Brian Clegg (Author of A Brief History of Infinity)

Brian Clegg rated a book 3 of 5 stars

The Serpent's Promise: The Bible Retold as Science
by Steve Jones

read in May, 2013

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There are broadly two ways to write a popular science book. One is, like my book Gravity, to pick a specific aspect of science and really dig into it. The other is to use a theme that allows you to explore a whole range of different scientific topics...more There are broadly two ways to write a popular science book. One is, like my book Gravity, to pick a specific aspect of science and really dig into it. The other is to use a theme that allows you to explore a whole range of different scientific topics. I confess I’ve done this as well with the likes of Inflight Science and The Universe Inside You and the approach can be very effective. But there has to be a reason for choosing the framework – and I find Steve Jones’ hook in this particular book – the Bible – a little odd.

The bumf for the book says ‘The Bible was the first scientific textbook of all; and it got some things right (and plenty more wrong).’ I’m really not sure about that premise – I don’t think anyone sensibly would regard the Bible as a scientific textbook. The whole reason, for instance, that Genesis gets away with having two scientifically incompatible versions of the creation story is that it isn’t intended to be a literal, scientific explanation, but rather a contextual, spiritual description. (Which is why those who take the Bible as literal truth have an uphill struggle.) This is a bit like thinking that people thought the Earth was flat in the Middle Ages, because the likes of the Mappa Mundi look like a flat Earth – again, this was a symbolic representation, never intended as a projection of the real world.

In his introduction, Jones takes a slightly dubious path, saying he isn’t attacking religious belief per se, and then setting out to do just that. I’ve nothing against scientists attacking religious beliefs, there is plenty of reason to do so – but they shouldn’t try to weasel out of what they are doing. However, in the book proper he moves away from this (until the last chapter) and gets down to some more interesting stuff.

Rather strangely, and perhaps reflecting Jones’ background in biology, he starts not with the creation, but with humans and the endless lists of descent that are found in the Bible, using this to explore the real genetic, DNA-based possibilities, including the ‘real’ Adam and Eve, separated unfortunately by about 100,000 years, so not exactly on the best of terms. These lists in the Bible are rather dull, and unfortunately the endless seeming discussions of different lines of descent in Jones’ modern-day telling also gets a little tedious.

We then jump back to the creation and some fairly straightforward big bang description – adequate, though rather skimpy compared with the depth he went to on inheritance and DNA. It’s a shame, given Jones makes a big thing of one of the distinctions between religion and science is that religion has a ‘what’s in the book is true’ stance, where science goes on data and method that he doesn’t point out that the big bang is not ‘truth’ but the best accepted current theory, but we’ve all slipped into that kind of easy science writing – it gets a bit boring to keep pointing out the limitations of our knowledge, but it would probably have been worth doing it at the start, just to emphasize this is real science, not the unquestionable word of the science oracle.

Although there is a touch of physics there, even that single chapter soon jumps to a much longer discourse on where life came from. For me there was far too much biology here, fine for a single topic book, but over-emphasised for a book based on such a broad concept. In writing terms, it’s a mixed book. Some of the content has Jones’ trademark storytelling but a lot of it is plonking facts with little flow. Some parts read well, others (often where there’s a lot of mention of DNA) get a touch boring.

In the final chapter Jones comes back to religion itself and does a fair demolishing job, though there is one glaring non-sequitur. He is commenting on wars driven by religion and concludes with a sort of rosy picture of a peaceful harmonious world without religious divides. Yet one of his principle lines seems to run counter to this. He comments ‘For civil wars, like those between nations, there was a striking fit between how long they lasted and how ethnically (and often religiously) divided the nation had become.’ He concludes that Pascal was right to ascribe evil to a religious conviction. Yet look what he has done. Take away the religion and the ethnicity is still there. Is there any reason to suppose that wouldn’t still be an issue, especially bearing in mind that ‘and often’? That’s not science, Dr Jones.

Overall, then, this is the classic curates egg of a book, not really doing what it sets out to do and rambling (I like a good diversion, but this jumps all over) too much for good storytelling, but with some undoubted good bits. It’s not a bad book, but not great either.

Review first published in www.popularscience.co.uk and reproduced with permission.(less)

Brian Clegg rated a book 4 of 5 stars

Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus
by Richard Carrier (Goodreads Author)

read in May, 2013

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History is not unlike science, an observation made by Richard Carrier, the author of Proving History - and when you think about it, this idea makes a lot of sense. They both involve weighing up evidence, testing hypotheses and drawing up conclusions....more History is not unlike science, an observation made by Richard Carrier, the author of Proving History - and when you think about it, this idea makes a lot of sense. They both involve weighing up evidence, testing hypotheses and drawing up conclusions. In fact arguably cosmology is, in effect history rather than science, as it involves looking into the past and it is rarely possible to subject it to experiment or repeat it to see what happens.

That being the case, to do history properly, historians really ought to be using some of the tools available to scientists, but that they tend to ignore, in part because history has been around longer, but primarily, I suspect, because most historians have neither the training nor the inclination to dip their toes into mathematics. But the message of Proving History, written by a historian, is 'Come on in, guys, the water is lovely!' Carrier doesn't mention it, but there is a precedent here. Until recently biologists were basically natural historians. They merely observed and classified - they were doing Rutherford's 'stamp collecting' - they too avoided mathematics with fear and loathing. Now, though, some branches of biology make heavy use of maths, and have been transformed as a result. Biologists have learned to love numbers and a new breed of historians (it's probably too late for the old brigade) can and must too.

The tools Richard Carrier employs are logic and Bayes' Theorem. The logic is simple enough (though it is surprising how many examples Carrier gives where historians have drawn illogical conclusions). Bayes' Theorem is a little harder to get your head around. This statistical method is something I cover at some length in Dice World, because it is arguably one of the most powerful tools we have for predicting the future. What I didn't really full absorb is that it is also a great way of weighing up historical evidence and hypotheses. (It's odd, now I think of it, that I didn't do this, as the main example I give to demonstrate Bayes is deducing whether or not my dog is a golden retriever, which is, in effect, history, rather than future gazing.)

What Bayes' Theorem does is allow you to work out the probability of something being true with limited information, and modified by secondary evidence. As mathematics goes, it is actually very simple - a doddle compared with calculus, for instance - but for some reason, the way it is traditionally described makes it really hard to grasp, so one essential in selling the value of Bayes to historians is making your description simple. Unfortunately this is where Carrier falls down. If anything he makes Bayes' theorem sound more complicated than it is.

There are a couple of other problems with the book. I'm not quite sure what the target audience is, but the book is far to dry and dull to be anything but an academic text. This is a real shame, as the message is one that everyone should be interested in - here is a tool that could transform the way we assess our historical data, that could transform history. He perhaps should have had a co-author to make the text more approachable. It's not that the content is too complex, just that the way it is put across is often difficult to absorb.

The other problem is that Carrier is setting up this method primarily to be ready for his second book, in which he will dispute the historical reality of Jesus. This being the case, most of the examples in the book are from the Bible. I think this is a mistake, because this approach is so powerful it ought to have been set out in general historical terms in book 1 before he got onto his 'historicity of Jesus' theme in book 2. I think the subject matter will put some people off, who would otherwise benefit greatly from the underlying theme.

So if you are interested in the nature of history and how it can be improved, it is worth wading through the rhetoric to get to the juicy bits. It's a shame there aren't more examples, as the writing comes to life when dealing with specifics - it is only when it is being generic, which is much of the book, that it is hard going. If you are interested in Christian history, well and good - but if you aren't, again I would urge you not to be put off because the underlying approach applies to all of history and is far too good to waste.(less)

Brian Clegg made a comment on his review of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

"You're welcome! "

Brian Clegg rated a book 4 of 5 stars

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember by Annalee Newitz

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction
by Annalee Newitz

read in May, 2013

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I’m not a natural audience for books about surviving disasters (even though I wrote the Global Warming Survival Kit). I can’t stand disaster movies, because I can’t take the pragmatic ‘Oh well, some survive,’ viewpoint as I watch millions perish. So...more I’m not a natural audience for books about surviving disasters (even though I wrote the Global Warming Survival Kit). I can’t stand disaster movies, because I can’t take the pragmatic ‘Oh well, some survive,’ viewpoint as I watch millions perish. So I thought that I would find this book, with its subtitle How Humans will survive a mass extinction somewhat unappetising – but I was wrong.

The Earth has gone through a number of mass extinctions, where a fair percentage of living species have been killed off. The most famous is the one that mostly took out the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago, but there have been others and, Annalee Newitz points out, if we want to see the long term survival of the human race, we need to be able to make it through one, should it turn up, whether caused by climate change, pandemics, a supervolcano or an asteroid.

What Newitz does surprisingly well here is weave together what are really around four different books, all in one compact volume. We start of with palaeontology, looking back over previous mass extinctions, getting a better understanding of what happened, what survived and how it survived. From here we segue into human pre-history and history, drawing lessons from the plight of the Neanderthal and the impact of plague and other pandemics. After this, in a transitional section we see the examples of the three techniques in the book’s title – scattering in the Jewish disaspora, adaptation in cyanobacteria (and how we could use it) and remembering on the part of the gray whale, before taking another transition into a more science-fiction driven view.

Newitz starts by pointing out the potential lessons to be learned from the SF writing of Octavia Butler who is apparently ‘one of the 20th century’s greatest science fiction writers’, which I was a bit surprised by as I read a lot of science fiction and I’ve never heard of her. The segue here is into the shakiest part of the book where it dabbles in futurology. This broadly divides into relatively short term survival approaches and longer term diaspora into space.

One of the reasons this is the weakest part of the book is that Newitz offers us castle-in-the-air solutions with no obvious way (and certainly no hint) of how to get there from where we are now. So she says we will need underground cities if we need to survive some kinds of impact, while we would be helped by building green cities that merge biology and construction… but it’s not clear how we would ever get started on such major, long term projects. She doesn’t address the reality that humans are very bad at taking the long view.

I was, though, pleasantly surprised by this book, particularly the first half. This is genuinely interesting and thought provoking, up to and including the Octavia Butler section. And though it goes a little downhill after that, it never fails to be readable and interesting – just a little far fetched. So congratulations to Newitz on taking the rare long view – and in having optimism for our ability to survive what the universe can throw at us.

Review first published on www.popularscience.co.uk and reproduced with permission(less)

Brian Clegg rated a book 3 of 5 stars

Network Geeks: How They Built the Internet
by Brian E Carpenter

read in May, 2013

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There is a series of TV adverts in the UK that have managed to embed their tagline into common usage. The ads are for a type of varnish, and that tagline is ‘It does what it says on the tin.’ There is a real problem when a book doesn’t do what it say...more There is a series of TV adverts in the UK that have managed to embed their tagline into common usage. The ads are for a type of varnish, and that tagline is ‘It does what it says on the tin.’ There is a real problem when a book doesn’t do what it says on the tin – you get cognitive dissonance, expecting one thing and discovering another. That’s what happened when I opened up Network Geeks.

The subtitle promises ‘how they built the internet.’ Now this is a topic I’m fascinated by. I really enjoyed the book Where Wizards Stay Up Late, which details the story of the origins of the internet, but that’s quite old now, and I assumed this would give a modern day take from the viewpoint of an internet dominated society. What you get inside is totally different, and that’s a shock.

In trendy music terms, this book is a mashup. It really has three separate themes, only linked by the author, Brian Carpenter. One is an autobiography – so we get a fair amount of Carpenter’s family history, going back a good few generations. It’s not badly written, but probably of limited interest to anyone outside Carpenter’s family. Secondly – and this is the best bit – we have a considerable account of Carpenter’s work at CERN. He worked there twice and if you are into the developed of distributed computing (as I am) there is some really interesting material here, as CERN was both groundbreaking and yet isolated from the mainstream. Apart from anything else in this technical memoir part of the book I had distinct tugs of nostalgia as I had a great time working on DEC equipment, which regularly rears its head, while in the OR department of British Airways.

So far, so good – but we are yet to encounter anything that really has to do with the supposed topic of the book. This comes into the third part of the mashup, featured in the introductory section (which is part of the reason it is such a shock when the book suddenly goes into autobiographical mode) and towards the end. But this isn’t really about ‘how the built the Internet’ at all. It is about ‘how their committees made endless bureaucratic decisions about the architecture and protocols of the internet and how the architecture and protocols developed.’ To be honest, that is a rather less exciting, and certainly a lot more specialist field.

The problem is, unless you are really into the nitty gritty of how the committees that control the internet work, this probably isn’t for you. Carpenter falls into a few writing traps in naming far too many people we aren’t really interested in, using endless acronyms we don’t really care about and giving much too much detail on the minutiae to the extent that we lose the big picture. Here’s a not atypical snippet to get a feel: ‘Internet standards, originally endorsed by DARPA, came from the IETF by 1991, and certainly not from the ITU or the ISO, the twin homes of CLNP. On the other hand, CLNP was officially defined and had already been picked up for the next version of DECnet, a significant factor in the minicomputer market then served by the Internet.’

It’s not that this is a bad book – it just doesn’t do what it says on the tin, and I can only recommend it for the rather narrow audience for whom this kind of thing is meat and drink.

Review first published on www.popularscience.co.uk and reproduced with permission.(less)

Brian Clegg rated a book 2 of 5 stars

TimeOne
by Colin Gillespie

read in May, 2013

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I have always said that there is a real opportunity if anyone can write fiction that manages to entertain but also to educate about science at the same time. It is certainly possible, but fiercely difficult to do well. As we saw with something like P...more I have always said that there is a real opportunity if anyone can write fiction that manages to entertain but also to educate about science at the same time. It is certainly possible, but fiercely difficult to do well. As we saw with something like Pythagoras’ Revenge, the result almost inevitably is either bad fiction with a slew of science or readable fiction where the science really doesn’t come across well. So I was excited when I saw the publicity for Colin Gillespie’s TimeOne, intriguingly subtitled ‘discover how the universe began.’

The idea of this work of fiction with a strong science content is to explore the nature of the big bang using the unusual concept of having a detective examine the ‘clues’ to see if they can work out how it all began. I’ve given it an extra bracketed star for ingenuity and effort, but I have to say that the outcome did not give me any joy.

There is plenty of reasonable science in here (along with an awful lot of philosophy and waffle), but the problem is that as a story it is nothing short of awful. There are three main characters, the employer, a mysterious woman who keeps popping into the office then flying off to mysterious destinations, the narrator, who is employed as a researcher to dig up the facts and history of the science, and an ex-cop detective who seems mostly there as a foil for the researcher. Three hours into reading all that had happened was that the employer came and went, the researcher VERY gradually dug out bits of information about relativity, quantum theory and the like, and the detective slobbed about. There was no story, no suspense, no real characters, no development, no plot.

Add to this an incredibly slow laying out of the facts, with a huge slab of philosophising and I really could not keep reading. It was extremely hard work with no real reward. I did try skipping forward to see how it would all turn out, but I couldn’t find any deviation from this formula (nor any great revelation about the big bang).

As I said at the start, I admire the intent and the work that has gone into this – I just don’t think that anyone is going to learn much science, or have any enjoyment from it as fiction.(less)

Brian Clegg rated a book 3 of 5 stars

The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible
by Lance Fortnow

read in May, 2013

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There is good and bad news early on in this book about the P versus NP problem that haunts computing. The good news is that on the description I expected this to be a dull, heavy going book, and it’s not at all. Lance Fortnow makes what could be a fa...more There is good and bad news early on in this book about the P versus NP problem that haunts computing. The good news is that on the description I expected this to be a dull, heavy going book, and it’s not at all. Lance Fortnow makes what could be a fairly impenetrable and technical maths/computing issue light and accessible.

The bad news is that frustratingly he doesn’t actually tell you what P and NP mean for a long time, just gives rather sideways definitions of the problem along the lines of ‘P refers to the problems we can solve quickly using computers. NP refers to the problems to which we would like to find the best solution’, and also that he makes a couple of major errors early on, which make it difficult to be one hundred percent confident about the rest of the book.

The errors come in a section where he imagines a future where P=NP has been proved. This would mean you could write an algorithm to very efficiently match things and select from data. Fortnow suggests that our lives would be transformed. This is slightly cringe-making as fictional future histories often are, but the real problem is that he tells us that the algorithm would make it possible to do two things that I think just aren’t true.

First he says that from DNA you would be able to identify what a person looks like and their personality. Unfortunately, these are both strongly influenced by epigenetic/environmental issues. Anyone who knows adult identical twins (with the same basic DNA) will know that they can look quite different and certainly have very different personalities. And they will usually have been brought up in the same environment. Fortnow is forgetting one of the oldest essentials of computing – it doesn’t matter how good your algorithm is, GIGO – garbage in; garbage out.

The other, arguably worse error is that he says that it will be possible to have accurate weather forecasts going forward X days. This is so horribly wrong. He should have read my book Dice World. The reason you can’t predict the weather at all beyond about 10 days is nothing to do with the quality of the model/algorithm, it is because the system is chaotic. Firstly we just don’t know, and never can know, the initial conditions to enough decimal places not to deviate from the real world. When Lorenz first discovered chaos it was because he entered the starting values in his model to 4 decimal places rather than the 6 to which the model actually worked. It soon deviated from the previous run. We can’t measure things accurately enough. The other problem is that the weather system is so complex – hence the slightly misleading title of Lorenz’s famous paper Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? – that we can’t possible take into account enough inputs to ever have so good a model as to go forwards that far. Sorry, Lance, it ain’t going to happen.

For the rest, the first half or so of the book goes along pretty well, gradually opening up the nature of P and NP, the problems that are of interest and the ‘hardest’ NP complete problems. I found the main example, used throughout, a hypothetical world called Frenemy where everyone is either a friend or enemy of everyone else confusing and not particularly useful, but Fortnow gets plenty of good stuff in. After that it’s as if he rather runs out of material and it gets a bit repetitious or has rather tangential chapters.

Overall, despite the flaws, a much better and more readable book than I thought it was going to be – but probably best for maths/computing buffs rather than the general popular science audience.

Review first published on www.popularscience.co.uk and reproduced with permission(less)

Brian Clegg rated a book 5 of 5 stars

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe
by Lee Smolin

read in May, 2013

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As I write this we are a third of the way through 2013 (time is important here) and I can say with hand on heart this is the best popular science book I have read all year.

Lee Smolin’s book is largely accessible (more on this later) and simply mind-b...more As I write this we are a third of the way through 2013 (time is important here) and I can say with hand on heart this is the best popular science book I have read all year.

Lee Smolin’s book is largely accessible (more on this later) and simply mind-boggling in its scope. What he does here is take on time, and specifically the position of time in physics. Even taken as a simple book on time this is brilliant. The fact is, the majority of books that claim to be about time tell you nothing. It’s striking that A Brief History of Time tells us that amongst a list of deep scientific questions that have answers suggested by ‘Recent breakthroughs in physics, made possible in part by fantastic new technologies’, is ‘What is the nature of time?’ But you can search the book from end to end for any suggestion of what time is or how it works. There is plenty on how we observe time, and how interaction with matter can change these observations, but nothing deeper.

Smolin gives what is, for me, the best analysis of the nature of time from a physics viewpoint in a popular science book I have ever seen. He goes on to describe how most physicists consider that ‘time does not exist’, and comes up with an approach where time becomes real in physics. Now I do have one issue with Smolin here. He says that amongst his non-scientific friends ‘the idea that time is an illusion is a… commonplace.’ This is garbage (or at least his friends are non-representative). The vast majority of people who aren’t physicists or philosophers would say ‘Of course time exists.’ However, Smolin sets off to first persuade us it doesn’t, using the most common arguments of current physics, and then to show how this is a mistake.

In fact, I think the reason most people wouldn’t agree is because it isn’t really true that modern physics says time doesn’t exist. What it says is that the idea of time as a moving present that heads from the past into the future isn’t real, and that there are plenty of concepts in physics like natural laws that appear to be outside of time, and so time isn’t as fundamental as people think. Nor, relativity shows us, is it absolute. This isn’t the same as something not existing or being an illusion, and I think the physicists who use this label have spent too much time talking to philosophers. Dogs aren’t fundamental to the laws of physics, but this doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Nonetheless, current mainstream physics does prefer time to be kept in a box – and this is where Smolin breaks out. He shows us that pretty well all of physics is based on the idea that we are dealing with closed systems, where in reality there is no so such thing – meaning that it is quite possible that pretty well all existing physics is just an approximation. And he comes up with a mechanism where time, something that actually ticks by and has a universal meaning, can exist (though at the expense of space being quite so real as we thought).

In doing this, Smolin will have irritated a whole lot of physicists. Some will simply not agree – any string theorists, for example, would dismiss his loop quantum gravity viewpoint. Many others will simply not be able to cope. Physicists are, on the whole, a fairly conservative bunch (with a small ‘c’) – they aren’t very good at coming with radical shifts in viewpoint like this. Of course this doesn’t make Smolin right, but it is a fascinating bit of speculation.

The book isn’t perfect. Smolin’s writing style is workmanlike, but suffers from too academic a viewpoint – he doesn’t have the common touch. Oddly, it’s not so much that he baffles us with science, but rather he baffles us with labels which don’t have enough science attached. He has a tendency to use terminology and then say effectively ‘but you don’t need to know what that’s all about.’ I think popular science is much better if you avoid the jargon and instead explain what lies beneath. Also he uses really scrappy hand-drawn illustrations that I suspect are supposed to make them look more friendly and approachable, but actually makes them practically incomprehensible.

These are minor moans though. Whether or not you agree with the physics, this is a book to get you thinking, awash with ideas and totally fascinating. It isn’t the easiest popular science book to understand – it is very much of the ‘read each sentence slowly, and some times several times’ school, yet it is a superb contribution to the field that really puts that cat among the pigeons. Three cheers for Lee Smolin who is, for me, apart from lacking that common touch, the nearest thing we have in the present day to the late, great Fred Hoyle.

Review first published on www.popularscience.co.uk and reproduced with permission(less)

Brian Clegg voted on the list Best Science Books - Non-Fiction Only

How to Build a Time Machine by Brian Clegg

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	A Brief History of Infinity: The Quest to Think the Unthinkable 3.25 of 5 stars 3.25 avg rating — 130 ratings — published 2003 — 2 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The God Effect: Quantum Entanglement, Science's Strangest Phenomenon 3.66 of 5 stars 3.66 avg rating — 83 ratings — published 2006 — 3 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Inflight Science: A Guide to the World From Your Airplane Window 3.14 of 5 stars 3.14 avg rating — 94 ratings — published 2011 — 6 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Before the Big Bang: The Prehistory of Our Universe 3.6 of 5 stars 3.60 avg rating — 82 ratings — published 2006 — 6 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	How to Build a Time Machine: The Real Science of Time Travel 3.67 of 5 stars 3.67 avg rating — 52 ratings — published 2011 — 4 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Universe Inside You: The Extreme Science of the Human Body From Quantum Theory to the Mysteries of the Brain 3.77 of 5 stars 3.77 avg rating — 40 ratings — published 2012 — 4 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Armageddon Science: The Science of Mass Destruction 3.33 of 5 stars 3.33 avg rating — 40 ratings — published 2010 — 4 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Gravity: How the Weakest Force in the Universe Shaped Our Lives 3.6 of 5 stars 3.60 avg rating — 35 ratings — published 2012 — 3 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Upgrade Me: Our Amazing Journey to Human 2.0 3.21 of 5 stars 3.21 avg rating — 28 ratings — published 2008 — 2 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The First Scientist: A Life of Roger Bacon 3.61 of 5 stars 3.61 avg rating — 23 ratings — published 2003 — 3 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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