has stuck in my memory, despite only finishing the book half an hour ago. Despite its title, the book is actually pretty thin when it comes to discussing the actual etymology of the words being discussed, which I found intensely frustrating.
And the structure of the book, where the author's final comment on each tale leads him on to the next word he wishes to examine, often feels painfully contrived. As a result, much of the book reads like a collection of segues from a not particularly funny stand-up comedian. It's an okay effort, but that's all. It would have been better to skip the lame jokes and just let the ludicrous histories of the words themselves get all the laughs.
Published by: PH Learning Co., 2023
This (self published) book is subtitled "Think, learn, and problem solve like a Nobel Prize-winning polymath" which is a bit strong, I reckon. We get to read a few pithy quotes from the great man and there are one or two entertaining anecdotes about Feynman's cognitive approach but the book is best described as a self-help manual for people wanting to develop their critical thinking skills. And it only does so at a very basic level. It's unlikely to teach you how to think or innovate like Feynman could. It omits several of the principal explanations that Feynman himself gave about the way he approached science (for example he once famously asked a biology class why they still bothered memorising the names of all the things inside an animal when someone else long ago had already produced, as Feynman put it, a "map of a cat"—thus demonstrating that for Feynman it was more important to be able to find something out when you needed to than it was to fill your head with a lot of information which you may never need to use again for the rest of your life). The author also recounts the beginning of Feynman's tale about noticing the Cornell crest rotating on a spinning plate thrown by someone in the cafeteria there one lunchtime, but he doesn't explain what was going on or that Feynman misremembered the ratios of wobble to rotation and then omits the punchline entirely: the chain of thought which led to the work which earned Feynman his Nobel Prize (Feynman describes this in his autobiography, Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman?):
"I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there's the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was "playing"—working, really—with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems."
It's that ability to chain apparently unrelated concepts together like this which was one of Feynman's greatest gifts. While it's an ability that might be acquired through diligent practice, Feynman evidently had an innate aptitude for it. Similarly, being able to clearly visualise a problem and intuitively see what is going on is frequently cited by renowned scientists as the principal reason for their insights (such a list of innovators includes not just Feynman, but also Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Edison, Tesla, Kekule, Einstein, and Steven Hawking). The book doesn't explain how we might learn to do this beyond recommending that we "remember the value of play." Instead there's a discussion of data representation as taught by the great Edward Tufte which is a different kettle of fish altogether. And while chapter four of Hollis's book relates Feynman's own account of being able to solve problems because he had ended up with a "different set of tools" to those used by his peers (such as less-frequently-taught approaches to calculus) it's rather sketchy on how you or I might go about building up our own cognitive skill sets in this way. Instead, the book pivots to a description of Feynman's four-step learning technique, but the author can't even settle on what the four steps are.
Hollins also regularly veers off into the weeds. While he accurately observes that Feynman loved to communicate things in the simplest language he could manage, here we're lectured about what is clearly one of the author's pet peeves and in criticising the use of impenetrable jargon he takes several pages to cover the basics of The Sokal Affair. Aside from the quoted slabs of text being meaningless (after all, that was the point of the paper) the point is largely irrelevant. One might have taken the opportunity to examine why it is that scientific papers are so frequently written in deliberately obtuse language (and yes, I'm looking right at you, Thomas Kuhn) but this is not done.
The book's a nice idea, but quite honestly you'd get much more out of reading Feynman's own books on the matter, Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman? and The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.
Published by: Arkana, 1989
This is the first of a loose trilogy of books which Koestler wrote about the development of human thought. It was followed by The Ghost in the Machine and The Act of Creation but somehow I ended up reading them in reverse order. The Sleepwalkers was first published in 1959, and rather like me (I came along the following year), it's beginning to show its age.
Koestler's main thesis (which gives the book its title) is that the originators of some of science's grandest leaps forward came up with their ideas, not as the result of blinding flashes of inspiration, but through a long and muddled process during which they often failed to recognise the most important aspects of their discoveries and operated for the most part in a kind of somnambulant stupor. Indeed, after the death of Aristotle, the idea of evidence-based thinking was replaced by philosophising based on dogma and it took more than two thousand years before anyone took any interest in figuring out how the cosmos might actually work again.
Koestler covers the evolution of cosmology from Aristotle and Plato by way of Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton and his research goes into forensic levels of detail. As a result, he explodes many of the myths which are still prevalent in popular culture sixty-five years later (Galileo never spent a single day in a prison cell as a result of his arguments with the Church, nor did he remark "Eppur si muove" at any point in response to his interrogators from the Inquisition). Kepler's achievements are extraordinary because the errors which he made miraculously cancelled each other out and led him to the right answers by a largely spurious path. Galileo didn't get round to making the leaps of thought that changed physics for ever until he was in his seventies. The book also shows how the Catholic Church cracked down on challenges to the scriptures even though their own scientists knew that the theories which they proclaimed in public to be heretical were in fact correct. One is left marvelling that any scientific progress at all ever happened back then.
It all goes to pieces in the epilogue, though. Koestler downplays the importance of relativity or quantum theory to a surprising degree. The observed expansion of the Universe (now known to be a result of the Big Bang) is alluded to in a single, dismissive sentence. The concepts of forces and fields are just as important in modern thought as Kepler's and Newton's laws, but they are sidelined here because Koestler sees them as labels for things which we don't understand, but instead just nod wisely when they're discussed as if giving a concept a name equates to understanding what it is. Koestler is most definitely not okay with anyone trying that. As an example of such vague or indeed circular definitions he gives us "magnets work because they're magnetic" and I can see his point, even though that's how most school physics textbooks summarise the subject. "And what about ESP?" he then asks us (parapsychology was a lifelong interest for him and his will included an endowment for a research chair at Edinburgh University to ensure that exploration of the subject continues to this day. Koestler died in 1983). I offer no judgment on that particular point, but instead observe that this book may be one of the first ever places where the popular culture myth that we only use a few per cent of the brain's capacity (which is, as I hope you already know, utter bollocks) appeared in print. But the foundations of both The Ghost in the Machine and The Act of Creation are visible in his closing arguments here.
Published by: Quercus Editions, 2020
This is a rather lovely collection of essays on different things that Bill recommends as sources of happiness. And you can't argue with his choices, although some of them (such as climbing an active volcano) may involve a bit more effort than just doing a spot of birdwatching or popping down the road for a stroll in your local park.
Again, this is a book which was written during lockdown in the initial stages of the Covid pandemic. As a result, there's a certain wistfulness in the descriptions of his more wide-ranging adventures in Colombia and Indonesia, for example. Going out for a walk for an hour or so was one of the few nice things that we were encouraged to do back then, and it's a habit that a lot of people have stuck with. "Will we ever return to normal?" Bill muses. Nearly five years later, Covid is still out there; trying to stay mentally and physically fit is just as much of a challenge.
Published by: Titan Books, 2023
Straight on to book #2 of Gareth's Continuance series. This one is set some fifty years after the events of the first, and features a whole new cast of characters. The ensemble he introduces here really let him stretch out as a writer, as he has created a wildly disparate bunch of protagonists from many different species with many different world views. There's a fun framing device which explains how the diegetic nature of the tale has been brought about; this seems to be a theme of the series, as much the same thing is done in Stars and Bones. In each case, it's done smoothly and plausibly without ever throwing the reader out of the action. Kudos, too, for the layered meanings of the novel's title. Nice!
And without spoiling things, I should say that I have always been a big fan of science fiction novels which involve a Big Dumb Object (BDO). In Descendant Machine we don't just get one BDO, but several of them, and not only are they all splendidly inventive pieces of technology, each of them turns out to be a satisfyingly important plot element.
I was a little let down by the ending. The unavoidable existential threat that our heroes are facing gets subtly retconned into an ever so slightly less dangerous thing that one of them can figure out how to fix, because of course they can. This sort of thing has been done far too often in recent episodes of Doctor Who, and it bugs the hell out of me. And here, the idea that the "solution" would not have been discovered by a galaxy full of beings who are SPOILER REDACTED felt wildly implausible, to put it mildly. But I enjoyed the book all the same, and I read the whole thing in a couple of sittings; that's always a sign that a tale is worth reading as far as I'm concerned. More please, Gareth!
Published by: Titan Books, 2022
This is the first in a new series of books that are collectively known as the Continuance; saying more would constitute a spoiler, I reckon, so I'm not going to discuss the central premise of the novel at all. But the book was written during the pandemic, and it's very much a product of its times. The spectre of contagion is an inescapable, powerful presence which grounds the otherworldly aspects of the fiction in an uncomfortably familiar, real-life context. The growing horror as the body count rises (and it rises a lot, in a style that reminds me strongly of The Expanse) is expertly conveyed.
There are a couple of plot holes that you could drive a starship through but the book's central themes of family bonds and parenthood are deftly worked in to the story and the resolution is unexpected and satisfying.