The popular science and science fiction book review site
Physics of the Future – Michio Kaku ***
'Prediction is very difficult,' said the great physicist Neils Bohr, 'especially about the future.' So physics professor and science populariser extraordinaire Michio Kaku is taking on a very risky task in trying to predict the way science will develop between now and 2100.
The approach he has taken is to talk to a vast swathe of scientists – the acknowledgements list is truly breathtaking – and as Kaku points out, unlike the work of many futurologists, this is an attempt to predict the future of science based on the knowledge of working scientists, not historians or science fiction writers or sociologists. Surely this is bound to succeed and make a great book? In practice, the result is mixed. Things don't go well where you use potential developments in science to predict consumer products. What consumers buy is not based on how good the science is – and the sections of the book covering consumer products are the weakest. The trouble is scientists in universities are the last people to know what normal consumers want. One of Kaku's sources is MIT's Media Lab. But if you look back over Media Lab's work over the last 20 to 30 years, practically none of it ever became commercial.
Things are much better in sections where the science drives the reality. So the parts of the book dealing with the generation of energy and space travel, for example, were by far the best and most enjoyable to read. They stopped sounding like a sales catalogue of the future and started really to excite. Of course even here there have to be provisos. These large scale efforts are mostly controlled by politics, not science. The reason we went to the Moon and the reason we haven't returned (or tried for Mars) are all about politics, something that Kaku can't really explore properly.
Unfortunately, what this book attempts to do is a very difficult task. Firstly, most future predictions books are virtually unreadable because they end up as a string of facts and rapidly become very dull. In his other books Kaku is a lively, approachable writer, but here he did suffer rather from factititis and sometimes it was difficult to keep interested. This book doesn't compare with some of his other work in terms of readability.
But perhaps the biggest problem, as I've already suggested, is the assumption that because scientists understand science, they understand everything else too. The future isn't just dependent on science. It is dependent on politics and economics and such like minor matters that scientists are traditionally very bad at. Time and again when scientists stray outside their field they get it wrong – think how physicists have been duped by fake mediums, for example. Kaku demonstrates this at full blast when he comments that we can expect to achieve a 'what physicists call a Type I civilization' within 100 years. Now leaving aside that quote (I don't think many physicists talk about civilizations at all, and certainly don't give them labels like this), this seems hugely naive.
Kaku's Type I civilization is basically a planetary civilization – there are still nations, but they are much weaker and most things are done on a worldwide basis. Really? Does he really think the American people would be happy to speak Chinese? Can you imagine what an amalgamation of just China and the USA -both very inward looking countries – would be like, let alone the rest of the world? Do you think the French will happily abandon their individuality? That the Islamic nations would say 'We'll just forget all that religious stuff' and fit in with everyone else? He holds up the European Union as evidence, but as this is currently in turmoil, it seems an unlikely exemplar. It really seems that to imagine a planetary civilization could happen in less than 100 years is pretty optimistic. And if he can get something as fundamental as this wrong, it's hard to believe that the fine detail has any great weight either.
Overall, then, a great idea with some excellent thoughts about specific science and technology, but gets a little dull in places and like all futurology lacks credibility. However, compare it with a 'classic' of the genre, Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and it's much more readable, and much more plausible. In this field, there is no doubt this is a great book – it's just not a topic than can ever be done awfully well.
Kindle:
Review by Peter Spitz
*** Futurology Physics
Labels: *** Futurology Physics
Where are the chemistry popular science books?
by Brian Clegg
There has never been more emphasis on the importance of public engagement. We need both to encourage a deeper interest in science and to counter anti-scientific views that seem to go hand-in-hand with some types of politics. Getting the public interested in science both helps recruit new scientists of the future and spreads an understanding of why an area of scientific research deserves funding. Yet it is possible that chemistry lags behind the other sciences in outreach. As a science writer, and editor of this website, I believe that chemistry is under-represented in popular science. I'd like to establish if this is the case, if so why it is happening - and what can be done to change things.
An easy straw poll is provided by the topic tags on the site. At the time of writing, there are 22 books under 'chemistry' as opposed to 97 maths, 126 biology and 182 physics. The distribution is inevitably influenced by editorial bias - but as the editor, I can confirm …
Artificial Intelligence - Yorick Wilks ****
Artificial intelligence is one of those topics where it's very easy to spin off into speculation, whether it's about machine conciousness or AI taking over the world (and don't get me onto the relatively rare connection to robots - cover designer please note). All the experience of AI to date has been that it has been made feasible far slower than originally predicted, and that it faces dramatic limitations. So, for example, self-driving cars may be okay in limited circumstances, but are nowhere near ready for the commute home. Similarly, despite all the moves forward in AI technology, computers are so-so at recognising objects after learning from thousands of examples - sometimes fooled by apparently trivial surface patterning - where humans can recognise items from a handful of examples.
Even so, we can't deny that AI is having an influence on our lives and Yorick Wilks, emeritus professor of AI at the University of Sheffield, is ideally placed to give us a picture …
Apollo 11 - David Whitehouse *****
The problem with doing a book about the Apollo programme is that it's hard to find something that hasn't been said before - but with the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing just weeks away, the publication of this elegant book is extremely timely, and science-reporting veteran David Whitehouse manages to make the story feel fresh, even if you're one of the just 20 per cent of the world population who were alive on the remarkable day in 1969.
Although he has worked a lot with New Scientist, Whitehouse was for many years a TV journalist, and that comes through in his impressively engaging prose as he takes us back to the origins of the US/USSR space race that would lead to the moon landing. He passes through the wartime aspects relatively quickly, but once the two superpowers are flexing their space technology muscles, Whitehouse achieves a near perfect balance between the far less-heard USSR side of the story and the US. This is probably the best bit of the whole bo…
About our editor
Brian Clegg
Brian read Natural Sciences at Cambridge University and gained an MA in Operational Research at Lancaster University. From Lancaster, he joined British Airways, originally working in OR and later forming a new department tasked with developing hi-tech solutions for the airline. Brian now concentrates on writing popular science books, with topics ranging from infinity to time machines. He also writes for magazines and newspapers from Nature and The Wall Street Journal to Playboy. He gives regular talks and has contributed to radio and TV programmes. Brian edits the www.popularscience.co.uk book review site and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Science in Seconds – Hazel Muir ***
The Story of Astronomy – Heather Couper & Nigel He...
Heather Couper – Four Way Interview
Simplexity – Alain Berthoz **
Click here to select by topic
**30
***443
****477
*****199
Artificial intelligence13
Astrobiology6
Astrophysics15
Biology154
Brain40
Climate26
Computing50
Cosmology71
Ecology16
Engineering11
Evolution20
Flight1
Fringe8
Futurology13
Human science127
Humour9
Information5
Interviews90
Material science5
Maths130
Optics1
Particle physics18
Philosophy18
Philosophy of Science37
Physics233
Probability12
Quantum physics50
Relativity22
Royal Society Prize for Science Books9
Science Fiction132
Sports science3
Time16
Authors - A
Authors - C
Authors - D
Authors - E
Authors - F
Authors - G
Authors - H
Authors - I
Authors - J
Authors - K
Authors - L
Authors - N
Authors - O
Authors - P
Authors - Q
Authors - R
Authors - S
Authors - T
Authors - V
Authors - W
Authors - Y & Z
Royal Society Prize for Science Books
Follow us Twitter to discover new reviews:
Tweets by @brianclegg