"Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) grew up in Ripon, a part of Yorkshire blessed with a unique but rather alarming geology. Deep vertical pits are liable to appear without warning in the ground, swallowing up homes and gardens in seconds. It is quite possible that the memory of these holes inspired Alice's fictional fall 'down, down, down' the seemingly bottomless rabbit hole. After all, as Ted Nield points out, Carroll's fantasy was originally titled Alice's Adventures Under Ground. But Nield's real interest lies in geology, not literature. Why, he asks, are the rocks of Ripon so prone to sudden collapse? To answer this, you have to drive out of Ripon and head west to the Pennines, the backbone of England. Gradually the fertile fields with their oak trees and hedgerows give way to moorland from where you can look down across the lowlands to Ripon. If you take a walk up the heathery slopes and stand on a rough lump of millstone grit, says Nield, 'you are climbing the exhumed topography of Pangaea'."

It's a fascinating book and well worth reading. My review was in Saturday's Guardian and you can read it online here.

Isaacson also had privileged access to a cache of family correspondence which was kept under lock and key until 2006, in accordance with the will of Einstein’s step-daughter Margot, so he can righful claim to have new material. He makes good use of these personal documents, although I suspect much of interest remains. We will have to wait for future volumes in Princeton's excellent Collected Papers for the full picture.

You can read my review here.

'Early one freezing January morning in 1896, a massive explosion ripped through the Tylorstown Colliery in the Rhondda Valley. The force of the explosion blew the roof off pitshaft number 7 and sent a “black tornado of dust up through the shafts”. A quick count of the missing miners’ lamps suggested that more than 100 men were below. In addition, there were the boys, known as “the trappers”, employed to open and close the thick wooden doors in the pitch-black tunnels.'

Read the rest here.

“The whole thing took about 20 minutes,” he said later. “I just needed scissors and forceps.”

Apparently, Abrams keeps the eyes in a bottle in a New Jersey bank. He told one of Einstein’s biographers that “when you look into his eyes you’re looking into the beauties and mysteries of the world.”

(Okay, so these aren’t really Einstein’s pickled eyes in this picture. After my biography of the relativity maestro was published my sister gave this to me as a delightfully ghoulish gift. But of course it’s the thought that counts.)

Eyes and seeing are the subject of two very different but equally fascinating new books that I’ve been reviewing. They are: The Eye: A Natural History by Simon Ings, and Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture by Stuart Clark.

Simon Ings tells the “sprawling and epic story” of the eye – a 538 million-year history from the crystal eyes of the prehistoric trilobites to our very own “squishy vertebrate eyes”.

On the way he explores the physics of other more exotic eyes, such as that of the dragonfly Anax junius. This creature is blessed with the densest compound eye on the planet – made up of no less than 28,500 “ommatidia”, or mini camera-type eyes. Spare a thought for the poor naturalist who had to count them all! Among the other weird eyes he discusses is the brittlestar (Ophiocoma wendtii) which “is one huge complex eye, its whole surface punctured by little eyespots linked by nerve bundles running just under the skin”.

There’s no doubt that The Eye: A Natural History is a feast of science and history. But for my taste it’s rather too rich a diet. The encyclopaedic coverage of the book tends to weaken the narrative. But if you’re looking for one big book to tell you everything about the eye, then this may well be the one for you.

Stuart Clark’s study is aimed at a more scholarly market. But if phrases like “the language of veridicality” or “ocularcentrism” don’t put you off, then this fascinating cultural history has much to offer.

His theme is how people in Europe came to distrust the evidence of their own eyes in the early modern period (the 15th to the 17th centuries). The veracity of vision was unsettled by beliefs about how demons could trick our eyes.

According to Clark, people viewed the Devil as “a consummate still life artist, able to deceive the viewer into confusing an image of something for the thing itself”.

Apparently one of the Devil’s wickedest wiles was the illusory stealing of penises.

From madness and magic to dreams and demons, Vanities of the Eye is a detailed and densely argued account of the visual culture of this formative period. Clark’s findings will make a significant contribution to our understanding of the rhetoric of the Reformation and the scepticism which fuelled the Scientific Revolution. It is an impressive piece of research and a book which will open your eyes to a new aspect of intellectual history.

Most of us take seeing for granted. After all, what is there think about? You open your eyes and it’s all, well, there. But as both of these books show, vision is a complex and subtle process. And seeing has a compelling history – both biological and cultural.

You can read the published review for the Guardian here.

I used to be professionally concerned with vision – I was a photographer.

This was one of my more commercially successful pictures, taken in Somerset.

(And just in case anyone wonders: No, we don’t all live in thatched houses in England.)

There’s more of my photos on Flickr if you’re interested. I keep meaning to add some more…

Remember the bamboo I mentioned in my first TNB post? Well, it’s now planted and doing fine.

Which is more than can be said for my back after excavating the hole in our back garden. The ground turned out to be mostly brick and stone. I guess that’s what happens if you buy a house built on industrial land.

Actually some of the stones in the hole were rather beautiful pebbles.

I’ve often wondered how long it takes a river or the sea to create such perfectly smooth pebbles. Not quite as long, perhaps, as it took nature to come up with the eye...

[originally posted on The Nervous Breakdown]

Well, maybe suffering is a bit harsh - but we've got the builders in our house. They've been here 6 weeks and 4 days - and believe me, I am counting the days...

Have you tried writing to the accompaniment of a hammer-drill? On second thoughts: suffering is definitely the right word.

Anyway, apologies for a general lack of communication on my part. To make amends here is a piece I did on John Gribbin's latest pop science best-seller The Universe. It's a cool book - lots of stuff on cosmology and the quantum wonderland. Enjoy.

If you're looking for something to read (hopefully not to the sound of hammer-drills) you could do worse to check out some of the recent paperbacks I've been reviewing - here and here and here.

Got to go now - I think they've just drilled through the water main...

[originally posted on Myspace]

I also thought I'd tell you about a really great book I've just been reviewing – The Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations. Ok, so the title doesn't sound so hot, but believe me this is a wonderful book. Medical historians WF Bynum and the late great Roy Porter spent fifteen years accumulating quotes on science. This is the splendid result - to my mind, it's a lot more than just a reference book for it really opens up the cultures of science and allows you to dip into some of the most fascinating debates in human history. 

I also like the way they haven't just included quotes by famous scientists. There are ones from writers, poets, and critics. Passages from Max Born stand next to Borges, Frederick Soddy next to Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz: "Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?"); and Hans Bethe is alongside the Bible, which would have brought a wry smile to the face of the physicist who revealed the secret of the sun's energy.  

The great German writer and Romantic scientist Goethe is well represented. They missed one of my favourites: "Life divided by reason leaves a remainder." But this was new to me: "Mathematicians are like a certain type of Frenchman: when you talk to them they translate it into their own language, and then it soon turns into something completely different."

For some reason Einstein only gets three or so pages of quotes, whereas Newton gets more than eight pages. William Blake (half a page) would have been displeased: "Pray God us keep / From single vision & Newton's sleep!"  

This is one of my favourites from Einstein: "I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."

On the subject of the future, there's this classic from quantum guru Niels Bohr: "Predictions can be very difficult – especially about the future." By the way, just in case you wondered (and I know Steven Hall did), Bohr is responsible for my profile quote too. 

There are some suitably incomprehensible passages from Stephen Hawking, as well as this wonderful side-swipe at Einstein's opposition to the unpredictability of quantum theory: "God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen."

This book gives science and scientists a human face. As the outspoken co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, Jim Watson, shows: "One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid."  

Watson's quote perhaps explains this classic misjudgement by industrialist Thomas J Watson, Sr.: "I think that there is a world market for about five computers."

Remember that the next time you listen to some technophile predicting that a shining scientific utopia is just around the corner. Or as George Bernard Shaw put it: "Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more."

Carl Sagan has these wise words on the practice of science itself: "One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)"

But it seems somehow appropriate when talking about quotes from the great and the good that the final comment should go to an anonymous saying: "Man occasionally stumbles on the truth, but then just picks himself up and hurries on regardless."

If any of you have got a favourite quote – not just on science, but on life, the universe & everything (it doesn't get broader than that!) – then I'd love to hear them. My own rather quirky favourite on science (not in Bynum & Porter's book) is from the cold war film Hell and High Water (1954):  

"That's no female. That's a scientist."

[originally on MySpace]