Who wouldn't want a doorway that looked like this? Last night I had a quaint dream. Don't stop reading - I know the rule is to never tell other people about your dreams because it's so BORING, but the whole point of this post is about when it makes sense to break the rules. In the dream I was helping out a company whose sole product was doorways designed in the style of the old Foyles building in Charing Cross Road (don't ask). They were worried about their advertising, which consisted of half page magazine adverts that were totally full of text apart from a backdrop of a Caribbean beach. Now, one rule of advertising is Don't use too many words . People switch off. Get your message across with images and a few snappy words. (You can have small, secondary text to give follow-on information, but the main message should be short and big.) If you look at adverts on Tube stations these days, for instance, that's generally the case. But when I regularly caught...

I have just read the 17 May edition of New Scientist . (My reading filing pile is somewhat random.) In the leader we are told how the illegal export of rhino horns, ivory etc funds terrorist groups like Boko Haram. Fair enough. Then comes this statement: 'When it comes to wildlife crime it is easy to point the finger at Chinese demand for ivory, rhino horn and tiger penis while forgetting that all consumers contribute to some extent.' What?  I'm sorry, I find this extremely offensive. You can't make a blanket statement like that without evidence, and a science magazine should know better than to do so. I simply don't accept that I, as it later puts it, as an 'affluent consumer', 'encourage the slaughter of endangered animals.' I think the slaughter of these animals and the uses of their materials in what is nothing more than a pathetic attempt at magic is unacceptable. I don't in any way support the practices in which they are used. I...

One of my (many) favourite parts of the wonderful Buffy the Vampire Slayer is when they need a mcguffin called an Urn of Osiris. One is duly obtained and when someone asks, amazed that this rare item has been so quickly found, the answer is something to the effect of 'Oh, I got it on eBay.' I have a mixed relationship with selling books on eBay. I used to regularly sell my Organizing a Murder ebook of party games that way, selling at least a copy a week, which worked wonderfully well as there was nothing to post (and I got really happy feedback). Eventually eBay stopped me from selling it because they said I didn't have the rights to do so. Despite many attempts to point out that, as the author, I had every right, I never got anywhere - any attempt to get an non-robotic response out of the supposedly human customer service team at eBay is a nightmare. I think they have now banned selling e-products. I've never really bothered selling physical books this wa...

One of my early popular science books, The Man Who Stopped Time , was on the photographic and moving picture pioneer, Eadweard Muybridge, who did most of his work in Pennsylvania and California, but who was born in Kingston-upon-Thames. Here's an account I wrote at the time of hunting for Muybridge in Kingston. When getting under the skin on Edweard Muybridge you can’t avoid Kingston-upon-Thames. It inevitably means regular visits to the North Kingston Centre, an unfriendly, echoing civic building tagged onto a school, which houses the local history room. The room, entered through a strangely bunker-like door, resembles every reference library you have ever been in. Old well-used tables, a slightly musty smell and a few modern contrivances – PCs, photocopier, microfilm readers – sitting uncomfortably alongside the huge bound volumes of the local paper. Very friendly and helpful staff, though. But that’s a little world of its own as is the Kingston Museum, with its dramatic Muyb...

I'm currently reading Philip Ball's new book Invisible for review (you can find out more about it at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com ) and there is a very interesting, if slightly pointed remark about magic books in it. Ball says: 'Magical books thus acquired the same talismanic function as a great deal of the academic literature today: to be read, learned, cited, but never used.' I did rather enjoy the dig at poor old academics, though there is an element of truth to make that dig stick. But I was also interested in the idea that these kind of books weren't really meant to be used. I was familiar with some of the early versions, as Roger Bacon was fond of one of the many (now known to be fake) books over the years called something like 'Secret of Secrets', usually claiming to be the wisdom of some ancient seer - in Bacon's case of Hermes Tresmegistus , a fabled mystic who seemed to combine Ancient Greek and Ancient Egyptian wisdom in one soggy whole...

We are used to thinking of science as being logical and ironclad in its approach. Admittedly, it doesn't provide the ultimate truth or definitive facts. One of the hardest things for many to grasp (including some scientists) is that all science can ever do is give us the best theories supported by the current data. It only takes one new observation that can be verified to throw the best scientific theory out of the window. At least that is the principle. But scientists are human and certainly don't want to start from scratch when this happens. So what they usually do is patch. They modify the theory until it does fit the data again. The trouble is, you can only do this so far before the creaking theory becomes hard to keep alive, but by now it is often a Frankenstein's monster with a life of its own, sustained apart from anything else, by careers that have been dedicated to bringing it into being. This was always the complaint Fred Hoyle had about the way his stead...

The actual beach I intend to be sitting on with these books I recently mocked a feature in the Observer , where lots of the sort of people who always get asked this kind of thing, told the paper all the boring, worthy and generally show-offy books that (they claimed) made up their holiday reading. The piece is labelled 'best holiday reads' - but these books really aren't holiday reads at all. We all know that these select literati will leave those classics and economics tomes at home and pack the Dan Browns (or, for the more tasteful, P. G. Wodehouse) in a plain brown wrapper. Or, even better on a Kindle. So I thought it was time to come up with an honest holiday reading list. Here are three books I've just bought to take with my to sunny France later in the summer: Neal Stephenson: Reamde - because every holiday pile should include one book that's thick enough to act as a doorstop and/or to defend yourself against muggers and bag snatchers. And Ste...

The panel looking gormless (photo Debbie Gilpin @Deborah_Deborah) I had the pleasure of helping organise and taking part in a 'How to write a popular science book' masterclass on Sunday, and just wanted to take the opportunity to say that if the attendees enjoyed it as much as I did they will have had a good day indeed. We had a fascinating keynote speech on why communicating science is important from Professor Stephen Curry , one of the organisers of Science is Vital and an early scientist blogger, a great talk from science journalist and author of Geek Nation Angela Saini on what makes a good popular science book (and what doesn't), various odds and sods from me, ranging from research to selling your book, and a spot-on fact-filled guide to producing the perfect proposal and the book production process from ex-MD of Icon Books and author of The Science Magpie , Simon Flynn . The closing part of the event was a chance for members of the audience to give brief pi...

Here's the thing - I'm very pleased with my new book The Quantum Age . It combines the weird and wonderful nature of quantum physics with an exploration of remarkable quantum applications, from lasers to superconductors, and the stories of the development of these ideas and technologies featuring some big (and sometimes decidedly strange) characters. The Kindle edition usually sells for about £8.99, but as part of their 'Summer Reads' promotion, Amazon currently has it at 99p ($1.69) - because why wouldn't you want to read about something as mind boggling as quantum physics on the beach? Being a Kindle ebook, you can read it on a Kindle device, but also on tablets, smartphones, laptops, the better kinds of abacus* - so there's no excuse. You are probably thinking, yes, but I don't want to deprive Brian of income. Don't worry - I really do want you to get a copy. Leaving aside the fact that not everyone would buy it at full price, if enough of you d...

I was mildly depressed by the title of a piece in The Telegraph the other day by Sinclair Mckay. 'Let's hope galactic travel never takes off,' it reads, with the subhead 'A British launch pad for space tourism will diminish the mystery of the universe.' One of the reasons I was mildly depressed was that in a few weeks time I've a new book out from my US publisher, St Martin's Press called Final Frontier , celebrating our attempts to travel into space and looking positively into the future. To be honest, the article isn't as extreme as the title, but I think there are several ways that Mr Mckay gets it wrong. The first is that term 'galactic travel'. Of course any space travel is likely to be 'galactic travel' in the sense that it's unlikely to be intergalactic - but by that argument, nipping down to the shops is galactic travel, and that already has taken off. Quite a while ago. I think the headline writer is investing too muc...

Yesterday, a couple of people on Facebook shared this Voltaire quote with me, illustrated by an image of the masses being crushed by a rich hand. (You could tell it was rich, because it had a fancy bejewelled ring.) It struck me this was a much more interesting concept than was probably intended, because it may well tell us a lot about how things have get better, at least in some parts of the world. The fact is, in the West at least, we are doing pretty well on this measure, to the extent that you begin to wonder if anyone does rule over us by this definition (is that democracy?). Specifically there is no possibility that we aren't allowed to criticize politicians or bankers or rich businesspeople (if you doubt this, watch an episode of Have I Got News for You ). We don't just do it, we do it for entertainment. We are also allowed to criticize religion as we never were before, which is just as well when you look at the amount of negative stories in the news with a religio...

I frequently get emails from people who have read my books (usually satisfied customers!) - but the other day, for the first time, I was contacted by someone who had enjoyed listening  to one - the audio book version of A Brief History of Infinity . Something that was particularly encouraging about hearing from Richard Madigan in New York was that the audio experience was sufficiently clear that he felt inspired to produce the graphic below of Galileo's 'parallel wheels' thought experiment. For some reason I had always imagined it turning the other way, but it's fun having a concept in an audio book made very elegantly visual this way. Here's the GIF:

The Soil Association's carefully worded announcement heading I like to keep an eye on the UK's organic body, the Soil Association . I have been a little suspicious about their approach to science ever since I queried an outburst from them on the subject of nanoparticles six years ago. In January 2008, the Soil Association, banned nanoparticles from organic products. Nanoparticles are ultra-small particles of anything, provided the substance is divided up into pieces that are just a few nanometres (billionths of a metre) across. But the Social Association specifically only banned man-made nanoparticles, claiming that natural ones (like soot) are fine because ‘life has evolved with these.’ This is just not an acceptable argument. If a nanoparticle is dangerous because of its scale – entirely possible, because the physics (rather than chemistry) of particles of this size is quite different from the objects we are familiar with – then that danger is just as present whether...

Human hair louse - nature at its best There used to be a common saying - less so in these 'everything goes' days - where people would shake their heads and say 'It's not natural.' But they got it all wrong - what they were really thinking is  'it's not civilised' or to put it another way, 'it's too natural.' The reason this phrase is so back to front is that we have a rosily incorrect mental picture of what is 'natural'. As soon as we hear the word we get a knee-jerk reaction that's all rosy and fuzzy about rolling hills and beautiful scenery and pretty animals and whole grain, organic, hand-knitted yoghurt. And of course there are circumstances where natural is better. Processed foods for instance. There are nations that are particularly good at beating the nature out of food and drink - dare I mention US squirty cheese (or is it Cheez?), chocolate and attempts to make tea to name but three. However, most of the time, bei...

 One of my favourite activities is giving talks based on my books, and I'm grateful to Bath University for hosting a talk recently on How to Build a Time Machine as part of their General University Lecture Programme. While an audio version misses out on the excitement of seeing me wave my arms about (not to mention missing the sight of the cardboard box of time ), it still might be of interest to hear the talk, which doesn't use slides. You should be able to play it using the controls at the top of the screen - but if that doesn't work, click here to access the podcast . It lasts about 45 minutes. If it's a subject that interests you, please take a moment to have a look at my book , which inevitably can go into a lot more detail and cover many more aspects of the science of time travel.

A little quiz for you today. What do you think this is? A few helpful hints. 'A piece of tree' won't do - this is a part of a piece of early technology. But what was it used for? And how? To give some scale, it's about 30 cm across. And the answer is... ... it's a piece of a wooden water main . I saw it on a visit to WRC  (formerly the Water Research Council) in Swindon with Radio Wiltshire presenter Mark O'Donnell . The company provides services to the water companies and have interesting facilities, including an indoor section of road as a test pit where pipes are buried and then put under pressure to see how and when they fail. Remarkably, the WRC chief exec informed us that, in all probability, there are still some wooden water pipes in use in the UK. Another surprise was to discover that a fair number of older houses still get their drinking water through lead pipes. The water companies use a dilute phosphoric acid to coat the pipes on the inside...

Some related artists, earlier I can't justify paying £10 a month for Spotify, the music streaming service, but I have dabbled with the free version, and now that it is possible, for instance, to specify that you want to play the tracks of a specific album in the mobile version (even if it has to be shuffled), I am finally starting to get the point of Spotify. Of course, it's useless for all my 70s concept prog rock albums, which have to be played in the correct track order, or Rick Wakeman comes round and duffs you up. But for a lot of others, shuffle is just fine. However I do still have a bit of a problem with the streaming service (over and above the feeble royalty payments they make to the performers). The thing is, when I want music at the moment I typically go to my iTunes library and flick through it and I'm looking at stuff I know and love - I can browse it sensibly. But Spotify is too big to browse in an undirected fashion. I find myself staring at the in...

I'd like to draw your attention to the 'Writing a popular science book' Masterclass organised by the Guardian on 20 July in London . Whether you are a scientist who would like to get wider public interest in your field, or just someone who has always wanted to write a book, this is a great opportunity to gain the necessary know-how on everything from choosing topics to selling your idea and the publishing process. With talks from scientist and communicator Professor Stephen Curry, TV presenter and author Angela Saini, former science book publisher and author Simon Flynn, award winning science writer Brian Clegg and former biologist and author M G Harris, plus the opportunity to pitch your book ideas to an expert panel for instant feedback, it should be a brilliant day.  To ensure a place, tickets need to be booked by 7 July - you can find all the details on the Guardian website. Here's a little more about the team: Brian Clegg is a popular scienc...

Reading for review Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom, I couldn't help but be struck by this graph: The remarkable thing is, if you zoom in, a huge amount of that growth has happened in my lifetime. We talk casually of change, but I think this emphasises how different things are now from the way they have been at any time in history. And as for the famous climate change 'hockey stick' graph - 'Call that a hockey stick? THIS is a hockey stick!' (HT to Crocodile Dundee.)