"How Life Works" by Philip Ball

This book radically transformed my understanding of cellular biology. 

I'm not a biologist but I was a science teacher and I taught that the genome programs cells; that sections of DNA unwind and are used as templates to make strands of messenger RNA which then float out into the cytoplasm and are in turn used as templates for making proteins. That's not false. But, as Ball points out, that doesn't explain how some of my body cells develop into neurons and others, which have exactly the same DNA, into skin cells and others into blood cells and others into heart, lung, liver, spleen ...

By describing recent research on protein synthesis and embryo development, Ball shows that:

• Genes rarely have a unique function. The same gene which does one thing in a fruit fly can do something totally different in a human.
• Many morphologies are the result of combinations of genes.
• Genes can be 'switched' off or on by proteins. 
• Messenger RNA molecules seem to be made up of bits of heterogeneous nuclear RNA fragmented and then stitched together.
• The cells in multicellular life forms operate differently from bacterial cells.  
• Proteins fold because some sections of the protein chain attract water, others repel it. This also means that proteins can embed themselves into a cell wall.
• Changes in gene function can be caused by signals coming from outside the nucleus or even outside the cell itself. These signals can be electrochemical (as in neuron transmission), chemical (eg hormones), or even mechanical (eg when a cell is stretched). 
• Many developments involving proteins are combinatorial. This reduces 'noise' and makes the system more robust. If one enzyme doesn't work, another may be found to do the job. Molecular promiscuity with combinatorial fuzzy logic might be the only way for genetically identical cells to work together in diverse but specialised states. This also means that protein networks can develop new functions without losing old ones, which enables evolution to happen.
• Multicellularity has only happened twice: for plants and for animals (fungi don't count). There were significant changes in the ways that genes developed and communicated after the evolution of mammals and particularly placental mammals.  
• The epigenetic landscape is composed of a variety of bifurcating river valleys down which the cell tends to progress in a process called canalization. This landscape develops as the cells grow producing "a delicate dance of contingency and inevitability” like the growth of a city. (Ch 6) The valleys in the landscape can act as 'attractors' but genetic changes can alter where these attractors are.
• Cells have an awareness of their environment. Perhaps awareness of one’s surroundings is a fundamental feature of life.
• A random mixture of two morphogens, one an activator and one an inhibitor, in which the inhibitor diffused faster than the activator, creates patches in which one or the other morphogen predominates. This is responsible for eg patterned skins, the arrangement of hair follicles or feathers, the fractal branching of lung tissue, and even fingers (and fingerprints). 

This book also explained how a living cell, which appears to flout the second law of thermodynamics which insists that in an equilibrium system randomness tends to increase, can become increasingly organised. It points out that there are systems in physics, such as phase separation and crystallisation, which are inherently organised and that life appears to use these.  

I also learned:

• How tortoise shell cats get their markings and why 2999/3000 are female. 
• Why identical twins can be different from birth.
• Why planarian flatworms are effectively immortal. 
• How a human embryo develops and how an undeveloped embryo can be found inside the brain of itself developed twin. 
• That there is a gene called Sonic hedgehog. 
• How cells can 'request' the blood system to provide them with capillaries.
• Why humans mostly have their liver on the right, and their stomach and spleen on the left.

It was hard work. The information is very condensed and I needed to concentrate and take notes. But in the end I was rewarded in spectacular fashion. This is one of those books that provokes a paradigm shift, a revolution in the way one thinks.

Other brilliant books by Philip Ball that I have read include:

• Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another 
• H2O: A Biography of Water
• The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
• The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China
• Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different 

Selected quotes:

• “Looking to the genome for an account of  how life works is rather like ... looking to a dictionary to understand how literature works.” (Prologue)
• “There has never been a machine made by humankind that works as cells do.” (Prologue)
• “Life is a hierarchical process, and each level has its own rules and principles.” (Prologue)
• “The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance.” (Ch 1)
• “Cells commit to fates by noticing and assessing what their neighbours are doing. It's rather like voting with a show of hands: we might sneak a look at how others are voting before deciding.” (235)
• “Life doesn't make systems that can do or construct a single thing, that produces entities ... that embody a wide range of options ... In normal circumstances, the system converges on the outcome(s) favoured by natural selection, while still maintaining enough phenotypic variability to be evolvable. Evolution does not know ... what it is going to need tomorrow - so it must keep its options open.” (Ch 7)
• “Life ... can be considered as a computation that aims to optimise the acquisition, storage, and use of ... meaningful information.” (Ch 9) 

A superb book. August 2024; 460 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Beyond Weird" by Philip Ball

This book is about quantum physics. It contains all the usual suspects: wave-particle duality, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Schrodinger's Cat, the Many Worlds Interpretation. According to Ball these are fundamentally inadequate attempts to view the quantum world - which underpins (and is coherent with) the everyday world - in images that rely on everyday understandings. He throws in some of the modern research on entanglement, superposition, wavefunction collapse and decoherence. And, in the end, he concludes that possibly, quantum physics is a theory of information.

It is a comprehensive overview of the field and, so far as I can judge, it is fair to all the many different interpretations of what quantum physics means. It even asks whether the theory is ontic (dealing with reality) or epistemic (dealing with what we know). I found it tough going in places and there are some bits that I still don't understand (and I used to teach quantum physics at secondary school level). But there were other moments when Ball's explanations led me a significantly deeper understanding than I had before and for that I can only be grateful. And impressed. If he can deliver even a little greater understanding about this tough subject, it is a remarkable achievement.

Selected quotes:

• “Quantum theory ... is a theory about information. ... it asks what a theory of knowability can look like.” (p16)
• “What do we mean by ‘is’? ... As for what an electron ‘is’, all we can talk about for sure is what we can see and measure.” (p60)
• “Everything that seems strange about quantum mechanics comes down to measurement. If we take a look, the quantum system behaves one way. If we don’t, the system does something else.” (p78)
• “Niels Bohr ... wasn’t naturally gifted as a writer - he would draft and redraft endlessly without much obvious benefit to the prose.” (p104)
• "Whatever the question, the answer is ‘Yes’ (unless it’s ‘No’)" (chapter heading)
• “Quantum mechanics might seem ‘weird’, but it is not illogical. It’s just that it employed a new and unfamiliar logic ... with different customs and traditions and with its own beautiful internal consistency.” (p128)
• “It is not obvious why any of the properties that things have at the everyday scale should remain meaningful properties at the microscopic scale. Some don’t. Electrons don’t have a colour.” (p129)
• “No one fully understands how quantum computers work.” (p278)
• “In science ... it’s as worthwhile for an idea to be productive as it is for it to be ‘right’.” (p285)
• “Might it be that non-locality is simply in the nature of things, and relativity is the only thing that limits its influence?” (p309)
• “There’s no guarantee that the world’s innermost workings will fit a language developed mostly to conduct trade, courtship and banter.” (p324)

October 2022; 354 pages

Other books reviewed in this blog about science and scientists can be found here. 

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Great Arc" John Keay

A comprehensive and sometimes fascinating account of the project to map, by triangulations, most of British-controlled India, beginning in 1800 and ending in the early 1840s. Tigers weren't the only problem the Survey faced. Most of the surveyors suffered terribly from dysentery, malaria and a variety of jungle fevers. Triangulation requires one to see survey poles and flags from a distant theodolite so trees had to be chopped down, towers built (sometimes they piggybacked on religious monuments (such as the Jain statue shown below), to the anger of the locals; sometimes the surveyors were accused by local lords of spying on their women from the towers) and sometimes villages moved. Indian dust sometimes intervened anyway. And there are intrinsic problems with mapping which need correcting; these include:

• thermal expansion of the metal chains used
• refraction in the air causing sight lines to curve
• plumb lines don't hang true when they are near mountains

The first leader of this endeavour was a modest man called Lambton, who got on well with his staff and others (especially the ladies). His work was critical to the success of the mapping and he has been almost totally forgotten; the author uncovered his forgotten grave. His successor George Everest (pronounce Eve-rest) was a horrible man who took all the credit for the Surveys successes and blamed his subordinates when things went wrong; he was a dreadful man-manager and he has had the highest mountain on the world (which he never saw) named after him. Life is so unfair.

Selected quotes

• "Most of the rest of Africa remained shrouded in that mysterious 'darkness' which was simply Europe's ignorance." (Foreword)
• "Giving credit to his subordinates would not come naturally to George Everest." (Ch 1)
• "In 1802 'sea-level' was construed as high water, although later in the century a mean between high tide and low tide would be adopted as the standard." (Ch 3)
• "The people had not previously come across a European - let alone a breeding pair complete with offspring." (Ch 3)
• "If Hathipaon has a ghost, he may be sporting woolly underwear." (Ch 10)
• "By razing whole villages, appropriating sacred hills, exhausting local supplies, antagonising protective husbands and facilitating the assessment of the dreaded land revenue, the surveyors had probably done as much to advertise the realities of British rule and so alienate grassroots opinion as had any branch of the administration." (Ch 11)

By Kuldeep S - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72787861



It was regarded as the tallest monolithic statue until 2016.

It shows Jain guru Bahubali who stood still to meditate for so long that a vine grew around his legs.

June 2022; 172 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Underland" by Robert Macfarlane

A travel book in which the author explores a variety of subterranean landscapes including cave systems and glacier moulins as well as those that are manmade, such as the catacombs below Paris and mine-workings and underground storage facilies.

Much of the joy of this book lies in his descriptions. Here is one example, from the first page:

• “Late-summer heatwave, heavy air. Bees browsing drowsy over meadow grass. Gold of standing corn, green of fresh hay-rows, black of rooks on stubble fields. ... A swan flies high and south on creaking wings.” 

There is much of this throughout the book, combining detailed observation with precise vocabulary and perfect metaphor.

There’s a lot of science (from an experiment to detect dark matter, buried in an English mine, to geology to climate change), much of it viewed through a quasi-mystical lens. Most of the journeys that Macfarlane makes are, for him, deeply spiritual experiences, and he connects them with legends about the underworld, and more recent stories - perhaps legends in the making - such as the Victorian obsession with a hollow earth.

I found many of Macfarlane’s journeys horrific. He squeezes into impossibly narrow tunnels, descends gulping sinkholes, wades starless rivers and wanders underground labyrinths, sometimes describing his terror, and I really didn’t want to share his experiences. Even when he is above ground, climbing glaciers and mountain sides, often alone, sometimes in heavy fog, far from any prospect of help, I was terrified on his behalf.

My favourite part was his description of the underground urban explorers in the Paris catacombs: perhaps because I am fundamentally a townie I could understand the romance and excitement of this below-street counterculture (though I still wouldn’t go down there: too scary!).

He makes the point repeatedly that geology has a much longer time span than humans and that all our little lives and dreams will disappear into nothingness. But then he also talks about the ‘anthropocene’, the new geological era characterised by human activities, and implicitly suggests that we shouldn’t produce so much plastic waste, or consume so much oil, or mine so much, or bury long-half-life nuclear waste. “Viewed from the perspective of a desert or an ocean, human morality looks absurd - crushed to irrelevance.” (Ch 1)

There is a great deal to enjoy in this book ... but there is a great deal. I thought it went on too long. It belaboured the environmental message and over-romanticised the ‘little people’ who lived simple lives in impossibly beautiful (and often dangerous) landscapes - and still burned oil and produced wastes. And, at the end, there were just too many tunnels to squeeze through, too many mountains the climb, and the last ones just sounded the same as the earlier ones.

But the descriptions were beautiful.

Selected quotes:

• “An aversion to the Underland is buried in language. In many of the metaphors we live by, height is celebrated but depth is despised. To be ‘uplifted’ is preferable to being ‘depressed’ or ‘pulled down’. ‘Catastrophe’ literally means a ‘downwards turn’, ‘cataclysm’ is ‘downwards violence’.” (Ch 1)
• “To perceive matter than casts no shadow, you must search not for its presence but for its consequence.” (Ch 3)
• “If we’re not exploring, we’re not doing anything. We’re just waiting.” (Ch 3)
• “All cities are additions to the landscape that require subtractions from elsewhere.” (Ch 5)
• “A densely stacked modern cityscape leads, inevitably, to a new geography of inequality ... Broadly speaking, wealth levitates and poverty sinks.” (Ch 5)
• “Urban exploration mandates itself as a radical act of disobedience and liberation: a protest against state constraints on freedom within the city.” (Ch 5)
• “The city was full of portals - service hatches, padlocked doorways, manhole covers - that lay unseen in plain sight.” (Ch 5)
• “The leather noise of their wings kept time for me.” (Ch 5): Bats emerging from a cave at night
• “That cenote was understood by the local indigenous people to be an access point to the Mayan underworld, to ‘xibalba’ ... ‘place of fear’ ... a brutal realm ... heavily staffed by demons ... Just to reach Xibalba, you had to cross a river filled with scorpions, a river filled with blood, and a river filled with pus. If you were lucky to make it that far, you were then tested in the six deadly Houses of Trial.” (Ch 5)
• “The sound of this starless river is like none I have ever heard before. It has volume. Its volume has hollowness. Each sound has its echo, and each echo its interior.” (Ch 6)
• “In the Celtic Christian tradition, ‘thin places’ are those sites in a landscape where the borders between world or epochs feel at their [page break] most fragile. Such locations were ... often to be found on westerly headlands, islands, canvas, coasts and other brinks.” (Ch 8)
• “It is so cold the ink in my pen freezes in under a minute.” (Ch 10)

Shortlisted for the 2019 Waterstones Book of the Year

April 2022; 425 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Where do camels belong?" by Ken Thompson

 This brilliant book by an ecologist is a polemic against the division of species in 'native' and 'alien'. He shows that the idea of 'naturalness' is wrong-minded by asking where camels belong: in the middle east or in North America (where they evolved and then went extinct) or in South America (where llamas and alpacas etc represent the greatest species diversity from the camel root) or in Australia (the only country where camels are feral).  He suggests that the myth of nativeness assumes something special about this moment in time, the writer of a key text, “Elton believed firmly that species belong to wherever they happen to be right now, irrespective of length of tenure or of where they had evolved or migrated from. More than that, he believed that belonging confers rights of occupancy, that these rights extend indefinitely into the future, and that natives are morally superior to aliens.” (Ch 2)

He goes on to suggest that the talk of 'invasive' aliens is based on a very few cases where an introduction (normally by humans) caused damage to an ecosystem and that normally the arrival of aliens increases biodiversity, or would do except that “Invasion biologists worry a lot about biodiversity, but only native biodiversity; introduced species are not allowed to contribute to biodiversity. alien species can never add to biodiversity.” (Ch 12). He suggests that most examples of harm are caused because human agency alters ecosystems and this provides an opportunity for new (alien) species to thrive where the established species can't (because their environment has been changed which means that “Blaming an alien for filling the gap left by declining natives looks like shooting the messenger.” (Ch 4)

He provides oodles of evidence and gives a short (and easy-to-read) course in biogeography and ecology. He demonstrates that the evidence for alien harm is often based on dubious science: “I was going to say that ... I debunk the myth that alien species constitute the second largest global threat to biodiversity (after habitat destruction). But on reflection I think that assertion has been debunked so often ... that it no longer deserves the status of a myth, and is best described merely as a straightforward lie.” Ch 2)

He lambastes the ridiculous ideas built upon the idea of nativeness as enshrined in laws which don't take account of the fact that most 'invasions' are done without (conscious) human agency: “Nowadays, for plants with the right kind of seeds, socks are a major dispersal pathway.” (Ch 1)

It's very convincing ... and made even better by an author who can really write well and is often very funny

And, of course, it has huge implications for humanity. Who is 'entitled' to the United States: the post-Columbian immigrants or the Native Americans? And the perjorative language used again 'invasive alien' plants and animals resonate quite strongly with the way some right-wing politicians talk about human immigrants. 

Selected quotes:

• “Conservation is a value-laden activity ... ‘Nativeness’ appears to offer the prospect of unambiguous attributes that make something worth conserving; or, in the case of its absence, worth exterminating, or at least controlling. To question this approach is close to heresy.” (Introduction)
• “Species are born, and then they die. That is, is they evolve by natural selection from earlier species, and eventually they go extinct.” (Ch 1)
• “By definition species evolved in one particular spot, but later they may spread to occupy a much wider range.” (Ch 1)
• “Brown tree ... snakes climb pylons and frequently short out power lines, causing power cuts. In fact somewhere on Guam experiences a snake-related power cut about every other day.” (Ch 3)
• “The modern world is essentially a mosaic of new ‘anthropogenic biomes’” (121) This is why “in the last few thousand years, and especially in recent centuries and decades ... being a rat or a weed has turned out to be the golden ticket in life.” (Ch 7)
• “The Wildlife and Countryside Act Schedule 9 ... lists the species that cannot legally be introduced into the wild ... it now includes several species of Cotoneaster ... spread far and wide by birds, none of which can be persuaded to read Schedule 9.” (Ch 8)
• “The difficulty here is the inevitable collision between the law, which deals in black and white absolutes, and ecology, where a grey fog predominates.” (Ch 8)
• “Assisted migration of endangered species is a small step in the direction of allowing them to compete on a playing field that still slopes uphill, but slightly less steeply than before.” (Ch 10)
• “Sometimes it seems many conservationists would prefer a species to go extinct than to survive somewhere it doesn't ‘belong’.” (Ch 10)

Great fun to read ... and eye-opening.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God January 2022; 223 pages

"The Virus Hunters" by Joseph B McCormick and Susan Fisher-Hoch

Ebola. Lassa Fever. AIDS. These are viral diseases responsible for horrible deaths. The authors have worked in Africa and Asia on the front-line of the war against these terrible diseases. The book, written in 1996, is not up to date with the latest treatments, or the more recent outbreaks, but it provides a compelling and highly readable account of how doctors, virologists and epidemiologists work in sometimes primitive conditions in scarcely-functioning underdeveloped countries to understand the methods of transmission of these diseases and to find ways of curing or, if possible, preventing them. The tenacity, skill and raw courage of these people is remarkable and the story that they tell is fascinating. And there are some great observations and sometimes some very funny moments.

I suspect some people might object to this book because it portrays various African and Asian countries as underdeveloped, frequently chaotic, and in dire need of Western help. I understand that this narrative reinforces a potentially racist perspective, suggesting that these countries are backward, uncivilised and primitive. On the other hand, it appears to be an honest reflection of the societies at that time, often torn by civil strife and misgovernment, and attempting to cope with rapid urbanisation and overwhelming poverty. It seems to me that it is better to be realistic about situation and to provide what help can be given, rather than to argue about who is to blame for what. Surely what we should do is try to alleviate the suffering of our fellow humans. These medics did that.

Selected quotes

• "These microbes do not lurk in some dark corner, waiting to pounce, in ambuscade for human prey. It is we who interfere with their habitat, not the other way around. Left to their own devices, they reside successfully - and often silently - in biological balance with their natural hosts. Only when man invades their environment does he become their prey." (Preface)
• "Ebola can produce a throat so swollen and painful that a victim of the disease can't even swallow his own saliva. When you peer down such a throat, you see what could be mistaken for a raw hamburger." (Prologue Nzara, 1979)
• "The first thing you have to do is become an instant expert. You have to get your hands on everything you can find on the subject and read it, for the most part en route to the site of the outbreak." (Of Epidemiology and Potato Salad)
• "Zaire was at peace now, but it was a peace of the dead and the dying." (The Death of a Nurse from Yambuku)
• "The advice the map offered wasn't exactly reassuring ... 'The delineation of international boundaries must not be considered authoritative'." (The Battle Commences)
• "The pace of the railroad challenged the snail for slowness."  (The Battle Commences)
• "Beer serves as a barometer of how an African economy is faring. When the beer goes, you know that things have hit rock bottom."  (The Battle Commences)
• "Anyone who had power and failed to use it was like as not to lose it forever."  (The Battle Commences)
• "He was laconic to the point of being mute. His silences had something belligerent about them, though." (The Ebola Trail)
• "Medicine ... reminds us: we make feeble gods." (Of Souls and Centrifuges)
• "Getting aloft seems a miracle unlikely to be matched by landing in one piece on the same trip." (Nzara Revisited)
• "There was no way I would find anyone willing to transport me. ... And then, lo and behold! Deus ex machina. Or if not Deus himself, then his representative. For who, of all people, should appear ... but the archbishop of Canterbury! And what's more, he has his own plane." (Sue's Story)
• "I was born in August of 1940 in Denby, England, in the middle of the only bombing raid the town experienced during that long, hot summer." (Sue's Story)
• "As we stepped out onto the runway we were immediately enveloped by a heat so intense asnd humid that it felt like walking through glue." (The Lassa Project Revisited)
• "Nothing moved except the flies and the mosquitoes, and the lizards chasing them over the walls and into the light fixtures." (Juju)
• "Sitting around the table were men of few words, many of which were now expletives." (Ebola in Virginia?)
• "In the Falkland Islands, mutton is called '365' because it is served every day of the year." (Desert Fevers)

An incredible book. August 2021; 365 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" by Marc J Seifer

Tesla was, to say the least, eccentric. Perhaps he was "the quintessential mad scientist" (C 45). Perhaps he was a misunderstood genius; perhaps he was a charlatan. In this odd biography Seifer attempts to write  "the biography of a genius."

Born a Serb in Croatia, Tesla studied in Serbia and Paris before making his way to New York to work for Edison. He was fascinated by electricity, in particular by electromagnetic induction in which a changing magnetic field induces electric current to run through a wire. This is the fundamental principle used in generating electricity, it is used to transform voltages up and down, and it is used in creating electromagnetic waves which enable you to send electrical signals from transmitter to receiver by electromagnetic waves, including radio waves.

When he arrived in New York he was a pivotal player in the 'battle of the currents': Edison championed direct current (dc) electricity; Westinghouse was in favour of alternating current (ac); the great advantage of ac is that it can be easily transformed to very high voltages which can be transmitted with negligible loss of power over great distances and then transformed down to safe usable voltages; it is the basis for most modern grid systems. Tesla had realised as a young student that ac had an advantage over dc in that an ac  generator doesn't need a component called a commutator as a dc generator does. Tesla was therefore an ac convert and his invention of three-phase ac, after leaving Edison and setting up as an independent inventor,  was the key component of the Westinghouse victory.

One of the grisly side-issues in the battle of the currents was Edison's attempt to brand ac as more dangerous than dc by having it employed to execute prisoners. An Edison associate called Brown manufactured electric chairs and experiment on electrocuting animals and sought employment as a prison executioner. The first prisoner to be capitally punished by electrocution was subjected to a drawn-out, much bungled affair. (C 6)

This led to fame and fortune for Tesla who began a lifetime habit of living in hotels, hobnobbing with rich and famous (John Jacob Astor III (as well as being one of the richest men in the world at the time he was a bit of an inventor including "a bicycle brake ... a storage battery, an internal-combustion engine, and a flying machine"; C 17), John Pierpoint Morgan and many luminaries of the science world), working all hours to come up with even more exciting inventions and writing patents, and fighting patent litigation battles against other inventors he claimed were pirating his patents (or those who claimed they had priority over him). The intricacies of the patent battles, fully described in the book, are a bit of a yawn.

As a very young man Tesla invented the Tesla coil, a coil of wire used to produce high-voltage high-frequency ac electricity and a key component in the early wirelesses. Thus, he claimed priority over Marconi, who used a Tesla coil in his early wirelesses. Tesla also claimed to have invented the ability to transmit much further using ground waves. Marconi's triumph in their endless battles over patents and priorities embittered Tesla and, perhaps, turned him from eccentric to madman. As a succession of investors discovered before pulling out, Tesla's Leonardo-like inability to focus on a single project to completion and his inability to produce something merely good, led to a succession of never-actually abandoned projects. His work degenerated into showmanship and endless promises of revolutionary new designs and world-beating systems which were incomparably better than anything yet seen but never actually materialised. This was the polar opposite of the Edison system of 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration (Tesla criticised Edison by saying "If he had a needle to find in a haystack he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw"; C 4) and Tesla, for all his genius, for all his spent his mature years dodging from hotel to hotel, his bills unpaid, sponging off friends, pleading for funds, and feeding pigeons.

The biography embodies the restless energy of Tesla, his chaotic lifestyle and his eccentric approach to life. I was surprised when, about half-way through, it moved from a conventional approach to quoting conversations verbatim; some of these are clearly 'reconstructed'; it is as if it has become a novel based on the life of Tesla at these points. For me the biography failed to make sense of the chaos of Tesla's life and it certainly failed to explain in a way I could understand and appreciate the physics behind Tesla's inventions (and I taught Physics for 33 years so I have some idea of electromagnetism). The moments it came alive were in the sympathetic portrayal of the character of the man, especially in old age, his triumphs forgotten, still working hard to pay his debts, still working hard to persuade investors of the value of his latest scheme.

In the end, Tesla was a bit of a loony. These tendencies started early when he seemed to be claiming that some of his nearly perpetual-motion systems used energy very similar to 'vril' the mysterious force invented by Lord Lytton in a work of fiction called 'The Coming Race' which became a favourite of occultists and led to a drink called Bo-Vril. When studying Hertzian electromagnetic waves he decided the Hertz was wrong and that radio waves were longitudinal. (C 11)His pursuit of perpetual motion disregarded the laws of thermodynamics; later he claimed to have invented particles and waves that travelled faster then light in defiance of Einstein's relativity: "the various discoveries and suggestions inherent in Tesla's theory violate not only accepted theories such as relativity and quantum physics but also, on the surface, common sense." (C 44)

This looniness went a bit sour when he became a devotee of eugenics: "Tesla supported the idea of 'sterilizing the unfit and deliberately guiding the mating instinct'." (C 46) He himself was. probably, celibate. "Tesla denied himself certain pleasures as a way to supposedly establish total control over himself. And yet Tesla was a complete slave to his idiosyncrasies and to a cauldron of phobias." (C 46)

There are also plenty of other weirdos, such as Abraham Spanel, an Odessan Jew who fled Russian pogroms in 1905 and ended up as president of the International Latex Corporation in Delaware, now Playtex.

Some brilliant bits:

• "Other bogus inventors of the day included Gaston Bulmar who tried to sell General Electric (GE) special pills that turned water into gasoline." (C 7)
• "Michael Pupin ... wanted to go to Cambridge to learn under James Clerk Maxwell, but he found upon his arrival that Maxwell had been dead for four years." (C 8)
• "For exercise, the inventor would walk '8 - 10 miles per day' ... Later, Tesla would add to his repertoire the squishing and unsquishing of his toes one hundred times for each foot each night." (C 43)
• Tesla said: "I'll never be rich unless the money comes in the door faster than I can shovel it out the window." (C 44)

June 2020; 470 pages

"The Invention of Nature" by Andrea Wulf

The core of this book is a biography of Alexander von Humboldt, a remarkable Prussian polymath who knew Goethe (and Schiller) in Jena and Weimar, who assisted the revolutionaries in the French revolution, who explored northern South America, who inspired Bolivar and Darwin and who laid the foundations of what we know know as ecology.

He must have been a remarkable man: hugely intelligent, hugely energetic, scarcely sleeping, unceasing, talking endlessly; fantastically impressive but I'm not sure he could have been a friend. He didn't really seem to empathise with people. He was glad when his mother died (partly because it released him to spend his inheritance on his passions) and a letter of consolation to his sister-in-law failed spectacularly to console. Though supposedly attractive to women he wasn't attracted by them and chose as his companions young men. But, above all, he was noted for talking non-stop and never letting anyone around him get a word in edgewise. Perhaps he was better off communicating through his hugely best-selling books (which were so expensive to publish that they ruined him).

Humboldt is important partly because of his ability to communicate his ideas through his books but mainly because of what those ideas were. He was the first to really understand the inter-connectedness of nature. This is the reason why this book is only partly a biography of Humboldt. It also explores, in a chapter for each of them, the influence of Humboldt's ideas on:

• Darwin for evolution by natural selection,
• Thoreau on the interplay of science and art: "his friend and Concord neighbour, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, described Thoreau as 'an intolerable bore' who made him feel ashamed for having money, or a house, or writing a book that people will read." (C 19)
• George Perkins Marsh, the US pioneer of the fight against deforestation, who believed that "if nothing changed ... the planet would be reduced to a condition of 'shattered surface, of climatic excess" (C 20)
• Ernst Haeckel, who coined the word ecology
• John Muir who fought for the first US National Park as a way of preserving the wilderness.

As a young man, Humboldt lived in Jena, where Schiller worked at the university and Goethe often visited from nearby Weimar. (C 2) Goethe was interested in the underlying patterns of animals, what he called the urform. "He distinguished between the internal force - the urform - that provided the general form of a living organism and the environment - the external force - that shaped the organism itself." (C 2)

His first exploration started in Venezuela and early on he saw a lake whose water levels were falling and he realised the part that intensive agriculture and deforestation had played in that. When he got to the rain forest he realised that the animals were competing for food, predating on one another, and that even the trees were competing for light. He discovered the Brazil nut which he introduced to Europe. (C 5) In what would become Ecuador he climbed Mount Chimborazo, at the time thought to be the highest mountain in the world, as high as anyone else had at that time but he couldn't reach the summit because his way was blocked by a huge crevasse. But it was staring at the surrounding landscape from this vantage point that showed him the zones of vegetation and allowed him to later divide the wold into climate zones. (C 7)

Back in Europe he met 21 year-old Simon Bolivar, a rich, spoilt, womanising playboy; Humboldt inspired him so he would later abandon his life of pleasure and return to his native South America to lead the fight for independence from Spanish colonial rule (Bolivar later decreed that Bolivia should plant a million trees.). (C 9) He then embarked on a grand tour with another in a long line of good-looking, unmarried men, this time the chemist Gay-Lussac. (C 9) By luck, Vesuvius erupted when they arrived in Naples. (C 9) Later he met Alessandro Volta by Lake Como (C 10)

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein just four years after the publication of Humboldt's tale of exploring South America; she made the monster declare to Victor that he wanted to escape to "the vast wilds of South America". (C 13)

Coleridge was inspired by Humboldt (C 13), as was John Lyell who wrote Principles of Geology which in turn inspired Darwin (C 13); in this book he theorised that climate is affected by tectonic movements. Humboldt knew Gauss and George Canning. (C 14)

For Humboldt it was all about connections. "He connected the sudden appearance of a new island in the Azores  on 30th January 1811 to a wave of earthquakes that shook the planet for a period of more than a year afterwards, from the West Indies, the plains of Ohio and Mississippi and then to the devastating earthquake that destroyed Caracas in March 1812. This was followed by a volcanic eruption on the island of Saint Vincent in the West Indies on 30th April 1812." (C 15)

He turned sixty during his second great expedition through Russia and into Siberia. "Humboldt celebrated his sixtieth birthday with the ... man whom history would remember as Vladimir Lenin's grandfather." (C 16)

Selected quotes:

• "When nature is perceived as a web, its vulnerability also becomes obvious. Everything hangs together. If one thread is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel." (Prologue)
• "Goethe began to fling his arms around whenever he went for a walk ... he had discovered ... that this exaggerated swinging of one's arms was a remnant from the four-legged animal." (C 2)
• "When he heard that a farmer and his wife had been killed by the lightning, he rushed over to obtain their corpses." (C 2)
• "One morning Humboldt placed a frog's leg on a glass plate and connected its nerves and muscles to different metals in sequence ... but generated only a discouraging gentle twitch in the leg. When he then leaned over the leg in order to check the connecting metals, it convulsed so violently that it leapt off the table.  ... Humboldt realised that it had been the moisture of his breath that had triggered the reaction." (C 2)
• "If everything was connected, then it was important to examine the similarities and differences without ever losing sight of the whole." (C 2)
• "Kant insisted that knowledge was a systematic construct in which individual facts needed to fit into a larger framework in order to make sense." (C 2)
• Goethe's "Faust, like Humboldt, was driven by an endless striving for knowledge, by a 'feverish unrest'." (C 2)
• "Like a wine connoisseur, he sampled the water of the various different rivers. The Orinoco had a singular flavour that was particularly disgusting, he noted, while the Rio Apure tasted different at different locations and the Rio Atabapo was 'delicious'." (C 5)
• "Humboldt had discovered the idea of a keystone species, a species that is as essential to an ecosystem as a keystone is to an arch." (C 5)
• "One particularly horrendous story involved a missionary who had bitten off his kitchen boy's testicles as a punishment for kissing a girl." (C 8)
• "Humboldt had written a book about the universe that never once mentioned the word 'God'." (C 18)
• "Neighbours reported that they saw the old man on the street, feeding the sparrows in the early morning hours." (C 20)
• "Many noticed how impossible it was for Humboldt just to sit." (C 20)
• "His finances remained precarious. He didn't even possess a complete set of his own books because it was too expensive." (C 20)
• "'Solitude', Emerson warned him, 'is a sublime mistress, but an intolerable wife'." (C 23)

Humboldt is also explored by the BBC Radio 4 In Our Time programme in a broadcast on 28th September 2006; it can be accessed here> https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003c1c2

A little bit more than a biography. May 2020; 337 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"What If?" by Randall Munroe

A weird science geek sort of book which takes hypothetical scenarios and uses science to predict what would happen. "If you suddenly began rising at one foot per second, how exactly would you die?" That sort of thing. The question about what would happen if all your DNA disappeared, whilst fanciful, did at least spark a discussion of chemotherapy which is designed to interrupt cell division thus targeting rapid dividers such as cancel cells ... and the cells that line the stomach and hair follicles which is why you get nausea and your hair falls out. (p 135) But when he calculates Yoda's power output based on the size of the plane he lifts from the marsh and how high and how fast he lifts it, and finding the appropriate planet's gravity from the fan site Wookiepedia (p 144), I start to realise that there are geekier geeks than me.

Some of these scenarios are interesting (though almost all are incredibly unlikely if not impossible). As with all books such as this one I discovered random nuggets of gold:

• Following the ice age species returned to New England at different rates: "when Europeans arrived in New England, earthworms had not yet returned." (p 17)
• "It seems reasonable to assume that however the human story plays out, in a million years it will have exited its current stage. ... Our most lasting relic will probably be the layer of plastic we've deposited across the planet." (p 21)
• "If your phone has a barometer in it ... you can download an app and actually see the pressure difference between your head and your feet." (p 74) although I tried this and with the app and phone I was using there was no difference. Perhaps I'm too short (1m85).
• All the hard drives in the world used to store the data on the internet could fit into a single oil tanker. (p 87) That was reassuring.

Some clever stuff but ...

February 2020; 295 pages

"The Double Helix" by James D Watson

The classic account of the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA for which Watson and Francis Crick won a Nobel Prize. This account is a real warts-and-all account of scientific discovery. Watson regularly admits he doesn't understand the maths for some of the work, and that he is a poor experimenter who blew up a Chemistry lab by heating Benzene using a Bunsen burner. He seems to spend most of his time thinking about pretty girls which is a feature he has in common with almost all of the other young men researching science. His sexist and misogynist attitudes make for difficult reading nowadays even if, in the epilogue to this memoir, he concedes that the by then dead Rosalind Franklin was a superb experimenter whom he greatly undervalued and that her behaviour, which he regularly considers unacceptable, might possibly have been a consequence of the difficulty facing women trying to be first class research scientists in those days.

Watson and Crick are neither supposed to be working on DNA (indeed Crick's boss Bragg has angrily told himk to concentrate on finishing his thesis and Watson is misusing the his funding which is for a different problem at a different Uni in another country!) but they keep tinkering with models. Nothing seems to be working. They (and everyone else except, it seems, Franklin) are convinced that the structure is helical but is in one, two, three, four or five strands twisted together. They and the rival groups working on the same problem are convinced that the backbone of sugars and phosphates is in the inside. But when Franklin's photo B clearly reveals helicity Watson starts to develop a two-strand model, which allows replication, and starts to think of the strands as held together by the bases. He assumes the bases are paired and that Adenine is held to Adenine by hydrogen bonds, as are Thymine to Thymine, Cytosine to Cytosine and Guanine to Guanine. Then a chemist friend tells him that the structures he is using are of the wrong isomers. Using the right isomers means that this like-to-like pairing (AA, CC, TT and GG) makes the essential double helix buckle; it would no longer be fundamentally crystalline. Furthermore there would be no reason why experimental results showed, as they did, that there was always the same amount of adenine and thymine and of cytosine as guanine, even though the ratios of A to C or T to G might vary. "Suddenly I became aware that an adenine-thymine pair held together by two hydrogen bonds was identical shape to a guanine-cytosine pair held together by at least two hydrogen bonds." A double helix structure in which the ladder steps are A-T or C-G explained why the proportions of A and T are always the same as well as explaining the X-ray crystallography data. And a quest as exciting as any Hollywood blockbuster is complete.

Other moments:
"One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that ... a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid." (C 2)
After Crick had so upset his boss he had been ordered to stop work on DNA: "News of the upset confirmed the fact that Francis might move faster if occasionally he closed his mouth."
On getting a textbook for a Christmas present. "The remnants of Christianity were indeed useful."
On discovering a co-worker in his room with a girl: "The presence of popsies does not inevitably lead to a scientific future."

Lively and entertaining. February 2019; 128 pages

"Milk" by Mark Kurlansky

Another food-themed book following Kurlansky's phenomenal Salt and Cod. As with Cod, I found the endless recipes rather tedious; the interest in the book lies with the fascinating stories that he tells.

Our drinking of milk is abnormal:

• “Lactose intolerance is the natural condition of all mammals. Humans are the only mammals that consume milk past weaning, apparently in defiance of a basic rule of nature. ... As most babies get older, a gene cuts off the production of lactase and they can no longer consume milk. But something went wrong with Europeans - as well as Middle Easterners, North Africans, and people from the Indian subcontinent. They lack the gene and so continue to produce lactase and consume milk into adulthood.” (C 1)

Kurlansky moves from here to consider the history of milk:

• “The Sumerian culture ... was among the first to milk domesticated animals.” (C 1)
• “ Archaeological finds suggest that humans have been herding animals for ten thousand years, and they must have been living close to them for at least that long because animal pathogens started mutating into animal human diseases such as smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis ten thousand years ago. Was it then that milking started?” (C 1)
• “Records dating back to the beginnings of civilizations reveal that even back then there were many formulas and medicines for ‘failed’ mothers.” (C 2)

He then considers milk products such as yoghurt, butter and cheese

• In Persian “there is an expression for mind your own business ... that translates into go beat your own yoghurt.”(C 2)
• “The solid cheese that remains after the whey is removed can then be preserved through brining to produce a cheese like the Greek feta, which is one of the oldest cheeses in the world.” (C 3)
• “More sophisticated variations of cheese were developed in Europe, where damp, cool cellars were available for aging.” (C 3)
• “Like the Greeks, the Romans made rennet from figs. They also made it from artichokes.” (C 3)
• “French butter makes better pastry the American butter because it contains more fat and less water.”  (C 4)
• “When the Romans first came to the Dutch lands in 57 BCE, according to Julius Caesar, they found a cheese-eating people.” (C 7)
• “Roquefort-sur-Soulzon has fewer than two hundred inhabitants ... only cheese that matures in the natural caves under the village ... can be called Roquefort. ... the circulation of air and the humidity trapped in the rocks creates a unique mold-growing environment.” (C 18)

He particularly considers milk and milk products in India where cows have been sacred for millennia and China which has very little dairy tradition.

• “Krishna is said to have originally been a cowherd. He also goes by the names Govinda and Gopala which literally mean ‘friend and protector of cows’.”(C 17)

Finally he considers aspects of the modern debates over milk: hormones, GMO and organic:

• “GMO grains, less expensive than non-GMO grains as well as insect-resistant, have literally saved the struggling family farm.” (C 20)
• Organic dairy farms must “refuse antibiotics to a cow with an infection” (C 20)
• “You could not feed the world organically.” (C 20)

Other fascinating facts

• “Christians in the Middle Ages thought that milk was blood that had turned white when it travelled to the breast, which is why milk was banned on meatless holy days.” (C 1)
• ”Young whales have to build a layer of fat quickly in order to survive, and so whale milk is 34.8 per cent fat, as opposed to human milk, which is only 4.5 per cent fat.” (C 1)
• “Before sugar cane and beet sugar became ubiquitous, honey was the number one sweet available. Milk was a close second, though, which is why the two are often grouped together. ... In the Old Testament, there are twenty references to milk and honey.” (C 1)
• “The last aurochs died in a seventeenth-century Poland.” (C 1)
• "the left breast ... was thought to contain the best milk because it was closest to the heart.” (C 2)
• “Many animals, especially cats, are great yoghurt lovers.”
• “Animals lactate in the spring and summer, the worst possible time in the hot climate of the Middle East.” (C 2)
• In early Christian communions, “the sip that represented the blood of Christ was often taken from a goblet of milk.”
• “The Turks also had iced fruit beverages, which they called sorbet. Persians called it sharbate” (C 9)
• “At the end of the eighteenth century, a Dublin hospital had a 99.6 percent infant mortality rate.” (C 10)
• “In the sixteenth century ... the Dutch, through the use of carotene, developed the first orange carrot. Previously, carrots were either pale yellow or purple.” (C 17)
• “The word ‘punch’ is derived from the Sanskrit for ‘five’, so called because it had five ingredients.” (C 17)
• “Desi is a Sanskrit word that denotes native to the subcontinent.” (C 17)
• “Italy does not have indigenous buffalo - they were brought in Roman times, probably as draft animals.” (C 17)
• “Cows are the leading source of hamburger meat in America.” (C 19)
• “The milking parlor of choice is a rotary milker ... In most milking parlors, cows grow restless, stamp their feet, and defecate, but this is not so on their rotating trip, which they thoroughly enjoy. When they get back to the starting point and have to step off, they clearly show their disappointment at leaving.” (C 19)
• “A dairy cow burps and farts between 300 and 400 pounds of methane gas every day. And that figure does not include the roughly equal amount that emanates from her manure.” (C 19)

As with his other books, Milk is interesting in its own right, but the little sidefacts make it fascinating.

January 2019. Thank you Lucy for buying me this book for Christmas.

"Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life" by Peter Godfrey-Smith

This is a beautifully written book about the intelligence of octopi and cuttlefish which are cephalopods. “If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is ... because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.” (p 9) Along the way it becomes an enquiry into what it means to have a consciousness. “For some animals, there's something it feels like to be such an animal. there is a self, of some kind, that experiences what goes on.” (p 10)

It starts tracing the evolution of the nervous system. After all, even bacteria can react to stimuli and therefore may be said to have some version of sentience:

• “The bacterium will swim in a straight line as long as the chemicals it senses seem better now than those it sensed a moment ago. If not, it’s preferable to change course.” (p 17)

The crucial factor is that the bacteria can in some sense detect the actions they themselves take. This feedback loop between sensory input and action and sensory input is the beginning of self awareness. And because one bacterium can detect things that other bacteria do it is the beginning of communication and socialisation. So when cells begin to get together in multicellular organisms we have the rudimentary mechanisms for a nervous system.

• “The receptors on the surfaces of bacterial cells are sensitive to many things, and these include chemicals that bacteria themselves tend to excrete” (p 18)
• “If a chemical is both produced and sensed by a particular kind of bacteria, it can be used by those bacteria to assess how many individuals of the same kind are around.” (p 18)
• “Chemicals that are made because they'll be perceived and responded to by others ... brings us to the threshold of signalling and communication.” (p 19)

At this stage I was getting excited. After all, Andy Clark in Surfing Uncertainty, working in the world of artificial intelligence, suggests that a computationally frugal solution for intelligence involves an organism making an expectation and comparing the sensory data with the expectation so that a simple error reduction algorithm can improve the expectation. This involves a feedback loop and here we see something similar being evolved from the simplest forms of cellular life.

G-S gives an example in technology developed to aid the blind. There is a system that uses a camera to change vision into tactile sensations on the skin of a blind person. The person soon learns to experience “objects located in space” BUT “only when the wearer is able to control the camera.” (p 80)

Of course, multicellular life had to evolve before cell specialisation could start developing proper nervous systems. But this wasn't as difficult as it might at first look. It has evolved independently more than once. “The transition to a multicellular form of life occurred many times, leading once to animals, once to plants, on other occasions to fungi, various seaweeds, and less conspicuous organisms.” (p 20)

And once predation begins (probably in the Cambrian) each organism must be aware of the others which adds further urgency to the evolution of sensory-action feedback loops. “From this point on, the mind evolved in response to other minds.” (p 36)

The only thing that makes animals different is that they have greater capacity to take actions and so need to be even faster at sensing their own actions. “All living things affect their environment by making and transforming chemicals, and also by growing and sometimes by moving, but it is muscle that gives rise to rapid, coherent action on large spatial scales. It makes possible the manipulation of objects, the deliberate and rapid transformation of what is around us.” (p 82) This “interaction between perception and action” is critical. (p 83)

And the next stage for feedback loops is our own thoughts. G-S suggests that the internalization of language, “Vygotsky’s transition ... was also an important evolutionary event.” (p 152) He spends some time on inner speech:

• “When we look inside, most people find a flow of inner speech, a monologue that accompanies much of our conscious life.” (p 138)
• “Ordinary speech functions both as input and output ... We both speak and hear, and we can hear what we say. Even talking to yourself out loud can be a useful way of approaching a problem.” (p 144)
• “In speech, the creation of an efference copy enables you to compare your spoken words to an inner image of them; this can be used to work out whether the sound ‘came out right’.” (p 145)
• This then means that we can “put together sentences that we don't intend to say, sentences and fragments of language that have a purely internal role. ... We can put things in order, bring possibilities together, can list and instruct and exhort.” (p 147) This is particularly useful for Kahneman’s [ref Thinking, Fast and Slow] “System 2” thinking, the “slow, deliberate style of thinking we engage in when we encounter novel situations ... [which] tries to follow proper rules of reasoning, and tries to look at things from more than one side.” (p 147)
• This resonates with the “workspace theory of consciousness” (p 149)
• Inner speech is especially prominent when “we bring attention to bear on our own thought processes, reflect on them, and experience them as our own.” (p 152)
• “When you write something for yourself to read ... it is a communication between your present self and a future self.” (p 155)

There is also an interesting argument about ageing. Why do species age at different rates: trees last hundreds of years, humans perhaps a hundred, cephalopods mostly two? The idea is that “When molecular accidents put mutations into the population ... the late-acting mutations will be cleaned out less efficiently than early-acting ones.” (p 166) “So mutations with good effects early in life and the bad effects later in life will accumulate; natural selection will favour them.” (p 167) Therefore some populations have evolved such that the bad mutations tend to affect them later in life ... and it seems like spontaneous ageing. The life-span is thus partly a matter of evolutionary chance and partly governed by the balance of reproduction and predation. When the octopus lost its hard shell it became much more susceptible to predation which meant that it had to live its life a lot quicker because, sooner or later, a sharp-toothed fish would eat it. Presumably humans are mostly prey to diseases which, sooner or later, will get them, so they are able to evolve genes which allow then to fight the diseases for a while even at the cost of dying later.

Other thoughts from this brilliant book:

• Cuttlefish sometimes deeply ignore visitors to their watery world. “Being ignored so deeply makes you wonder if you are entirely real in their watery world, as if you are one of those ghosts who does not realise they are against.” (p 118)
• “When animals did crawl onto the dry land, they took the sea with them. All the basic activities of life occur in water-filled cells bounded by membranes, tiny containers whose insides are remnants of the sea.” (p 200)

A readable and intensely thought-provoking book. March 2018; 204 pages

The author has now written a sequel: Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God