Paradigm Explorer 2018/2
Books in Brief SCIENCE/ PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE ■■ The Secret Life of Science David Lorimer
Note: many of these books are now available in downloadable electronic form
Jeremy J. Baumberg Princeton 2018, 236 pp., £25, h/b.
In this brilliant, original and stimulating study, the author offers an acute and wide-ranging analysis of the state of what he calls the global scientific ecosystem consisting of interactions between people, knowledge, funding and the media translating findings into the public arena. Each area is populated by different players and stakeholders, with many competitive interfaces. The book takes the form of a survey of different parts of the system and the ways in which they mesh together. He begins by redefining scientists as either simplifiers or constructors, the first seeking to understand the components of the natural scientific system, while the second use insights to synthesise new domains. He sets out to answer a number of questions from the first chapter relating to the number and types of scientists, the filtering of news from original papers, the pecking order prestige of journals and the changing nature of conferences. Along the way he discusses motivations, chains of influence, the publish or perish culture, competition for funding and the peer review system. Baumberg includes some fascinating statistics, for instance the increase in the number of scientists from 5 million in 2002 to 8 million in 2013, with an annual growth rate of 4%; of these, 60% are in industry. He looks at changing patterns in the award of Nobel prizes and how long it takes on average between the discovery and the prize – now about 25 years. There are 25,000 journals publishing 1 million articles a year. Nature receives 10,000 submissions a year and publishes 700, 42% of which are biochemistry or molecular biology (and only 10% physics). 65% of library budgets go on journal subscriptions. The author describes the evolving ecosystem of conference attendance
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as well as the various ways in which science is communicated and the typical progression of academic careers. His final chapters consider the future of science and how the ecosystem might change, including rationing conference attendance, encouraging open science platforms and developing artificial intelligences to mine the web of science knowledge. The book is full of fascinating insights and analysis, making it required reading for anyone who seriously wants to understand the competitive dynamics within global science today.
■■ Gravity Pierre Binetruy Oxford 2018, 245 pp., £19.99, h/b.
This is a brilliant and accessible illustrated book about gravity and gravitational waves, whose existence was only confirmed experimentally in 2016 and resulted in the award of the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017. It draws on first-hand experience with many practical insights and useful extra focuses, and encouraged me to do an experiment comparing dropping a sheet of paper and a book separately, then putting the sheet of paper on top of the book - they fall together as the book protects the paper from friction forces in the air. The author describes the history of work on gravity, ranging over physics and cosmology with more recent detail on the quest for gravitational waves. I gained a better understanding of the Big Bang in relation to the universe being infinite with a clever analogy of different scales of markings on a rope. At the end, the author speculates on the future dominance of dark energy for a new phase of inflation. The book will surely become a classic in explaining gravity in such an engaging manner, reflecting as it does the late author’s stellar reputation as a science communicator.
www.scimednet.org
