Book review: How We Got To Now, by Steven Johnson

BOOK
How We Got To Now
Steven Johnson (Penguin)
★★★✩✩

The world is rich with academics with a good turn of phrase exploring the history of ideas and innovations, making the mundane endlessly fascinating.

Spiral Notebook: How we're handing bacteria the advantage in the Battle of Wounded Knee

War drives innovation. Copper sheathing for hulls was first suggested in 1708 to tackle the problem of weed growth that slowed and hobbled ships of the line.

But it wasn't until decades later the practice was pushed and perfected.

Book review: The Universe Within, by Neil Shubin

BOOK
The Universe Within
Neil Shubin (Allen Lane)
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Shubin tries to make sense of the universe using the human body and behaviour as the keyhole to peep through.

REVIEW
The universe, as lesser scientists than Neil Shubin have pointed out, is a vast place.

It contains wonders that defy credulity all presented in magnitudes that stretch the meagre capacities of our imagination.

Tall order then for an author to capture its marvels in print, especially in such a compact length - other authors please take note.

Distinguished scientist Shubin has opted to take the tricks of his first love - paleontology - to give this book a spine. Fossils are glimpses and clues to the real beast. In the same way, the human body is a synedoche for just about everything there ever was.

From DNA, to time-telling, from the products of the Big Bang, to celestial imbalances that produce Ice Ages, Shubin sets out to show that a residue of all existence is contained in our own bodies. Neat idea, neat book.

Book review: Gravity's Engine, Caleb Scharf

SCIENCE
Gravity's Engine
Caleb Scharf (Allen Lane)
★★★★✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Caleb Scharf examines the latest thinking about the greatest enigmas in the universe - the black holes that destroy and create our galaxies.

REVIEW
Few books have attempted the epic opening of Caleb Scharf's wonderful description of a photon's journey from the beginning to time across 12 billion light years of void before it splats - like fly against windscreen - into a sensor that builds an image of a far-away cluster on the computer of Manhattan-based scientist.

British-born Scharf's 200-year odyssey into the mind-baffling world of black holes continues in the same vein - exciting, filled with awe and thickly laced with the sorts of figures the popular science market loves.

(Millions are nothing, there are black holes out there more than a billion times more massive than the sun.)

Scharf's lucid account picks apart these swirling, superlative-laden enigmas and takes us to the edge of current thinking about how they kill and create the cosmos with frantic ease.

They twist space-time to such an extent that both become irrelevant and yet far from being celestial rarities they are the heart of every galaxy, including our own.

The armchair enthusiast often parts company with some of these dense tracts because there's only so much boggling a mind can take on the DLR but Scharf has enough metaphors, juicy gobbets and narrative nous to keep the reader hooked and enchanted.