On a first glance of the cover you might think that Jim Baggott and John Heilbron were brilliant Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein impersonators. In fact Baggott is an excellent popular science writer and Heilbron was an esteemed historian of science, both specialising in quantum physics. There's another way the cover is misleading - you might think this was an in-depth exploration of Bohr and Einstein's relationship. The topics they argued about certainly come into it, but instead this is detailed look at how quantum theory developed. I've read a lot of books on quantum physics, but I've never ..read more

Defining science fiction is tricky. The most obvious way this interesting novel is SF is the catchall ‘it’s by an SF author’, which is why I presume it made its way onto the SF Masterworks list. Generally acclaimed as one of the much-missed Christopher Priest’s best books, at its simplest The Affirmation can be seen as the musings of the mentally ill Peter Sinclair, whose attempt to construct a better life by writing himself a fictional autobiography gradually results in a loss of awareness of what is and isn’t real. What makes it an exceptional novel is that its structure very cleverly takes ..read more

Harry Cliff is a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge working on the LHCb experiment, a huge particle detector buried 100 metres underground at CERN near Geneva. He is a member of an international team of around 1400 physicists, engineers and computer scientists who are using LHCb to study the basic building blocks of our universe. Harry also spend a big chunk of his time sharing his love of physics with the public. From 2012 to 2018 he held a joint post between Cambridge and the Science Museum in London, where he curated two major exhibitions: Collider (2013) and The S ..read more

Sadly deceased in 2023, Karen Bakker combined geographical, environmental and technology interests, a crossover that she presented in her last book, Gaia’s Web. The idea here is to make use of the abilities of modern information technology, from machine learning to specialist sensors and satellite data to monitor both the state of the environment and those who are misusing it. As such there is some fascinating material here. Bakker shows the power of digital eco-surveillance to protect the environment from everything from overfishing to forest fires, but emphasises rightly the accompanyi ..read more

This is a remarkable book, pulling together two key threads - chaos theory and economics. Doyne Farmer has a reputation as someone who breaks the mould: famously, he dropped out of studying physics at graduate level, working with a handful of others to put together a wearable computer (back in the 70s, when such a thing would have seemed pretty much impossible) to enable them to successfully beat the odds at casinos, picking up on the slight biases in roulette wheels. Now, he presents a powerful case for applying chaos theory to economics, modelling economies in a totally different, agent-dri ..read more

It's a difficult task to write a sequel to a successful thriller and make it work as a standalone novel - sadly, this wasn't achieved well with The Coming Storm. It follows Greg Mosse's generally well received The Coming Darkness, a near future SF thriller set in a dystopian 2037 where both climate change and rampant infections have made the world a far less pleasant place and a worldwide conspiracy sets out to wreck modern civilisation. Unfortunately, this book is way too slow to get started. Most of the first half of the book is just the three principle characters recovering from their exer ..read more

After an introduction to exoplanets - planets orbiting stars other than the Sun - Alien Earths concentrates on the theory of and the search for life on these planets. Written by astronomy professor Lisa Kaltenegger, who runs the Carl Sagan Institute for the Search for Life in the Cosmos at Cornell University, it's a gentle guide to one of the most imaginative aspects of astronomy. A fair amount of the content looks at what makes a habitable planet (which is not always an Earth-like situation), what life is and how we may be able to detect it a great distance. There are some good details here ..read more

Reading this novella was a strange experience. It was more like watching an episode of an SF anthology TV series such as The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror than reading a book. Like these, there is limited character development and a restricted plot with interesting ideas, but not a full story arc. It did made me wish Adam Roberts had fleshed it out to a full novel - I could see so many more opportunities that were unfulfilled - but like the better episodes in the TV shows, as long as you take it for what it is, it's still a fun experience. The central character Hi (a name with echoes of ..read more

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few ..read more

Mark Wolverton is a science journalist, author, dramatist, and 2016-17 Knight-MIT Science Journalism Fellow. He writes for various national and international publications including WIRED, Nature, Undark, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Scientific American, American Heritage, The Atlantic, and Air & Space Smithsonian. He has also worked with the NASA Ames History Project, Argonne National Laboratory, MIT, the Franklin Institute, and the NASA ISS Science Office. His books include A Life in Twilight:The Final Years of J. Robert Oppenheimer and The Science of Superman. His latest title ..read more