Review by Booklist Review
Rutherford, a geneticist, and Fry, a mathematician, reveal our common scientific misconceptions, explain why they exist, and discuss how scientists have found ways to overcome these preconceptions and biases. The authors have a humorous and engaging writing style, posing both thoughtful and amusing questions to the reader throughout the text, while also explaining phenomena like belief perseverance and confirmation bias that impact scientific research. They tackle such questions as do humans really have free will, is there such a thing as perfectly round, and how do we track time? The book is teeming with curious facts and interesting anecdotes around topics including animal form and function, the end of the world, and animal senses and perception. Detailed sidebars (many more than a page in length) are included throughout to highlight specific scientific examples; footnotes appear throughout to add detail and author commentary. The book concludes with a list of web links to references for specific research, articles, and studies cited in the text. The science is detailed and comprehensive in this fun and fascinating read, originally published in the UK.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Rutherford and Fry (cohosts of the podcast The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry) offer an informative and entertaining look into the science behind everyday phenomena and questions (e.g., do humans have free will? do dogs feel love for their owners?). Human intuition was invaluable when a person's primary focus was avoiding predators and finding food to stay alive, but in the modern era--as society at large begins to understand the often-counterintuitive scientific basis for how the universe functions--human senses and instincts sometimes get in the way of comprehension, Rutherford and Fry contend. Fry (a mathematician who specializes in patterns in human behavior) and Rutherford (a geneticist) are well-equipped to guide readers through this maze of thought, perception, and knowledge. Their writing is clever and personable, and they incorporate immersive stories of culture, art, and rudimentary science to explain seemingly complex topics (e.g., the theory of time) in consumable morsels. They reference several academic papers, but only to highlight some of the most entertaining research that has been done in the name of science. VERDICT This book will appeal to fans of Rutherford and Fry's podcast and to general popular science readers.--Cate Triola, Univ. of Minnesota
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Two veteran science writers address a host of big concepts. Geneticist Rutherford and mathematician Fry begin by describing a library whose books contain every possible combination of letters, spaces, commas, and periods. "Every possible" means "infinite," so the library would fill far more than the cosmos. Infinity is a fascinating concept, vividly explained by many authors. Rutherford and Fry, however, employ it as a metaphor for the complexity of the universe, the difficulty of communication, the evolution of language, and the mechanics of Darwinian evolution. In the chapters that follow, the authors answer intriguing, if often oddball questions. What would an alien look like? Deeply unimaginative, Hollywood gives us either humanlike beings with swollen heads or "insectoid, human-sized, phallic-headed, acid-blooded, armour plated" monsters. The authors emphasize that almost all earthly life is tiny; bacteria dominate. The total mass of plants is vastly larger than that of animals. Basic science reveals that on any planet, flying creatures will have wings; living in liquid, they'll be torpedo-shaped; on land, they'll have legs, maybe four, six, or more. Some readers may be surprised to learn that two-legged animals are rare. Telling time seems straightforward, but it's actually quite complicated. An earthly day is not only not 24 hours long; an average day is not 24 hours either. The sloshing of the Earth's liquid core, the tug of the moon and planets, and even winds make the time of one earthly rotation "totally unpredictable." Atomic clocks are the most accurate time-keepers, losing "less than a second every 15 billion years." Throughout history, predicting the end of the world has been irresistible; surveys today reveal that 1 in 7 people think it will happen during their lifetime. After an amusing review of doomsday cults, the authors reveal the facts: The sun is slowly getting hotter and will render the Earth uninhabitable in roughly 1 billion years. Compelling popular science with an ambitious underlying theme. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
