“The big blunders in this book are not accidental but intentional.” So physicist Freeman Dyson proclaims of the maverick ideas percolating through this collection of his New York Review of Books essays and book reviews from 2006 to 2014. Dyson delivers his iconoclasm with humour, honesty and off-the-cuff brilliance, whether riffing off microbiologist Carl Woese's concept of living systems by seeing both thunderstorms and butterflies as “patterns of organization”, imagining ecology enriched by genome designers, or mulling over how Mary Shelley's Frankenstein cast science as “an agent of doom”.

The chunks of broken protoplanet we call asteroids are potential killers as well as scientific gold mines. Both thrills are explored in this comprehensive study of these “little worlds”. Planetary geoscientist Michael Shepard recounts the history of asteroid spotting, from pioneers such as Giuseppe Piazzi — who detected the first, Ceres, in 1801 — to today's Catalina Sky Survey, run by the University of Arizona. Interweaving anecdotes from his own work with copious technical detail, Shepard leads us on an expert tour of a fecund branch of astronomy and its lessons for planetary science.

The air — all 51 quadrillion cubic kilometres of it — is the biggest ecosystem on Earth, an atmospheric ocean connecting all life. Yet as science writer Mark Everard shows in his original study, the importance of this layered envelope of gases and aerosols is hardly reflected in policy. He argues for reassessment, looking in turn at the nexus of atmosphere, biosphere and human culture, and abuses such as air pollution and climate change. To secure “breathing space”, Everard calls for an approach integrating management of the atmosphere with that of other Earth systems.

A playful erudition permeates this biography of Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century English polymath who wrote the debunking classic Pseudodoxia Epidemica, coined 784 new words and had an eye for patterns in nature. Hugh Aldersey-Williams zips between our time and Browne's, and through the East Anglian landscapes Browne knew, to reveal the man and his work. Browne emerges as an exemplar of synthesized knowledge — and as such, curiously at home in today's cultural remix of science and humanities.