Books shelved under “Science”

I came across this book while browsing the science section in Waterstones, because that’s where they hide all the good mathematics books as well, and I was looking for an appropriate math book to give to a fellow math friend for her birthday. (I opted for Ian Stewart’s Hoard of Mathematical Treasures.) Having read Dava Sobel’s explication of John Harrison and the marine chronometer in Longitude, I snapped this up without a second…

I was never promised a flying car.

What I mean to say is that my generation was never the generation of flying cars. We grew up knowing better. It’s been seventy years since we started breaking open atomic nuclei to harness their incredible capacity for destruction and creation, and we are still sucking fossilized plants from the bowels of the Earth and lighting it on fire as fuel. My parents grew up watching men go…

Certain things just make Canadian public broadcasting awesome, and the Massey Lectures are one shining example. For one week, since 1961, with a few exceptions, CBC radio has broadcast annual lectures on a topic from philosophy or culture by notable figures. These lectures now get published in book format. Douglas Coupland’s most recent novel, Player One, is an adaptation of the lectures he gave in 2010. Now Neil Turok, a noted physicist and current…

I kind of want to cut this book in half, praise the first part, and stick the second part in some corner to gather dust. Not that the second part is bad, mind you; the entire book is well-written and obviously the product of someone who knows their field. There’s just a lot of it. Thinking, Fast and Slow is kind of like a guest who shows up to your party and then dazzles everyone…

I love physics. I love that we know so much about physics, and that we still have so much left to learn! I love reading about how far we have come from Ptolemaic ideas of geocentricity to mapping the cosmic microwave background radiation itself. And don’t get me started about the Large Hadron Collider: 7 TeV? Really? Up to 14 TeV in the next few years? Various atrocious self-help books claim they’ll help you unlock…

Editor's note: Since I read this back in 2012, Wade has gone on to write more openly racist and eugenical books. For what it’s worth, I don’t think his views are so overtly on display in Before the Dawn. Nevertheless, as a result of his more recent writing, I do not recommend reading this book or any of Wade’s books. This review is preserved for posterity.

There is a conciliatory tactic in the trenches…

Rocks. They’re old.

Thank you for reading my review.

OK, I guess I’ll go into slightly more detail. In his phenomenal A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson devotes slightly less than a page to William Smith and the first geological map of Britain. This is likely a result of Bryson (or his editors) striving in vain to meet that promise of being “short”. Bryson promises us a more “comprehensive” account in The…

I take GPS for granted. I don’t use it that much personally, because I don’t tend to go anywhere, but I’m sure all this technology I love to use makes use of GPS. Thanks to GPS, we can forget that calculating longitude without the help of a network of satellites is difficult and requires great mathematical and engineering expertise. GPS might not be great at giving directions, but that doesn’t mean you’re lost.

In the…

Space is a difficult word to pin down. Colloquially, it probably conjures images of stars and supernovae, Jupiter and Saturn and Mars, and the shuttle hanging against the backdrop of clouds and the horn of Africa. It is—or was—the Space Age, when we were supposed to go forth and colonize the stars. It didn’t work out that way, but our association of the word with “not of Earth” continues. Space can also refer to a…

N.B. September 2013: So apparently this book is a pile of plagiarism. This review is therefore preserved for posterity, but I no longer recommend this book.

In my recent review of The Grand Design I went on about my love of science, particularly of physics. I’ll be honest: although biology is really, really cool, I also find it kind of gross. It’s full of squishy stuff, and it was my least favourite of the…

I make no secret about the fact that I love science, and of all the sciences, I will make no secret about my love for physics, for theoretical physics, and for cosmology. These fields help us understand the universe, that crazy thing that’s all around us, and the fact that we have come so far is simply amazing. In The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow reflect upon how physics achieves…

Drumroll of irony, please: I bought this book because it was the required textbook for one of my education courses, Educational Psychology, and this is the first time I’ve opened it. Those of you who know me as a student will understand that this is uncharacteristic behaviour and might even suspect I’ve been replaced by a school-hating doppelgänger. In fact, Educational Psychology was one of very few courses that I disliked during my time…

The Invention of Air has a catchy title, but its subtitle better describes the book itself: A story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. Steven Johnson uses Joseph Priestley as a touchstone for a much larger argument about the relationship among science, religion, and politics and the effects this had on the Enlightenment and the American Revolution. Priestley's role in isolating oxygen and his interactions with Antoine Lavoisier make an appearance…

Full disclosure: I received this book in a Goodreads First Reads giveaway. Loves me the free books.

In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams argue that the Internet has irrevocably altered the way corporations and businesses will interact and develop new products and services. The proprietary, closed models of research and design are obsolete and must be replaced by mass collaboration with outside talent. Companies that do not embrace this new ethic of…

I am at war with myself. The feminist in me, who has been taking philosophy courses and reading books that challenge contemporary notions about gender, regards much of culture as a construction, something abstract and even arbitrary that we should alter to improve the status of various groups of people. The scientist in me, who reads books about genetics and ponders how amazing it is that we're programmed to learn how to talk but have…

Third Review: March 5, 2019

Has it really been nearly 9 years since I re-read this? No. But I guess it has. A Short History of Nearly Everything is one of those formative books that has stuck with me for a long, long time.

I have little to add to this review. I thought I had lots to say, but re-reading my review from 2010 below … I already said it there. I was going…

I must confess that, as a kid and an adolescent, I never shared the ardour for comic books many of my peers did. I collected Archie comics and read the odd Superman comic, but that was about it. So unlike most, who come for the superheroes, I came to The Physics of Superheroes for the physics.

As an aspiring teacher, I love to hear about new ways of teaching difficult or boring topics to students.…

Welcome to our universe. We only get one (regardless of however many there are). The search for a more complete understanding of our universe, out into the macroscopic and deep into the quantum foam, is a search for an understanding of who we are, why we're here … and where we might end up. This is a book of sublime thought that takes the ivory tower and turns it into an ivory ladder that anyone,…

History is more than just a series of events happening in sequence. So many history books focus on discussing their subject matter as a series of chronological events, however, so books that flout this convention always feel the need to warn us. This is what George Basalla does in The Evolution of Technology. At the same time as he reassures us that this is an historical account of how technology develops, he dispels any…

Just so there are no illusions, from the top I want to make one thing clear: this is a difficult book to read. It is short, and Robert Klee explains concepts and theories very well. Nevertheless, he covers so much that I had to refer frequently to the glossary to keep all the terms straight. I read this book in two weeks because I'm taking a Philosophy of Science & Technology course; if you're reading…