Marcus Chown, The Never-Ending Days Of Being Dead. Scotland on Sunday, February 4, 2007. Review by Andrew Crumey.

THE speculations of cutting-edge physicists have taken firm root in popular culture. From the parallel realities of Doctor Who to the simulated universe of The Matrix, science has fed the public imagination a rich diet of outlandish ideas. The essays of science journalist Marcus Chown are yet another plate on the smorgasbord, and it is difficult at times to know whether these "dispatches from the front line" are fiction or fact.

"It has long been known that an atom flying through space really does fly along multiple trajectories simultaneously," says Chown. Certainly, it has long been said in popular science books that this is what happens, but can we be sure that what looks like a case of being in two places at once is really that? Physicists have been arguing about it for the best part of a century, and a mind more sceptical than Chown's might conclude that what it shows is that there is still a lot left for physicists to figure out.

Chown acknowledges that big questions remain unanswered, but what is troubling about his book is the way it too often elevates speculation or interpretation to irrefutable fact. We would not expect a political journalist to trumpet the views of Blair or Cameron without challenge, yet Chown appears to think that for science to be palatable to the public, it must be presented with an air of unqualified credulity.

It is only when reporting the extreme ideas of cosmologist Frank Tipler that Chown is prepared to show any real doubt at all. Tipler believes that mankind will one day colonise the entire universe, download its collective memory into indestructible computers, and resurrect every human in a simulated afterlife that will last for an eternity - the never-ending days of Chown's title. The opinion of most physicists is that Tipler's theory is good after-dinner entertainment but scientifically worthless. Chown, however, gives it the sort of even-handed presentation customarily adopted by television pseudo- documentaries about ghosts or alien visitation, offering no more than a disclaiming shrug after a long and sensational exposition.

Most of us are able to make up our own minds about ghosts or aliens, but when it comes to asking whether variations in the "fine-structure constant" reveal the tinkering hand of a cosmic super-intelligence, it is to people such as Chown that the public turn for help; yet Chown is no help at all. Physicist John Barrow made the suggestion ironically in a letter to Nature; Chown repeats it dead-pan and unsourced, as a serious possibility.

The essays in this book appear to have started life as New Scientist articles, making them somewhat repetitive in content. Each has an attention-grabbing sense of "incredible if true", though without asking "is it true?" Many of the topics are extremely interesting, but a significant proportion are the hobby-horses of 'renegade' scientists doing battle with the establishment. Even the greatest minds have lapsed into crank science - if Chown could have interviewed Isaac Newton, he might have written an article explaining how planetary orbits, as Newton claimed, give absolute proof of intelligent design. Like this book, it would have made for a lively and thought-provoking read - but when the public seek entertainment rather than knowledge, there are better places they can turn to.

Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics. Scotland on Sunday, March 11, 2007. Review by Andrew Crumey.

THE trouble with physics, Lee Smolin claims, is that it has made remarkably little real progress in the last 30 years. Given that we constantly hear of major new breakthroughs on the road to an ultimate theory of everything, this may sound like the carping of a crank. But Smolin is a leading player in theoretical physics, known to the wider reading public through two previous outstanding books. He has to be taken seriously, and his assessment is a grim one.

In the 1970s, Smolin explains, physicists perfected the so-called 'standard model' which explains how particles called quarks and leptons combine to form the familiar atoms of matter. The theory was triumphantly vindicated in particle accelerator experiments, but the one force still left unexplained was gravity. What has been going on since then has been a worldwide attempt to explain how quantum particles make things fall down.

The search led to conjectures that our universe has more dimensions than three, and that matter might really be made of tiny 'superstrings'. But as Smolin emphasises, these remain conjectures. Despite acres of overheated coverage that has appeared in popular science magazines and documentaries, there remains not one shred of hard physical evidence for superstrings, supersymmetry, extra dimensions, parallel realities and all the other wonders that feed science fiction with an endless supply of useful jargon.

Nevertheless, superstring theory has taken over as the number one research topic for physicists around the world. Smolin says that if you want to get a job in a university theoretical physics department, you have to work on superstrings or its even more hypothetical successor, 'M theory'. The picture he paints will be of interest to academics in other fields who have seen similar takeovers by modish theories. In Harvard it became fashionable to speak of 'postmodern physics', with 'mathematical beauty' considered the essential mark of validity in the absence of anything more concrete.

The downside of Smolin's book is the amount of time he takes explaining details of a theory in which from the outset he expresses doubts, lessening the reader's willingness to unpick the technical minutiae. Anyone who has struggled with more optimistic accounts of string theory written by true believers will have a hard time here.

More interesting to a general audience is Smolin's account of possible alternatives to string theory, which a few brave souls (Smolin included) are pursuing in the academic wilderness while all the big research grants go to the string people. He offers sensible advice on how the system might be improved so that young researchers are less dependent on the patronage and approval of older scientists eager to see their own ideas vindicated. Einstein had trouble finding a job one hundred years ago - Smolin says he would have an equally hard time now, since the dominance of string theory favours virtuoso problem solvers rather than deep thinkers.

Recently, though, it seems that even the string theorists have begun to have doubts, having managed to find more potential 'theories of everything' than there are atoms in the universe, with no way of choosing which one might be right. History may look back on string theory as an intellectual triumph or a 30-year mistake. Only time will tell.

Donal O'Shea, THE POINCARÉ CONJECTURE. Scotland on Sunday, May 27, 2007. Review by Andrew Crumey.

THIS book is subtitled "In search of the shape of the universe", and if that is not tempting enough, the dustjacket promises "An unsolved mystery, a reclusive genius and a race to win a million dollars." All true enough, though somewhat misleading to potential readers.

The Poincaré Conjecture is a mathematical problem first formulated in the late 19th century and still unsolved 100 years later when the Clay Foundation named it one of its "millennium problems", offering dollars 1m to anyone who could crack it. Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman was declared to have succeeded in 2006. He had been beavering away at the conjecture for years, and the cash was unimportant to him. He was also awarded the Fields Medal - the mathematicians' Nobel Prize - but turned it down.

Those are the facts alluded to on the dust-jacket; but the trouble with reclusive geniuses is that very little can be said about them. In a couple of pages we learn that Perelman went to a top Russian school, was a brilliant student, and has never shown much interest in anything except mathematics. Working largely in seclusion, his only race was against his own demons, whatever they were.

And what of the Poincaré Conjecture itself? Well, if you had lots of maps showing little bits of space, the question is whether you would be able to stitch them all together in the right way to make a complete cosmic atlas. You might quibble that we don't actually have maps of every bit of the universe; but remember this is pure mathematics. So Perelman's epoch-making achievement hasn't really told us anything about whether space goes on forever or curves round on itself, and nor does this book.

What all this means is that readers lured in by the promises on the cover are apt to be disappointed, which is a shame because this is an interesting and well written book. But it is not a book about space, money or tortured geniuses: it is a potted history of geometry and topology written for the sort of people who can get excited about differentiable structures on three-spheres - in other words, mathematicians. Lovers of the subject will welcome the small chunks of biography - the coldly aloof Gauss, tragic Riemann and suave Poincaré - and the occasional historical excursions that offer relief to over-worked brains. As for whoever wrote the jacket copy - they'd make a great estate agent.

Jonathan Black, THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE WORLD. Michael Shermer, WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS. Scotland on Sunday, September 23, 2007. Review by Andrew Crumey.

JONATHAN Black's fat volume promises much. "Here for the first time is a complete history of the world, from the beginning of time to the present day, based on the beliefs and writings of the secret societies."

It is a story of "initiates". Pythagoras was one, so too was Shakespeare, while Martin Luther may have been. Exactly what it was that these people were initiates of is never fully spelled out, because that is the whole point of "esoteric" wisdom. It is secret, bound up with the mysteries of ancient Greece and Egypt, kept alive by shadowy figures of the kind found in Dan Brown novels.

In Black's history, the world was once inhabited by giants and unicorns, whose disappearance has coincided with a change in human consciousness from "mind over matter" to "matter over mind". The Egyptians had advanced scientific knowledge, but love was only invented in the time of Dante; personality started with the Mona Lisa.

Does Black believe in the literal truth of this history? Apparently not; it is an "upside down, back-to-front" version of reality, an "imaginative exercise". Then is it true in a spiritual or poetic sense? No, the reader should "beware" of taking that step, lest he or she "begin to walk down the road that leads straight to the lunatic asylum."

Well, this book certainly drove me nuts. When Black tells us there was an 18th-century French count who lived for more than 100 years without ageing a day, is he claiming this as fact, myth, legend, poetic fantasy, hocus pocus or what? And what of his assurance that he will "cite authorities throughout, providing leads for interested readers to follow"? In fact the book lacks references, footnotes or even a decent index. Black mentions "Spanish scholars" who reckon Don Quixote is a coded commentary on the Cabbala, but doesn't tell us who those scholars are. Presumably they're the Spanish equivalent of the people who reckon Shakespeare's plays were written by Francis Bacon - a theory Black appears to endorse, or at any rate reports. Bacon, needless to say, was an "initiate".

Centuries ago, chroniclers would write about faraway lands where "it was said" that people were 10 feet tall or had faces in their chests. Black's book is similar: in its total disregard for any dividing line between reality and fiction, it is positively mediaeval. That is a pity, because its subject area is a fascinating one. Black's large but disorganised bibliography praises David S Katz's recent volume The Occult Tradition, and that is a far better book.

In search of some sanity I turned to Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things. Shermer, an arch-sceptic and veteran debunker of outlandish beliefs, is a writer I admire. Alas, I found his book almost as tedious as Black's, because while both authors evidently feel it their duty to instruct, they neglect to entertain. Each tries to persuade us of a particular world view, and both end up preaching to the converted.

Over many pages, Shermer shows us why creationism is not science, why people who think they have been inside a UFO almost certainly have not been, why the Holocaust can be considered historical fact, and why a great many other things that most people believe to be true must indeed be true. Shermer offers scary statistics demonstrating the credulity of the American public, but anyone who thinks the Holocaust was a hoax won't be reading this book, they'll be waving banners at neo-Nazi rallies, and nothing Shermer says will ever persuade them otherwise. His book is instead a primer for those wishing to sound the kill-joy voice of scientific reason in bar-room debates about telepathy, the afterlife, or "secret history".

This is the book's first appearance in Britain, but it was actually one of Shermer's earliest, having first been published in the United States 10 years ago. The time lag renders his accounts of the Roswell alien autopsy hoax, or the antics of David Irving, somewhat out of date.

A far better book is Shermer's The Borderlands Of Science, published here in 2001, which covers less familiar topics. But for a sceptic like Shermer, the real test is not to demolish fringe beliefs, but instead to take on "cults" that have established themselves as mainstream orthodoxy. What, I wonder, does he think of global warming, post-structuralism or superstring theory?