Last night, at a ceremony in London, Gavin Pretor-Pinney was named as this year’s Royal Society Winton Book Prize winner. His winning book, The Wavewatcher’s Companion, is his second, and followed naturally in the footsteps of The Cloudspotter’s Guide. He told me “many waves are revealed by clouds”, and that the act of watching clouds and waves is “rounding and calming”.

When I asked if he had a trilogy in him, Pretor-Pinney said he was uncertain but that: “what interests me is the ordinary, finding what’s exotic in our surroundings, seeing the miraculous in what is around us.”

The Wavewatcher’s Companion is an interesting choice. More contemplative in tone than the others, the author takes the reader on a stroll rather than pursuing his subject with the cantering speed of many other popular science books. See my review here

Richard Holmes, chair of the judges, said: “At the heart of the scientific enterprise is a desire to explore our world, and to understand it better. The Wavewatcher’s Companion used relatively straight-forward science to transform our perspective on the world around us, both visible and invisible, in a completely radical way. From Mexican waves to electro-magnetic waves, it gave us a new delight and fascination in our immediate surroundings. We were inspired to see waves everywhere and we were given an almost poetic vision of a dynamic universe. It is a book of old-fashioned charm and wit, provocatively organized and illustrated, and marvellously deft with its presentation of hard modern science. In short, it is a delightful winner.”

The ceremony was hosted by the President of the Royal Society, Sir Paul Nurse, and attended by all the shortlisted authors. They read excerpts from their books and participated in an audience-led Q&A.

A key discussion both in the ceremony and concurrently on twitter was about why female authors are so lacking in this prize – indeed only one female author has appeared on the shortlist in the past five years (former Nature news editor Jo Marchant, for the wonderful Decoding the Heavens. You can read her blog post on that here. No one had the answers, but judge Cait MacPhee admitteed that the judges were aware of this. Though there were two female authors on the longlist, the panel simply didn’t get as many submissions from female authors.

Sir Paul Nurse praised all the books on the shortlist, saying: “I look with admiration on the authors. Not only are science books pleasurable but crucial for the proper running of our society.”

Ruth Francis, Nature’s Head of Press, is reviewing all the entries shortlisted for the Royal Society’s science book prize. She’ll be reading one per week and posting her thoughts on the Nature news blog every Tuesday between now and the prize ceremony on 17 November.

Humankind’s view of the future has changed throughout the ages. As we have learned more about the depths of our past, our ability to peer further has improved: with a knowledge of deep time and past changes has come a greater awareness of future possibilities. The scientific and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century not only sped up progress, but also gave us the tools to imagine how our world could be different, rather than the repeating seasonal cycles to which we’d previously been limited. So argues Jon Turney in the early chapters of The Rough Guide to the Future.

Once he has laid out how humans have viewed the future in our history, and come to terms with various models for prediction and the growing numbers of think tanks that try to do it, Turney sets out what makes a successful prediction alongside some — sometimes unsuccessful — predictions from the past. One of the strengths of this book is that it teaches us how to evaluate future visions before putting them in front of us.

Jon Turney believes that distant ‘futurecasting’ is difficult — although he does go on to suggest possibilities himself. It is easier to imagine a near future, improved by technology that we already know, and this is where this book is most rewarding.

These chapters cover science, population, climate and energy — all topics that will be familiar to the reader. Whether his focus is prioritizing energy efficiency or computer scientist Gordon Moore of Moore’s law fame — who predicted in 2005 that transistors as small as atoms could exist in the next 10 to 20 years — the breadth of research and ideas is awe-inspiring. Later prediction, though important, is less certain, rather like a weather forecast that will be far more reliable for the next 24 hours than for the next 6 days.

The pages are punctuated with explanatory boxes for ideas and predictions from futurologists, scientists and other experts who tell us their highest hopes, their worst fears and their best bets for what will actually occur.

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Ruth Francis, Nature’s Head of Press, is reviewing all the entries shortlisted for the Royal Society’s science book prize. She’ll be reading one per week and posting her thoughts on the Nature news blog every Tuesday between now and the prize ceremony on 17 November.

Forty-eight years ago, an unassuming physicist drove to Princeton to present a controversial theory on the origin of mass. His visit triggered a hunt for a particle that has so far taken decades, cost billions of dollars and simultaneously raised and dashed the hopes of a generation of scientists.

Unlike the other books on this year’s Royal Society book prize shortlist, Massive follows one narrative thread, tied not to one central character but to one theory. Although it opens with Peter Higgs driving to Princeton and ends with him 15 years into retirement in Edinburgh, the particle named for him is the focus of the text.

Ian Sample had unrivalled access to the players in the hunt for the Higgs boson and recounts a gripping tale, littered with intimate insights into the participants: one lab head and senior figure in the Manhattan Project, for instance, was also a competent cowboy who could “lasso any of his three sons when they were young” and would happily roll up his sleeves to mend or even make machinery for a particle accelerator. Another challenges his team to push their accelerator to its limits, saying he’ll get naked in the control room if they succeed; he later backs down and rewards them in bubbly!

The physics is challenging — even for the physicist at the centre of the idea. Peter Higgs himself is quoted on the progression of his theory: “People assumed I’d understood whatever came next. But increasingly I didn’t. When it came to [later developments] I wouldn’t just struggle, I’d sink.” Rather than shying away, however, Sample laces the theory between the human stories, and never pitches the language at anything beyond lay terms.

We read about the highs and lows experienced in the search. Bottles of champagne are seen off as particles that support the theory are glimpsed, and depression moves in when projects are cancelled or delayed. In other instances, hopes are fleeting as further investigation fails to confirm sightings of the elusive particle.

Massive is a page-turner, at times thoroughly absorbing, and I challenge any reader not to be captivated by the ongoing hunt for the Higgs as it unravels.

Previously on Ruth’s Reviews

The Wavewatcher’s Companion

The Disappearing Spoon

Through the Language Glass

Alex’s Adventures in Numberland

Ruth Francis, Nature’s Head of Press, is reviewing all the entries shortlisted for the Royal Society’s science book prize. She’ll be reading one a week and posting her thoughts on the news blog every Tuesday between now and the prize ceremony on 17 November

Maybe you’ve sat by the sea and watched waves lapping up onto the beach, or showering rocks with their foamy spray. Pleasant as these contemplative or dramatic moments are, most of us will up sticks, walk home and not give waves an extra thought.

Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s The Wavewatcher’s Companion will take you deeper into the world of waves than you imagined possible. As I set sail I was uncertain his one central theme could sustain my interest across ten chapters, but my fears were unfounded.

Each chapter has a theme weaving through it. On the topic of information waves we may meander past hippos calling to one another and starlings flocking above the Roman rooftops. With a lovely symmetry this chapter opens with the euphoria induced by Mexican waves in football stadia and closes with waves of panic caused by H1N1 swine flu that originated in Mexico.

Whether the focus is sound waves or shock waves, Pretor-Pinney litters the text with pithy asides and quirky thoughts, and the author’s analogies are often humorous and always elucidate. I shall not forget the image of a line of terrified aliens running across the desert, hitting tarmac and refracting — or changing direction as the change of surface means they change speed. He uses excerpts of poetry and images too for context.

If I had one bugbear it is the variable quality of some of the images. The diagrams are hugely helpful in explaining sometimes complex ideas; a description of two moths fluttering their wings and creating overlapping waves in a paddling pool is accompanied with an illustration that ensures the concept is crystal clear. But the black and white printing does an injustice to some of the photographs and this seemed a shame. Much better to reduce these in number and use the colour printed insert in the centre of the book for these.

The laid-back tone of the founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society makes this a gentle but informative read. And it made me want to go surfing!

Previously on Ruth’s Reviews

The Disappearing Spoon

Through the Language Glass

Alex’s Adventures in Numberland

Ruth Francis, Nature’s Head of Press, is reviewing all the entries shortlisted for the Royal Society’s science book prize. She’ll be reading one per week and posting her thoughts on the news blog every Friday between now and the prize ceremony on 17 November

2011 is the International Year of Chemistry, and I have read a lot of grand claims in the past 10 months about the relevance and excitement of the field. I must confess that these claims have failed to excite me, and as such I approached The Disappearing Spoon – ostensibly a book about chemistry – with trepidation.

But Sam Keane’s enthusiasm is contagious. His awe of the elements, which developed as he regularly dropped thermometers and collected the mercury with his mother, is ever-present as he recounts the human stories behind their discovery or description.

Though the orientation in chapter one seemed technical, the author’s breathy excitement carried me through to the adventures beyond. These adventures include the race to discover and name artificial elements, which reached its peak in the Cold War; battles over mining in the developing world; and encounters with scientists and adventurers whose names we know, but whose stories we don’t.

The section on tin is prefaced by the tragic tale of Scott and Shackleton’s race to the South Pole. We meet Cooper, of Cooper pairs (those famous superconducting electrons); the man who put the Bose in Bose-Einstein condensates (that famously odd quantum matter); and delve into their work via anecdotes about their lives.

The book often mentions high school chemistry. Either I was very badly taught or my memory is far worse than I thought, but I remember little of high school chemistry. Keane’s scenic drive around the periodic table not only filled in some gaps in my knowledge but piqued my interest far more than I expected.

The Disappearing Spoon takes in the elements and their properties, chronicles discovery, adventure and ongoing saga; in short there is something for everyone here.

Previously on Ruth’s Reviews

Through the Language Glass

Alex’s Adventures in Numberland

Ruth Francis, Nature’s Head of Press, is reviewing all the entries shortlisted for the Royal Society’s science book prize. She’ll be reading one a week and posting her thoughts on The Great Beyond every Tuesday between now and the prize ceremony on 17 November

Back in 1858, William Gladstone wrote a three-volume tome on Homer. Volume three contains a chapter concerning the limited use of colour in the Iliad and the Odyssey. But why did the ancients use less colour in their literature? Did they perceive colour differently? Not give it much importance? Gladstone’s writing triggered a debate about whether nature or culture shapes and controls language.

The debate continues today, having swung back and forth between the two camps. In Through The Language Glass, Guy Deutscher sets out to educate the lay reader, illustrating the limitations in agreeing wholesale with either one side or the other.

Colour isn’t the only thing influenced by language. Outlining the arguments surrounding the languages of colour, spatial awareness and gender, the author takes the reader through the looking glass to turn familiar concepts on their heads. Deutscher believes, contrary to popular theory, that our mother tongue does affect the way we relate to our world: “habits of speech can create habits of mind that affect more than merely the knowledge of language itself,” and he sets out to persuade us of this.

In the Homeric example of colour use, we see that this muted world is reflected in texts from entirely different civilizations in the same period. Does this mean that the eyes of the ancients were less developed than our own? Or was language affected by the limitations of the culture of the time, for example an emerging dyeing industry meant fewer colours could be synthesized and so fewer labels for colours had been developed.

Travelling lightly through the analyses of various linguistic theorists, he argues that our concepts of colour can increase our sensitivity to certain colour distinctions. While nature lays out the spectrum of colour, cultures decide how we divide and label the spectrum.

His analogies are vivid here and in the chapters on space and gender, and I found myself thinking more about the labels we use for the world around us as a result.

The reader may feel like the Red Queen; running through various theory in order to conclude that language evolution occurs as a result of both nature and culture. No surprise in this destination but the storytelling en route is strong enough that we enjoy the journey all the same.

Previously on Ruth’s Reviews

Ruth’s Reviews:Alex’s Adventures in Numberland