Product Description

Is 96 percent of the universe missing? Was the 1977 signal from outer space a transmission from an alien civilization? This book presents thirteen modern-day anomalies that may become tomorrow's breakthroughs. Spanning fields from chemistry to cosmology, psychology to physics, it captures the excitement and controversy of the scientific unknown.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4646 in Books
• Published on: 2010-02-04
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Features

• New
• Mint Condition
• Dispatch same day for order received before 12 noon
• Guaranteed packaging
• No quibbles returns

Review
'Whether we believe we're stardust or nuclear waste, this book keeps us hooked...' --Independent on Sunday

`Outstanding non-fiction reading' --Esquire

`Impressively knowledgeable, articulate' --Independent

`An admirably clear and clever writer'
--Evening Standard

Customer Reviews

13 Things - Medieval Edition
Its pretty clear Brooks is no scientist. He seems to lump the scientific method and the myriad advances made through its implimentation into a tangible, fallible anthropomorphic contruct; silly science, it can't even explain where most of the universe is!

"The effects of homeopathy don't go away under rigorous scientific conditions"

Yes, yes they do - key word up there: rigorous.

"The US Department of Energy is re-examining cold fusion...because the evidence is too solid to ignore"

All 'evidence' to date has been either irreproducible or discredited - cold fusion is rather like 'Pascals Wager' - the possibility of sucess is so tempting that dellusion quickly follows.

"The placebo effect is put to work in medicine while doctors can't agree on whether it even exists... "

Really, who are these doctors? The existence of the placebo effect is so well known that it is used as a standard control in any decent drug trial.

"In an age when science is supposed to be king, scientists are beset by experimental results they simply cannot explain"

The implication that science is somehow broken or damaged by unknowns is rife and this book does very little to set that straight. Science thrives on unknowns. Ok, often gaps in our knowledge exist, they may or may not get closed, old theories become replaced by new, or go through iterative improvements, but the point is this: A gap does not imply that all science is broken, in crisis, inadequate or impotent - New Scientist is quickly becoming known in scientific circles as a magazine that will eagerly sell out this idea in favour of an attention-getting headline, or book blurb.

As food for thought on this, here is a medieval edition of 'things that don't make sense':

1) Lightning & thunder
2) Seeing visions after eating rye bread.
3) How rain can fall endlessly out of thin air.
4) Why we don't fall off the earth
5) Rotting
6) Disease
7) Recovery from disease
8) Tides
9) Comets
10) Solar Eclipses
11) Earthquakes
12) Witchcraft & floatation
13) Life

Very good in places - but completely ruined by homeopathy...
I thoroughly enjoyed about half of this book. The early chapters on physics & astronomy discuss some difficult concepts in a very approachable way, and the chapters on evolution are also very good. There is some really excellent popular science writing in these pages. Unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably in a book of this type, there are a few low points as well...

To be credible as a book about "scientific mysteries", the unifying themes should still have been the need for extraordinary evidence to support extraordinary claims, and the scientific method. This is, after all, a book with the word "scientific" on the cover. The tone of the writing in places is credulous where it should have been questioning.

But the real show stopper for me was the chapter on homeopathy. I strongly suspect that this was deliberately put at the end of the book. I (and many other readers, I suspect) would have stopped reading at that point if it had been any earlier. The last line of the preceding chapter serves as a warning to what follows: an examination of "science's least favorite anomaly". How something for which there is no credible scientific evidence *at all* qualifies as a scientific anomaly is quite beyond me. The studies and "evidence" discussed in this chapter are (without exception) discredited, or flawed, or small, or unrepeated, or statistically inadequate, or all of these. The unquestioning and naive tone of this chapter discredits the entire book, which is a great shame. To paraphrase the chapter title, homeopathy is patently absurd - and it won't go away because (i) people want to believe, (ii) it's a multi-billion dollar industry, and (iii) authors like Michael Brooks (who should know better) like to report the views of people with weird ideas - in the interests of being controversial.

I was left with a single example of homeopathy having a real effect: it unfortunately ruined this book. If only Michael Brooks had limited himself to writing about 12 Things That Don't Make Sense, I would have given this 4 stars.

Mind-boggling
I loved this book. It really makes you realise how little we understand about the universe and everything. It was detailed enough not to be condescending, but simple enough for a lay-person to understand. Like many others, I was disappointed by the homeopathy chapter (for the same reasons as everyone else!), hence only 3 stars. To get a non-scientist interested and amazed by the puzzles the world has to offer us, it's great though.