The Ten Worst Science Books

And following on from the editors of Discover magazine listing their 25 greatest Science books, John Horgan, a blogger with Discover, has an entry in his Horganism blog for the top ten worst Science books. It’s actually quite tricky to come up with a list that includes only genuine science books. There are thousands of books that claim to be about genuine science, but are simply pseudoscience. Anything by Deepak Chopra, for a start. So Horgan’s list is quite interesting.

 

I can readily believe that some of his nominated books are pretty dire. Anything that I’ve read by Ray Kurzweil, for example, usually has my eyes rolling by the end of the second paragraph. And I suspect I would agree with Horgan about the Tao of Physics – I have another of Capra’s books that had my eyebrows raising, and not in a good way. But I’ll reserve judgement on the nomination of Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe. Clearly, Horgan thinks it’s a load of tosh, and it is quite true that string theory pushes one’s sense of credibility to the limits. I quite liked the book. Greene explains things well. What we need, of course, is some experimental evidence to show that the theories of Greene and his fellow string theorists have some validity. We may get some of that once the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva becomes operational next year.