The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Calling all space cadets
Let science writers take you on one hell of a trip – from magic mushrooms to potatoes on Mars
If the events of this year have had you daydreaming about abandoning the planet entirely, Christopher Wanjek’s Spacefarers: How Humans Will Settle the Moon, Mars, and Beyond ( Harvard, £23.95) is a geekily pleasurable survey of the practicalities and challenges. The SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk wants to colonise Mars, but we don’t even know whether babies can be born in its low gravity. That doesn’t stop Wanjek from having fun with ideas such as skyhooks or railguns to hurl stuff into Earth’s orbit, and thinking seriously about what kind of crops we should grow on other planets (sweet potatoes and dandelions, he says). Now that the British government has announced its Space Command (after Donald Trump’s Space Force last year), this book should be given to all prospective space cadets.
Before the extraterrestrial dandelion crops are ripe, our astronauts will no doubt have to survive on freeze- dried ready meals. George Zaidan’s Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put in Us and on Us ( Duckworth, £ 12.99) might help readers relax about the occasional comforting serving of “ultra-processed” foods.
The author, a trained chemist, discusses everything from plants’ defences against insects to the “swimming pool smell”, and gives an excellent primer on the scientific method itself. He describes deciding to demolish a particular research methodology as putting on the “Asshole Hat”.
Wearing instead a mushroom hat is the biologist Merlin Sheldrake, whose Entangled Life ( Bodley Head, £20) is a fascinating survey of the kingdom of fungi, which enable trees to talk to one another, humans to bake bread, and ants to become zombies. Our author is a pleasingly enthusiastic guide, not neglecting either to sample some of the most mind-altering fungi available – all in the name of research.
A remarkable detective story of research misbehaviour, by contrast, is told in Susannah Cahalan’s The Great Pretender (Canongate, £16.99). A very famous 1973 paper, “On Being Sane in Insane Places” by the Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan, recounted how he and his fellow researchers had all gone separately to different psychiatric hospitals and reported hearing voices saying “thud, empty, hollow”. Based on this one symptom they were diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed for weeks against their will. This story fed into a wider countercultural mistrust of psychiatry, but almost none of it actually happened in the way originally reported. Rosenhan, it turns out, was a charismatic fraud, of the type that still crops up here and there if you know where to look.
To keep their bones and muscles from wasting too much in low gravity, our Mars-bound astronauts will have to do a lot of exercise on the trip. Daniel Lieberman’s Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health (Allen Lane, £25) is a relaxing myth-busting book in which the evolutionary-biologist author puts your mind if not your muscles at rest about what kind and how much exercise we need to get. It turns out that just walking is fine, as long as you do enough of it – at least five hours, at speed, a week.
Another myth- buster is Adam Rutherford’s stylish and punchy How to Argue with a Racist (W&N, £ 12.99). Rutherford, a geneticist, assures readers that his discipline provides no basis for modern racial pseudoscience; on the contrary, everyone’s ancestry is marvellously cosmopolitan. Every Nazi, we now can be sure, had Jewish ancestors. “For humans, there are no pure
bloods, only mongrels enriched by the blood of multitudes.”
Pragya Agarwal’s Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias (Bloomsbury, £ 16.99), meanwhile, is a useful survey of the manifold biases we can be prey to in matters racial, sexual, and other. You’ve probably heard of confirmation bias, but did you know there is a corresponding “disconfirmation bias”, according to which we “spend considerable energy in denigrating arguments that run counter to our existing beliefs”? I took many days constructing a brilliant refutation of this claim, but unfortunately this column is too short to contain it.
Nor are we naturally much cop at statistics, which is why they are so often used for nefarious political communication. So explains the Dutch economist Sanne Blauw in The Number Bias ( Sceptre, £ 16.99), ranging from Florence Nightingale’s virtuoso use of graphs in Crimea to the darker stories of how tobacco and oil companies have deliberately twisted data in order to sow mistrust in science. Our brains are prey to biases not because they are somehow dysfunctional computers, messy and wet; actually they are not computers at all, argues Matthew Cobb in The Idea of the Brain: A History ( Profile, £ 30). As he shows, our brains used to be thought of as marvellous hydraulic or clockwork systems. Our fanciest new technology is always thought to explain the brain, but the brain is more mindbogglingly complex than anything
Tobacco companies have deliberately twisted data to sow mistrust in science
we can build, and moves in ways still very mysterious.
Even Stephen Hawking’s brain was not a computer; fellow physicist Leonard Mlodinow provides a warm and three- dimensional portrait of a brilliant and stubborn human being, rather than simply a genius in a chair, in his Stephen Hawking: A Memoir of Friendship and Physics (Allen Lane, £20). One thing the great man was not was punctual: everyone around him had to learn to live on “Hawking time”, which could stretch and yawn nearly as much as time has done for all of us in 2020.