Cloud Hosting

By Simon Ings

by Lee Smolin

Allen Lane

It is easy to state the basic problem of quantum mechanics as a theory of reality, wrote Lee Smolinin an essay last year for New Scientist: it doesnt tell us what is happening in reality.

Advertisement

Like the small boy in Hans Christian Andersons fairy tale, Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, delights in pointing out that the emperors of contemporary quantum physics wear surprisingly few intellectual clothes. Their theories are messy. No findings could possibly falsify them. And they dont even explain observable reality. Smolin declared war on string theorists, in particular, in 2006 with The Trouble With Physics, and theres rigor, as well as sincerity, to his ongoing critique. Theory should offer a reasonable explanation of how the world works, not replace it with a solipsistic mathematical theory, however ornate. In falling in love with our mathematics, we have come adrift from the real.

Einstein hated quantum theory. So did Louis de Broglie, who first predicted the wave-like aspects of matter. So did Erwin Schrdinger, whose collapsing wave functions gifted us that notorious undead cat metaphor. Roger Penrose and Gerard t Hooft cant stand it. It satisfies no one but who will cast the first stone? Critics say Smolin is tilting at windmills. Champions say hes got quantum itself on the run.

by Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg

The Bodley Head

I began to feel a bit like Doctor Frankenstein, writes Jennifer Doudna, in a book that our reviewer Adam Rutherford likened to James Watsons classic DNA discovery story The Double Helix. Had I created a monster?

With three years hindsight, we can safely say that monster doesnt even begin to describe the scale and enormity of Doudnas scientific achievement. She was the scientist who directed and led the effort to harness the genome-editing systems that occur naturally in bacteria.

If that doesnt mean much, perhaps the acronym will: CRISPR allows us to cut and paste genetic information. Identifying a gene, working out what it did and then modifying it to do something else, or do something better, was a miraculous enough ability, acquired a bit over a decade ago, and it kept researchers and ethicists awake wondering what the consequences of this work would be for humanity and the planet. Back then, though, the whole process could take months, even years. With CRISPR, we can perform the same process in days.

Doudna and her colleague Samuel Sternberg write very well about the hard graft of research, and capture the thrill of discovery. Best of all, though, they never take their eyes off the main prize: explaining how we can use CRISPR for good to tackle disease, for example, and manage the genie that they and others have released.

by Stuart Kauffman

Oxford University Press

Stuart Kauffman is a polymath. Originally a medical graduate, he is also trained in biochemistry, genetics, physics and philosophy, a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Wiener Medal. And he can write. In this extraordinary, and extraordinarily readable re-evaluation of his lifes work, Kaufmann explains how life arises: how molecular machines can organise into bounded systems that construct and assemble their own working parts. Evolving by natural selection, these protocells then create new niches into which further novel creatures can emerge. The diversity we see is self-constructing, self-propagating and its development is impossible to predict.

Kaufmann avoids empty philosophising. But the implications of his work are daunting. In a universe containing an estimated 100 billion solar systems, evolving life could be everywhere. Amid such ceaseless creativity, says Kaufmann, we cannot predict how the universe will evolve. Physics is insufficient to guide us through a biological universe. He argues that biology is a weak tool, barely able to comprehend the evolutionary journey of single species on a single planet. Something more, something new an entirely new science of systems may yet be awaiting discovery.

by Anne Harrington

W. W. Norton & Company

Unlike other doctors, psychiatrists cannot peer into a microscope and see the biological cause of the illnesses they treat. Theyre stuck in the premodern era, using the outward manifestations of a disease to devise diagnoses and treatments, rather in the way doctors used to treat vague diseases like ague and dropsy with bloodletting and mustard plasters.

In Mind Fixers, historian of neuroscience Anne Harrington explains what happened when ambitious 20th-century scientists, frustrated by their primitive discipline, started to claim too much for their work. Early in the 20th century, psychiatry threw off the woolly, patient-centered approaches of psychotherapy. Researchers fully expected that scientific study would reveal the true, biological causes of mental suffering. But it didnt happen.

Some people do respond well to the one-size-fits-all pharmacological and surgical procedures modern psychiatry has developed. In every case, though, the treatment comes first, often by accident, and explanations for its efficacy are either specious or absent.

The history of psychiatry is no catalogue of heroic discovery. It is the cautionary tale of what happens when the world doesnt unpack the way our sense of reason expects it to. The brain is the most complex object we know of in the universe. Psychiatrists chipping away at it with their little picks of objective study are not at all misguided, but, says Harrington, in this often shocking but admirably fair and level-headed history, they cannot expect instant results.

University of Chicago Press

by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut

University of Chicago Press

Do you like charming memoirs about peoples relationships with endearing animals? Do you like expansive, dramatic accounts of evolution in action? Do you like hard-nosed, laboratory-based studies of animal development? Then youll love this book, which contrives to combine all three approaches in its account of some groundbreaking studies in animal domestication, begun in the Soviet Union by co-author Lyudmila Trut and her boss Dmitri Belyaev in 1959.

In those days, genetics was labelled a fascist pseudoscience; its study could cost you your job, and even get you internally exiled. But Belyaev, under the noses of the authorities, embarked on a lifelong programme to understand the evolutionary relationship between friendliness, intelligence and physical signs of domestication like curly tails. The natural evolution of dogs from wolves took around 15,000 years, but it took Belyaev and Trut less than a decade to breed puppy-like tame foxes with floppy ears, piebald spots and curly tails.

To date, 56 generations of such foxes have been bred. It is even possible to adopt a tame fox theyre expensive, though the money is used to sustain the research project.

Generation by generation, they are helping us understand the molecular and evolutionary mechanisms behind domestication. It seems that most domestic animals have prolonged infancies, and that this developmental quirk leads to changes in hormones and behaviour.

Trut, in collaboration with Lee Alan Dugatkin, a US evolutionary biologist, captures both the charm of her lifes work and the brutality of all those Siberian winters in a book full of delights both intellectual and human.

by Shoshana Zuboff

PublicAffairs

In 1988 Shoshana Zuboff, a professor at Harvard Business School, published In the Age of the Smart Machine, a study of the impact of computerisation on organisations that gave us a glimpse, as her subtitle would have it, on the future of work and power.

Just over three decades later, she returns with a bigger (660 page), more precise and indeed much more frightening case for how our commercial systems have exploited that technology to create an entirely new and unfamiliar (and indeed, deliberately hidden) form of capitalism one that (in common with any power grab left unchecked by civic discourse or law-making) is robbing us of our freedom.

Surveillance capitalism, Zuboff explains, works by providing free services that we all cheerfully use and depend upon. These services monitor our behaviours and feed that data through algorithms to make prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon and later. This has monetary value since many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behaviour.

Westerners tut at Chinas Social Credit System, which acts as an artificially intelligent judge and jury over a constantly monitored population, but the commercial logics of Google, Experian, Facebook and the rest are hardly different, and the political cultures of democracy and one-party dictatorship are rapidly becoming indistinguishable.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a crash course in the kinds of conversations we should have been having 20 years ago.

by Frans De Waal

W. W. Norton & Company

In April 2016, the biologist Jan van Hooff visited the Royal Burgers Zoo in Arnhem, the Netherlands, to say goodbye to Mama, a chimpanzee matriarch he had met and befriended 40 years before. Mama, now 58, was dying, and hardly able to move. But she recognised van Hoof, now 79, and at the sight of her old friend, she grinned from ear to ear and hauled herself up for a hug.

That hug, and the rest of that tearful, happy encounter, has been watched more than 10 million times on YouTube.

Humans arent the only species with the capacity for emotion. Considering how much animals act like us, share our physiological reactions, have the same facial expressions, and possess the same sort of brains, De Waal writes in Mamas Last Hug, wouldnt it be strange indeed if their internal experiences were radically different?

Mamas story and others like it from dogs adopting the injuries of their companions to rats helping fellow rats in distress will convince the reader that instead of tiptoeing around the emotions, its time for us to squarely face the degree to which all animals are driven by them.

by Jo Dunkley

Pelican

If youre new to astronomy, or simply want one slim, straightforward book to tell you how the cosmos works, then Jo Dunkley, a professor of physics and astrophysical sciences at Princeton University, has written the book for you. In her day job, Dunkley unpicks the origin and evolution of the universe. Here, she proves herself as adept at communication as she is at research, providing the sort of no-nonsense, cleanly written, non-technical account of whats out there beyond Earth, and why it behaves the way it does, that Patrick Moore provided for an earlier generation.

And it turns out the cosmos is far wilder than Moore and his peers could possibly have imagined. Did you know, for instance, that each of the multiple images of a distant object produced by gravitational lensing captures the object at a different moment in time? Or that we have two methods of measuring the rate that space is growing, and the age of the universe and that they dont agree? Dunkleys account is full of delightful details, wrinkles and unsolved mysteries. This book is a good start, for a reader new to astronomy, and for a researcher who could well become the public face of her discipline in the coming years.

Columbia University Press

by Donald Prothero

Columbia University Press

Books organised as a series of numbered vignettes are a dime-a-dozen these days, but now and again an author comes along who uses the format to bring their field to life as never before. Each of Donald Protheros 25 fossils is a complex puzzle, unfolding over generations, as palaeontologists repeatedly assembled, took apart and reassembled the fiendishly complex four-dimensional puzzle of dinosaur evolution.

How are scattered bones assembled to make a creature no one has seen before? How are dinosaurs of different ages recognised as belonging to one species? How do we know what dinosaurs looked like anyway, when the soft parts vanish during fossilisation? Why was the idea that birds are descended from dinosaurs so controversial for so long?

On the way, well learn why the brontosaurus never actually existed, and how the triceratopss three horns refused, for the longest time, to fit correctly on its head. From the desk of a seasoned and much celebrated California-based palaeontologist, this a story of imagination, rivalry, mistake and often not-so-quiet genius. Historical greats loom large. Theres Richard Owen brilliant, indefatigable, vain, arrogant, envious and vindictive and William Buckland, a notorious eccentric whose ambition was to plate up and eat every living thing. And as Prothero reveals, the field today is full of wonder and novelty, and hardly less colourful.

by Gaia Vince

Basic Books

The former news editor of Nature marshals the evidence of recent decades (genetic, anthropological, palaeontological, archaeological the list is long) to reveal whats special about the human species. Readers of Richard Wrangham (Catching Fire, 2009), mid-period Richard Dawkins (Climbing Mount Improbable, 1996), Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind, 1994) or, indeed, any of the popular volumes that have spoken to our place in the living world over the past 20 years, will have no trouble recognising where the riffs in Vinces medley hail from. But there is entertainment, and insight, in the synthesis she provides.

The qualities we once thought made us unique grammar, altruism, fire-starting, tool use, warfare, the pursuit of beauty, emotion itself are shared by many other species, who hone them to their own needs. Still, there must be some reason why those qualities, in combination, have given rise to contemporary Homo sapiens, a species that exploits 40 per cent of the planets total primary production.

In Vinces explanation, cooking and storytelling dominate. She is far too smart to be triumphalist: from far enough away, what human civilisation most resembles is a slime mould, in which single cells coalesce for group action, protecting the centre while exposing those on the margin to harm.

But why adopt so cold a perspective? Vince would rather we delighted in being ourselves, on a busy and various planet, and, for all our oddness, not so lonely after all.

More on these topics:

See the original post here:

10 of the best non-fiction science books to read right now - New Scientist