Dr Hilary Hamnett is a forensic toxicologist and Associate Professor of Forensic Science at the University of Lincoln, UK. In this book she reviews a number of fictional stories involving poisoning, including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Casino Royale, The Count of Monte Christo and Harry Potter. She suggests what poisons might have been used and what their effects would have been. She quotes other cases, real and fictional, of poisoning by these substances.

Along the way we learn about monkshood and aconitine, belladonna, mandrake, henbane and other poisonous plants. Then there are venomous snakes (Cleopatra) and poisonous chemicals (arsenic, lead).

Each section is meticulously referenced, and the technology of analysing for the toxins or their by-products in a modern laboratory described. A glossary at the start gives the chemical structure and brief notes about each chemical mentioned and a description of the various laboratory techniques.

Is it a useful handbook for would-be poisoners? Possibly, though perhaps the most significant lesson to be learned is that making your own poisons is a very hit-and-miss affair and probably best avoided!

This is a nice little^* book. I felt the blurb on the back says everything I wanted to say about it.

Packed with surprising facts, this delightful and gorgeously designed book will beguile anyone who is curious about weather. Expertly written and beautifully illustrated throughout with colour photographs and original colour artwork, ‘The Little Book of Weather’ is an accessible and enjoyable mini reference on the world’s weather, with examples drawn from across the globe. It fits an astonishing amount of information in a small package, covering a wide range of topics – from weather forecasting and extreme events such as hurricanes and typhoons to climate change and the future of weather. It also includes curious facts, myths, and history – from whether animals can predict the weather to the wintry conditions that helped to sabotage Napoleon and Hitler’s invasions of Russia. The result is an irresistible guide to the amazing world of weather.

* 10cm x 16cm

Another trip on the ‘Serious Scientific Answers to Daft Questions’ merry-go-round from the author of the xkcd online comic. Covers such weighty matters as “How many pigeons would it take to lift an average person?”, “Can all the world’s bananas fit inside all the world’s churches?” and “How many people would it take to build Rome in a day?”

This is an excellent book!

Almost everyone learns Pythagoras’ Theorem at school, which says that when the squares of each of the two shorter sides of a right-angle triangle are added together, the answers equals the square of the longest side. The most familiar example is 3² + 4² = 5² (9 + 16 = 25). Written algebraically

x² + y² = z²

has a solution where x, y and z are all whole numbers –  x = 3, y = 4, and z = 5 – but there are many other solutions, an infinite number in fact.

In 1637 the mathematician Pierre de Fermat famously wrote in the margin of one of his books that he could prove that similar equations but with any power higher than 2, such as

x³ + y³ = z³ ,or x⁴ + y⁴ = z⁴

and so on had no whole-number solutions, but he didn’t have room in the margin to show the proof.

Since then mathematicians have struggled unsuccessfully to find a proof for what has turned out to be the most challenging mathematical riddle ever.

Singh tells the story of how Andrew Wiles, with help from Richard Taylor, finally cracked the problem in 1994. Singh’s account spans the history of mathematics from the early Greeks through the medieval Islamic scholars to the present day. His achievement is not only to put Fermat’s conjecture and the attempts to prove it in that broader context but to do so in a way which is consistently entertaining, even exciting. Moreover he does it with hardly any maths, so anyone without even the vaguest recollection of the maths they did at school will be able to follow the story. It even has a cliff-hanger at the end: will Wiles be able finally to plug the one gap in his proof which he has wrestled with to the point of despair?

Along the way there are the stories of many of the key figures in mathematics over the past centuries. The book shows how single-minded and dedicated the very top mathematicians have to be to explore the most arcane areas of their work. Wiles himself worked on his proof of Fermat, alone, for about seven years. His proof pushed the boundaries of modern mathematics and for the first time demonstrated a link between two obscure and specialised fields. I was struck by a quote from one current mathematician about some aspect of Wiles’ work: “If I had to understand that I’d need to take at least six months reading up and researching it before I could even start.”

So even though I came a bit late to this party reading the book more than 20 years after it was first published, I can say I thoroughly enjoyed this excellent piece of writing about a difficult but fascinating subject.

If you already know the web comic xkcd you’ll know what to expect from its creator and author Randall Munroe. You’ll probably have read his earlier book ‘What If?’, or online extracts from it. In this latest publication Munroe applies his accustomed scientific geekery to apparently everyday problems, exploring solutions which may, or might, or definitely won’t, work. As he’s fond of saying, whatever you do don’t take any of this kind of advice from a webcomic author who quite likes it when things go bang and burst into flames.

So if you want to know how many shots it took Serena Williams to knock down a drone by serving tennis balls at one, or how test pilot and astronaut Col Chris Hadfield suggests you could land a plane on a ski jump, or how you could keep ants out of your house with a lava moat, then this is the book for you.

Title: A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived
Author: Rutherford, Adam
Published by: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson
Year: 2016
First published: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 2016
Date reviewed: 02.17
ISBN: 978 0 297 60937 7

The first half of this book is about the rewriting of the past using genetics, from a time when there were at least four human species on Earth right up to the kings of Europe into the eighteenth century. The second half is about who we are today, and what the study of DNA in the twenty-first century says about oour families, health, psychology, race and the fate of us. [p.9]

But don’t expect a simple linear account. Like genetics (= study of individual genes) and genomics (= study of entire genomes), the story is messy, tangled and confusing. In fact since Watson and Crick’s elucidation of the helix structure of DNA scientists have come to appreciate that our genes are far more complicated than they ever imagined in those early days. Just as the ‘Evolutionary Tree’ and your own family tree isn’t a simple branching structure, so this book branches out, loops back, criss-crosses and overlaps.

You’ll find out how it is that if you are European, you are related to everyone who was alive in Europe only 1,000 years ago (actually, the roughly 80% of those whose offspring survived to today). Go back 10,000 years and you – yes you, me, everyone – is descended from every human alive on Earth at that time. So when a celebrity on TV weeps to find she’s descended from Alexander the Great, or Charlemagne, or Socrates – well, so am I and (if you’re European) so are you.

You pick up other nice insights along the way.

• Icelanders are a rather closed group, and the country has almost complete records of every Icelander since the first settlements. There’s now an app for smartphones which will tell one Icelander how closely related they are to another. It’s popular for dating.
• Charles II of Spain, the last of the Hapsburgs and a sickly, deformed and crazy man, was more inbred than a child of two otherwise normal siblings.
• The ability of adults to digest lactose (milk) has spread in Europeans since the first farming of domesticated cattle about 5 – 6000 years ago – an example of continuing evolution.
• Your ear-wax says a lot about your genetic origins.

Towards the end of the book Rutherford gives a strong debunking of the concept of race, which he explains has no basis in genetics. Relatively small groups of humans migrated out of Africa to populate the rest of the planet, meaning that two black Africans are likely to be genetically more different from each other than a blonde blue-eyed Scandinavian is from a native of Borneo. Genes that we associate with ‘racial’ characteristics can be bred out of a family, or bred back in again, in a few generations.

Rutherford’s writing is authoritative, clear, witty, and informative. Follow him on the journey and you will reach the end impressed by what genetic research has achieved so far but appreciating how almost every new discovery raises even more complex questions.

Randall Munroe is the creator of the web comic xkcd.com, home of all geeks sufficiently socialised to have a sense of humour. In this book he applies rigorous^* logic to analyse the often weird questions people ask him.

Questions like “Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?”, “From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground?” and “Is there enough energy to move the entire current human population off-planet?”. Curious? Intrigued? Read the book!

^* May not actually be rigorous.

Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden explore the role quantum weirdness might play in many processes in living organisms – avian navigation, the sense of smell, photosynthesis and more. The scientific evidence is growing, although as they themselves acknowledge their conclusions and hypotheses are still speculative. I’m sure we’ll hear more about this relatively new branch of science over the coming decades.

The book is mercifully free of any of the mathematics of quantum physics but I think readers with some previous exposure to the ideas and concepts of quantum mechanics would do better than a complete novice.

This is classic David Deutsch. He is a radical realist: there is a real world out there, we can know about it, and there is no limit to our ever-increasing knowledge. He has no time for doubters and in his first chapter he dismisses empiricism, inductivism, instrumentalism, justificationism and more besides, and declares his allegiance to fallibilism, testability of theories, Popper, and the power of good explanations to increase our knowledge of the world. The key to this progress is the scientific method, emerging at the time of the Enlightenment, characterised by a rejection of received authority in many fields, and laying the foundations for what he terms a tradition of criticism (noting the irony in his use of the word ‘tradition’ on this context). In giving short shrift to some major contributions to epistemology Deutsch may appear to be skating over many philosophical difficulties. I know from hearing him speak on these subjects that he is perfectly capable of arguing his position, it’s just that he doesn’t really want to waste time on what in his view are fruitless debates about discredited ways of thinking. Whether you agree with him or not it’s best just to accept his starting point, fasten your seatbelt and get ready to enjoy the ride!

The “Infinity” in the book’s title refers to Deutsch’s concept that ‘we’ are at the start of limitless growth in knowledge. His thesis is that ‘there will always be problems’ [in our knowledge] but ‘problems are soluble’. Writing, numerals, digital computing, DNA are universal in their scope (‘reach’) – they can be applied without limits. He regards people as ‘universal explainers’.

In Chapter 3 he argues his case against two influential but ultimately limiting theories, the Theory of Mediocrity and the ‘Spaceship Earth’ theory. The Theory of Mediocrity is encapsulated in Hawking’s dismissal of life on earth as ‘chemical scum’; Spaceship Earth views our planet as having finite resources which we deplete at our peril. Deutsch counters that intelligent, problem-solving life-forms have the power to change the planet, the solar system, the galaxy. We may not have the knowledge or resources yet but we can imagine how it could be done without violating the laws of physics. He argues that the Earth and its ‘scum’ is very far from typical of the universe, which is almost entirely (to many decimals of 99.99999%) cold, dark and empty. Spaceship Earth does not support human life, as anyone prepared to spend a few days and nights naked in even the relatively benign environment of the English countryside can confirm. All our life-support is human-made: we survive through knowledge not genetics.

The next targets are the non-Darwinian creation theories. Deutsch takes a scythe to creationism, Lamarckianism, and other versions of anthropocentrism. Only strict neo-Darwinism remains – the genes that spread through the population are those that are best at spreading through the population, whether or not it gives them or the organism for which they encode any survival advantage.

By Chapter 6 Deutsch is ready to discuss the “Jump to Universality”. This is how things go from the particular to the universal – writing, numerals, computing and DNA are all examples. He asserts that historically, the achievement of universality in any field has not been a specific goal and at times has been positively resisted. Almost as an aside he points out that analogue systems cannot be universal because they lack the facility for error-correction, so errors accumulate until the system breaks down.

There are still many things for which we do not (Deutsch would say “yet”) have good explantions – creativity, consciousness, qualia. He maintains there has been no real progress towards artificial creativity or intelligence despite 50 years of trying. Artificial creativity – including present-day implementations of artificial evolution – only embody human programmers’ current knowledge. Only when we understand (i.e. have strong explanations for) creativity will we be able to programme it – and it will probably be quite simple!

Next there is a diversion into a discussion of mathematical infinity based on Hilbert’s Infinity Hotel, a chapter on ‘Optimism’ and, in a device borrowed from Douglas Hofstaeder, a chapter called “A Dream of Socrates” where he argues that ethical, moral, and political questions are also susceptible to challenge and error-correction. In the next chapter, “The Multiverse” Deutsch lost me completely. I can handle his explanation of why the ‘multiverse’ theory is the best explanation we have of how quantum physics works (I first came across it in his earlier book “The Fabric of Reality”, and then in subsequent reading on cosmology), but his concept and discussion of ‘frangibility’ was beyond me.

The Deutsch rollercoaster next swoops over representative democracy and why First Past the Post is the best voting model in a developed society; a chapter in which he argues that there are objective truths in aesthetics – beauty is objective – and a discussion of the role of memes in the evolution of culture and of creativity.

The final theme is a discussion of the concept of ‘sustainability’, which in Deutsch’s definition means maintaining things as they are. He equates this with ‘static’ societies, those where the search for new solutions to new problems is discouraged or non-existent. He illustrates this by contrasting two diametrically-opposed assessments of the famous Easter Island statues. In his television series “The Ascent of Man” (1973) Jacob Bronowski wonders why the Easter Islanders’ society ultimately failed, why no-one traded with them, why they didn’t leave, and why they continued building statues until their final demise. The answer from Bronowski and echoed by Deutsch is that they didn’t know how, and their society lacked the knowledge to do things differently.

By contrast, in his programme on Easter Island in the series “The State of the Planet” (2000) David Attenborough uses Easter Island as an example-in-miniature of Spaceship Earth where a society with ‘ample resources’ ‘sustained’ the population until their resources ran out. But as Deutsch points out, ‘sustain’ in this sense also means ‘static’. The Islanders’ society prevented them adapting to their changing world unlike, for example, the inhabitants of the British Isles whose vast forest cover provided a ‘sustainable’ way of life for centuries if not millenia but who found ways to adapt to different ways of life as those resources dwindled. As a result the population of the British Isles is far wealthier, healthier, longer-lived and educated than the Easter Islanders could have dreamed of, but the British have only achieved this by ‘unsustainable’ means.

This analysis, and his general commitment to problem solving, leads Deutsch to conclude that the right response for humanity faced with climate change is to put resources into inventing ways of protecting ourselves against the threats, surviving in a warmer world, rather than trying to reduce CO2 emissions to ‘sustainable’ levels.

There the rollercoaster ride ends, leaving the reader breathless and probably somwhere between awestruck and confused. The central thesis that people are ‘universal explainers’ with no limits to the growth of knowledge and understanding is inspiring, but there are others who do not accept the unlimited capacity of the human brain (see for example McGinn “The Problem of Consciousness”). Maybe we will never understand consciousness and creativity for the same reason a cat will never play chess. And perhaps in some other part of the cosmos there are non-human people who are universal explainers even if humans are not.

This isn’t really a review of “Cycles of Time”: I’m not going to discuss the structure of the book or the quality of the writing. Instead I’ve tried for my own benefit to summarise what I learned from reading it. I hope I’ve done Professor Penrose justice. Any rubbish I’ve written is my responsibility, not his!

A big problem with our current best description of the evolution of the universe is the Big Bang. There are good theories and explanations about why the universe looks like it does 14 billion years on, but what Banged and why is rather vague. An explanation based on a random quantum event is about the best going but it does seem rather unsatisfactory. An associated problem comes from the second law of thermodynamics, which requires entropy (‘randomness’) to be always increasing, which implies it had a very low value at the moment of the Big Bang.

Roger Penrose’s latest book addresses the question “What came before the Big Bang?” For those who don’t know why Penrose’s thoughts are worth considering, I quote from Wikipedia:

Sir Roger Penrose OM FRS (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College. He has received a number of prizes and awards, including the 1988 Wolf Prize for physics which he shared with Stephen Hawking for their contribution to our understanding of the universe. He is renowned for his work in mathematical physics, in particular his contributions to general relativity and cosmology. He is also a recreational mathematician and philosopher.

Although he says he has relegated the difficult maths to appendices I admit I can’t even follow the mathematics (geometry) in the main text. Conformal scaling of tensors in field equations, if that makes sense, is more than I can cope with. But I think I get the general idea. The universe, or spacetime, has a geometry. Not the plane Euclidean geometry some of us learned at school but something much more complex. Penrose’s analysis is based on conformal geometry where shapes and angles are preserved when the underlying ‘fabric’ is distorted. In this geometry, infinity becomes a definite boundary rather than an unattainable end point always approached but never reached.

The universe as we know it is generally accepted to be about 13.7 billion years old. That’s 1.37×10¹⁰ years. Continue for all that time ten times over. It’s now 1.37×10¹¹ years old. Do all those 10¹¹ years ten times over and it’s 10¹² years. Penrose proposes that over an unthinkable timescale of the order of 10¹⁰⁰ years, which he calls an aeon, the universe comes to a final end which is the start of another.

He calls his theory Conformal Cyclical Cosmology. The length of an aeon is determined by the expansion and cooling of the universe, where long after the stars have died and become cold dwarfs or black holes spacetime consists of these cold massive objects and low-energy photons and gravitons. The black holes themselves lose mass by Hawking radiation, which takes place over these vast periods of time. Estimating the length of an aeon at 10¹⁰⁰ years is based on the time it would take for the universe to cool to a temperature at which the largest black holes would radiate their mass away and die with a final ‘pop’.

General relativity implies that massless particles (photons, gravitons) are oblivious to time. And if you can’t measure time you can’t measure distance (trust me on this). So the condition of the universe near the end of an aeon is such that time and distance no longer exist but conformal geometry will still apply. Penrose shows that in these circumstances there can be a smooth and continuous transition from ‘before’ a Big Bang to ‘after’. He even suggests a mechanism which could transfer observable effects from one aeon to the next which could be detectable in the cosmic background microwave radiation.

Penrose addresses the entropy problem I mentioned earlier and gives a fairly detailed analysis of how the far-future phase of the universe can lose entropy as matter is drawn into black holes. But there is one vital part of his analysis (if I understand anything at all about it) which is still purely speculative. His theory requires that over the length of an aeon all the mass of the universe disappears and is converted to massless radiation. There is no evidence to support this idea at the moment, but Penrose suggests that our observational timescale is so short relative to the 10¹⁰⁰ or so years of an aeon that the universe might just not have been around long enough for such a process to become evident.

Although Penrose explains mathematically how certain aspects of a dying aeon could make a smooth transition through a new Big Bang into the start of a new aeon I failed to find an account of what this might involve in physical terms. How does a cold, dark, radiation-filled universe transform into a violent exploding maelstrom of energy? It’s very hard to imagine. In my naive ignorance I feel it would be nice to find an answer in the maths of String Theory and Quantum Field Theory (see for example “The Elegant Universe” by Brian Greene) – which Penrose does not support. Here the universe has several more ‘hidden’ dimensions, and dimensions can have a strange symmetrical property such that whether a dimension’s radius of curvature is defined as R or 1/R its properties are the same. So perhaps at the ‘end of time’ when the radii of curvature of spacetime have become infinitely large the geometry transforms into infinitely small radii and the next Big Bang takes it from there. But this is just my whimsical fancy – don’t pay it any attention. Unless of course it turns out to be right, in which case please send the Nobel Prize invitation c/o this website.