13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Intriguing Scientific Mysteries (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

I thoroughly enjoyed about half of this book. The early chapters on physics & astronomy discuss some difficult concepts in a very approachable way, and the chapters on evolution are also very good. There is some really excellent popular science writing in these pages. Unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably in a book of this type, there are a few low points as well...

To be credible as a book about "scientific mysteries", the unifying themes should still have been the need for extraordinary evidence to support extraordinary claims, and the scientific method. This is, after all, a book with the word "scientific" on the cover. The tone of the writing in places is credulous where it should have been questioning.

But the real show stopper for me was the chapter on homeopathy. I strongly suspect that this was deliberately put at the end of the book. I (and many other readers, I suspect) would have stopped reading at that point if it had been any earlier. The last line of the preceding chapter serves as a warning to what follows: an examination of "science's least favorite anomaly". How something for which there is no credible scientific evidence *at all* qualifies as a scientific anomaly is quite beyond me. The studies and "evidence" discussed in this chapter are (without exception) discredited, or flawed, or small, or unrepeated, or statistically inadequate, or all of these. The unquestioning and naive tone of this chapter discredits the entire book, which is a great shame. To paraphrase the chapter title, homeopathy is patently absurd - and it won't go away because (i) people want to believe, (ii) it's a multi-billion dollar industry, and (iii) authors like Michael Brooks (who should know better) like to report the views of people with weird ideas - in the interests of being controversial.

I was left with a single example of homeopathy having a real effect: it unfortunately ruined this book. If only Michael Brooks had limited himself to writing about 12 Things That Don't Make Sense, I would have given this 4 stars.

As a science-graduate of 15 years ago, I like popular science books and the history of science. So I was quite looking forward to this read but was surprised at how hard it was to follow, disappointed by his choice of 13 and disliked his writing style:

Clarity:
Generally I get most scientific ideas when explained by good populist science writers. But I just didn't understand whole arguments presented in the book. This is not Michael Brooks fault - he is trying to cover 13 topics for which there are at least 2, and often more, complex explanations (so you have c. 30+ scientific theories to get through in 300 pages). This is a tough ask and I think a fundamental flaw with the idea of the book.

Were they the correct 13?
- Brooks missed out our non-understanding of what makes up a proton (e.g., are there more than 4 dimensions? How can 'particle spin' seem to transmit info faster than speed of light etc?) This seems to me to be as interesting as dark matter / energy and clearly not understood.
- He also decided to hide the origin of life (very interesting topic) under a chapter about what is the definition of life (not interesting). Defining terms isn't a scientific mystery. It can be hard (try defining comedy or art) but it's not as interesting. Or put it another way: I am about 100 times more interested in knowing how life came about than am I knowing how best to define whether something is alive or not.
- Two of the chapters are single anomolies (i.e., happened once and for which there is no other evidence). These are both mysteries, but not on the same level as, say death, it is
- I have not read all the homeopathy chapter yet but am puzzled at it's inclusion. He also refers to a lancet meta-data paper in 1997 that was a) written by the "Centre for Complementary Medicine Research and they have a vested interest and b) was not that conclusive (at least against no single illness, although pretty good against all evidence) and c) the analysis has been redone by the authors who now concede "it seems, therefore, likely that our meta-analysis at least overestimated the e'ects of homeopathic treatments." Brooks also has so far failed to mention the other major meta-analyses; all of which find no evidence for homeopathy working better than placebo.
- On reflection of the topics chosen, he seems to have amassed a lost of "these are things scientists hate talking about because they can't explain them" not "these are the most interesting problems science is grappling with"

Finally, I disliked the style. He jumps from a narrative style about the people involved to a person style (I then believed because...) Either approach is fine, but the swapping over mid-book from one to the other was jarring. That is not all. Brooks does a bad job of summarising the debate, e.g., in the placebo chapter he does not look at anyone else's meta-analyses apart from the one that causes contention and does not tell us whether there are other meta-analyses (there are). He also tries to sensationalise some arguments, for example, the significance that a few species still reproduce exclusively asexually. With over a million species there are bound to be some that have gone down this cul-de-sac, but Brooks tries to milk this fact for more than it is worth.

All in all a disappointment, but perhaps inevitably with such a impressive scope?

An interesting and thought provoking book. Even the chapters on subjects that I had some prior knowledge of contained new perspectives and insights.

Unfortunately, the Kindle edition, at least, is let down by being littered with scanning/OCR errors ranging from spaces and hyphens erroneously appearing in the middle of words, through errors such as "woodness" in place of "goodness", right up to "A gram of carbon, for instance, contains 5 x 1022 atoms" which should, presumably, have been "5 x 10^22 atoms". Several paragraphs required reading through a couple of times to decode the author's actual meaning, which was something of a let down.