Rating: WORTHY!
I received this beautiful hard cover print book from Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review. It was such a pleasure to see this because most of my reviews are of ebooks which are so insubstantial as to almost non-existent. I can't donate ebooks to my kids' school library. This one, I can!
I routinely skip introductions, prologues, prefaces, etc. and I never miss them or find myself having to go back and read it to figure something out. I believe that if it's important enough to be read, then it's worthy of including in chapter one or later. These authors evidently have been reading my reviews (no, not really!) because they titled chapter one "Introduction"! Okay, guys, you got me! Now I have to read it!
So who are these authors? Johnjoe McFadden has a PhD on fungal virus genetics from Imperial College, London. Jim Al-Khalili has a PhD in theoretical nuclear physics, and is current president of the British Humanist Association. Both are professors at the University of Surrey. You will note that neither puts their academic credentials after their name on the cover. This, to me at least, is a hallmark of a serious scientific book. You may note that a lot of fringe books have author names sporting a string of acronyms after their name. I don't take those books seriously!
This book (as you might guess from the credentials of the authors) takes a look at the intersection of biology and quantum physics. I'm not convinced, as the blurb on the book's flyleaf claims, that the missing ingredient in the creation of life is quantum mechanics. Frankly I don't think we're missing anything except the original cooking pot where life began. I am convinced however, that what this book says about quantum biology is accurate and is one of the most exciting and useful frontiers of biological - and indeed medical - discovery.
This is written in clear, accessible, and precise language. It's difficult to give examples of the quantum world because it's nothing like the world with which we're familiar, but while qualifying their examples carefully, so we do not misunderstand how quantum mechanics works, the authors do supply very clear examples to emulate, in a simple way, what is happening in the more obtuse world they're actually discussing.
Real life examples, but nonetheless fascinating.
Starting with the European robin which has an amazing ability to navigate by tracking the magnetic lines between its northern nesting grounds and its winter vacation in the Mediterranean, the book launches into an engrossing and informative discussion of just how quantum mechanics not only pervades life, but it as essential to its functionality as it is to all of the modern electronic wonders we enjoy today, from computers to Blu-Ray disks, to MRI machines. One chapter title actually includes the words "quantum robin" which sounds like the title of a Jackson Five song, but I won't hold that against them!
On page sixty, a nanometer is correctly defined as one billionth of a meter, yet on page 78, "...just a few nanometers..." is incorrectly referred to as "millionths of a meter". Something is wrong here! You would need a thousand nanometers to be one millionth of a meter. A few nanometers is hardly a thousand! That aside I noticed no other errors. I can't speak for the science. I am not a scientist - I don't even play one on TV - but I am well read in the sciences, and the science here seemed fine to me. I'll leave it to the real scientists to pursue that aspect of this book, though.
I found one or two areas slightly lacking in detail for my taste - others may disagree, of course! One example of this was the double-slit experiment. I am by no means disputing the results. These counter-intuitive findings are well-established fact. What I would have liked to have read is a bit more detail about how exactly the experiments were set up and run, specifically: whether or not they've been performed in a vacuum. Some of this was addressed a bit later rather than in context, but I still would have liked to have known more. That said, there were other areas where I was overwhelmed by the science and had a hard time keeping track.
In overall terms, however, this book was very well done, covered what was, to me, a fascinating and cutting-edge topic, and was written for the most part in layman's terms - that is, if you're a laymen with a bit of science to give you a handle on these topics to begin with. I rate this a very worthy read and recommend it.
