Books

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The Cosmos - A Beginner's Guide

Published on 21st June 2007 by BBC Books.

From atom-smashing to alien-hunting, this book explores the latest ideas and experiments in cosmology.

For my new television series, I travelled around the world to meet the people and the apparatus at the cutting edge – the gamma-ray-burst team who are on constant readiness for text messages from a satellite, the physicists deep underground at CERN near Geneva, the engineers constructing spacecraft in Amsterdam, the astronomers above the clouds in Chile, the ingenious planet-hunter SuperWASP on top of an old volcano in the Canary Islands, and the SETI team building a vast telescope in northern California in order to listen for messages from outer space. Is there life elsewhere in the universe, or are we alone?

Read the review and interview published in Astronomy Now magazine

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History - The Definitive Visual Guide

Published by Dorling Kindersley on 30th October 2007

My latest literary work was to act as editorial consultant for the vast new history book published by Dorling Kindersley. I did not write it – there were many contributors – but I did read the whole thing and made suggestions, and I was mightily impressed.

The history I learned at school was a load of lists – dates and names, like the kings and queens of England (‘Willy, Willy, Harry, Stee, Harry, Dick, John, Harry III…’). As a result I hated it and never saw the connections between the various strands. I now realize that history is important, and that we can all learn from the triumphs and especially from the mistakes of our ancestors. This book paints broad pictures of the great sweep of history, as well as providing sharp biographies of the most important men and women who shaped the world. It’s a family reference book which teases out both the sparks of wars and revolutions, and the deep roots of great civilizations. 

There are helpful maps, showing the silk road, the partition of Palestine, and the great voyages of the pioneering sailors. There are useful timelines, which bring order to what might otherwise seem a random list of events.

Each double-page spread tells a story. Some describe a thousand years of ancient Egypt, or the Reformation in Europe. Others take much shorter periods of history such as the French Revolution. There are biographies of Napoleon, Karl Marx, Julius Caesar, and many others. Then there are entire spreads devoted to decisive moments – the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which sparked off the First World War, and the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.

This variations in style allow the team of authors to step back from time to time and provide a relaxed overview of ideas or movements that might never appear in most history books – democracy, evolution, and globalization. And finally, as an enthusiast of science and technology, I am delighted to see coverage of crucial science and inventions, from farming to the internet, and global warming.

Read the review in The Times and my article in Local History Magazine.

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Just Another Day

     Published on 21st September 2006 by Orion.

Have you ever wondered why the shower curtain always billows inwards? Why bran flakes make a good breakfast? Or why 'non-iron' shirts don't need ironing? These are just a few of the hundreds of intriguing questions I provide answers to in this fascinating book of knowledge.

Just Another Day follows me through my typical day, as I reveal not only the science and technology we are surrounded by in our everyday lives, but also the history behind inventions. This book is packed full of wonderful facts, such as how a modern radio-controlled alarm clock works compared with the first one ever made - by Ktesibios in Alexandria in the third century BC - as well as the real function of toothpaste and what our ancestors used before such a thing was available. You will learn how Roman lavatories worked and how the ancients used to shave, as well as whether you stay drier by walking or running in the rain and why ice cubes crack in your drink.

 

My thanks go to the British Library for assisting in parts of my research.

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Taking the Piss

                           

written with
Emily Troscianko.

Illustrations courtesy of Jolyon Troscianko.

Published on 10th October 2006 by The Chalford Press.

Nine years ago I offered a publisher a quartet of reference books – EncycLOOpedia, EncycloPOOdia, EncycloPEEdia, and Enfarta, but they turned me down, and all that came out was a little book about lavatories, called Thunder, Flush, and Thomas Crapper. It would have been longer, but my editor was ruthless, and told me to cut the crap. 

Seven years later my radio producer John Byrne, champion of wacky ideas, suggested we should make a radio programme called Taking the Piss out of London (see radio). We did, and it won an award, and a publisher then asked whether I could write a book about it. Luckily I had both my old files and an enthusiastic co-author (Emily Troscianko), and we set to work. There turns out to be a mountain – or perhaps a lake – of material about urine, just waiting to be sucked up. Peeing is such a routine function in life that people have not only found weird and wonderful ways and places to do it, and a plethora of uses for the stuff, but have also written about it extensively, and used urine in every medium of art. This is not a comprehensive account – we have left out more than we could cram in – but we hope it is an enjoyable taster. 

Contents: Why we wee, Where we wee, Emergencies, Health, Quirky recreations, Religion, superstition and spirituality, Testing, From alchemy to chemistry, Urban myths, Politics and psychology, Language, Literature, Music, Piss-artists, Family pets…, and other animals. 

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, and Ronald Reagan all star in the book, and there is even a game called Urine control (‘You’re in control’)…...

 

 

Why Does a Ball Bounce? And 100 other questions from the world of science

Why does a ball bounce? and 100 other questions from the world of science was published by Ebury Press in September 2005. It is full of my own photographs, with a scientific question about each, and answers to most.

 

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Talking Science

I interviewed some of the most influential scientists and thinkers of our time and let them tell me about their passion for their work.  I talked to Jocelyn Bell Burnell (Bath, UK), Sir Michael Berry (Bristol, UK), Colleen Cavanaugh (Harvard, US), Richard Dawkins (Oxford, UK), Loren Graham (MIT, US), Richard Gregory (Bristol, UK), Eric Lander (MIT, US), Lord May of Oxford (UK), John Maynard Smith (Sussex, UK), Rosalind Picard (MIT, US), Peter Raven (St Louis, US), Sir Martin Rees (Cambridge, UK), Eugenie Scott (Oakland, US), and Lewis Wolpert (UCL, UK). Read a review here (South Coast Magazine, February 2005).

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What the Past Did for Us

What the Past Did for Us accompanied a major 9-part series (see my TV page), in which I led you through the history of inventions while testing some of these in my 'studio'.

 

 

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What the Tudors and Stuarts Did for Us

250 pages with wonderful pictures and more detail than in the TV series.

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Henry Winstanley and the Eddystone Lighthouse The amazing joker who came to an extraordinary end. Read a review here.

written with Emily Troscianko

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I have written two books on the lavatory. Thunder, flush and Thomas Crapper was published by Michael O'Mara in 1997.