Writers talk about books they love…
We often turn to books to escape our humdrum lives, whether that’s travelling back in time to the Russian revolution or catapulting off to a far-flung galaxy. But there’s nothing like the sheer strangeness of the world itself to upend your view of reality. Here are 6 of the best science books to scramble your brain and leave you needing a lie down in a dark room with a wet flannel over your eyes.

The Human Cosmos – Jo Marchant (Canongate)
Science and mythology are often portrayed as being in opposition to each other. On the one had you have our dark past of primitive superstition that was vanquished by the light of Enlightenment science or, conversely, you have a romantic garden of Eden where we all pranced around with flowers in our hair until Newton and Darwin turned up with their chainsaws of rationalism. In Human Cosmos Jo Marchant paints a different picture as she charts humanity’s ever evolving relationship to the cosmos, from palaeolithic lunar calendars, through Stone Henge and the French Revolution, right up to the most advanced modern astronomy and astrobiology.
It’s a book that constantly asks us to shift our perspective, to see the world through different eyes. The most arresting example is the comparison between the methods of Captain Cook and Tupia, the Tahitian priest and navigator who joined his expedition. Cook’s voyage to observe the transit of Venus was guided by state-of-the-art astronomical instruments and precision cartography in stark contrast to the Polynesians who navigated across thousands of miles of empty ocean using complex multisensory clues, from the movement of the wind and the waves to “star paths” – intricate sequences of rising and setting stars memorised through myths and songs. These two world views couldn’t be more different, and yet they both equally “human” enabling feats of jaw-dropping navigation across the vastness of the ocean.

The Blind Watchmaker – Richard Dawkins (Penguin)
Out of all the books selected, this is the most personal. I read it in my late teens and it opened my eyes to the sheer grandeur of the natural world that has been with me ever since. The “Blind Watchmaker” of the title is a repost to the argument that the natural world is so complex that we can’t possibly imagine its existence without an intentional designer. Dawkins takes a sledgehammer to this notion, laying out in intricate detail the mechanisms of evolution, explaining how even the most astonishing and apparently “designed” structures such as echolocation in bats or the human eye emerged through eons long cumulative processes of genetic mutation and environmental selection.
The book is provocative and argumentative, and a tour de force of reasoning and critical thinking, but it is the sense of deep wonder that Dawkins brings to the natural world that has clung to my bones ever since. In a time of increased erosion of trust in scientific knowledge, from antivaxxers to climate deniers, this book is possibly more relevant than ever. One concept that is particularly threatening to many is that to truly take on board evolutionary theory is to let go of our view that humans are the predestined pinnacle of creation, and that this world is made for us to use as we please. Evolution has no goal in mind. No grand plan. Instead, we must see humans as just one expression of the infinitely variable spectrum of life, played out in the dance of genetics and environment.

Helgoland – Carlo Rovelli (Translated by Erica Serge and Simon Carnell) (Penguin)
To read Carlo Rovelli is to have your hand taken by a kindly Italian man with a soft voice and enigmatic smile, then led gently down the rabbit hole into a quantum wonderland where the only thing you can be certain of is that certainty doesn’t exist.
The book opens with the young Werner Heisenberg’s trip to a remote island in the Baltic to escape his allergies. While on Helgoland, Heisenberg had the profound insight that laid the foundations to the emerging field of quantum mechanics. This theory has been incredibly successful in describing reality at its deepest level, spurring the huge technological advances that launched our modern digital age. And yet the theory gives us a picture of the world so strange and paradoxical that 100 years on we’re still trying to work out what it actually means. Rovelli takes us on a journey to explore the ramifications of that theory, plotting a path through quantum entanglement, the nature of time and reality, via consciousness and Marxist theory. But the thing is, while you’re reading his lucid yet poetic prose you actually think you understand, just for a fraction of a second, that the world we experience is just a web of mutually generating relationships with nothing solid at its core. But then you close the book and that fleeting glimpse dissolves like a spider’s web swept away by the broom of humdrum life.

7 ½ Lessons about the Brain – Lisa Feldman-Barrett (Mariner)
If you want to scramble your concept of reality you needn’t look further than the inside of your own skull. The human brain is often touted as the most complex object in the known universe but we’re all guilty of taking this wonder of evolution for granted. In her reassuringly short 7 ½ Lessons About the Brain neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett takes the reader on a journey into the workings of our grey matter using clear and accessible language to gently shatter one preconception after another.
She begins with a question – why did our brains evolve? Then cuts us down immediately like a neuroscientist Yoda. “There is no why!” She punctures the idea that brains evolved to give rise to the wise and intelligent “you” – the CEO of consciousness that spends its time thinking profound thoughts and generally running the show. Instead, she paints a picture of the brain as a complex, self-organising biological network that generates predictive models of its environment in order to maintain an ever-changing budget of bodily needs, throwing thoughts and emotions up into our conscious awareness in an attempt to get us to eat a sandwich or take a nap. The predictive models that we call “reality” are stitched together from preconceptions and expectations with worryingly little input from our senses. And yet, even while she’s busy steamrollering our tightly held beliefs, she doesn’t take a tone of lecturing or grandstanding, but rather a sense of compassion and understanding. The brain, she tells us in the final sentence of the book, “… makes us simply, imperfectly, gloriously human.”
The Song of the Cell – Siddartha Mukherjee (Vintage)

The fact that our bodies are made from cells seems so banal that it barely raises a flicker on the Wow-o-meter. But in The Song of the Cell, oncologist and author Siddhartha Mukherjee shines a light on the fundamental building blocks of all life on Earth and opens up whole new worlds within us. Beginning with the fist descriptions of cells seen through the newly invented microscopes in the 1600s, Mukherjee charts a course through centuries of scientific discovery and medical revolutions, making us see each of our approximately 37 trillion cells in a whole new light. Each one teems like a city in miniature, a staggeringly complex wonder of self-regulation.
The book is remarkable on many levels, but the most stunning part is the section where he describes in intricate detail the journey from fertilised egg to a handful of cells, budding to form specialised collectives that develop into all the myriad structures of the body from the brain to the bowel to the big toe. The description is utterly mesmerising and a reminder that the most astonishing miracles of self-organising creation are happening around us all the time.
The Fabric of the Cosmos – Brian Greene (Alfred A. Knopf)

Every now and again you read a fact that you think you might never recover from, and I stumbled across one of these while reading The Fabric of the Cosmos by theoretical physicist Brian Greene. It goes something like this – the sun converts 4 million tons of matter into energy every second via Einstein’s E = mc2. To repeat: that’s 4 million tons every second. Not every year. Not every week. Every. Second.
Big numbers are hard to visualise so let me help you. That’s over 10 Empire State Buildings every second. Or, if you prefer a more London-centric measure, that’s three hundred and twenty thousand Routemaster busses (not including passengers – that would be inhumane) EVERY SECOND!
In The Fabric of the Cosmos Greene also covers a whole swathe of mind-bending theoretical physics, from the relativistic nature of spacetime to string theory and hidden dimensions rolled into tiny balls but somehow, after a gut-punch like that, the rest just fades into the background.
4 million tons.
Every. Single. Second.
JB SMITH IS A WRITER OF BOTH FICTION AND NON-FICTION WHO GREW UP IN SHROPSHIRE AND IS NOW BASED IN SOUTH LONDON. OVER THE YEARS HIS JOURNALISM HAS TAKEN IN TOPICS SUCH AS MUSIC, ART, SCIENCE AND MENTAL HEALTH. HE RECENTLY STUDIED FOR AN MA IN CREATIVE WRITING AT BIRKBECK, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON.
The Human Cosmos, by Jo Marchant (Canongate)
The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins (penguin)
Helgoland, by Carlo Rovelli (Penguin)
7½ Lessons About The Brain, by Lisa Feldman-Barrett (Mariner)
The Song Of The Cell, by Siddartha Mukherjee (Vintage)
The Fabric Of The Cosmos, by Brian Greene (Penguin – UK edition)
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