Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space

  • Lisa Randall
Bodley Head 64 pp. £4.99 (2012)

The Higgs bombshell on 4 July rocked the world of physics. In this slim volume, theoretical physicist Lisa Randall analyses the significance and implications of that momentous finding at Switzerland's Large Hadron Collider. She offers clear accounts of the Higgs mechanism and the role and modes of the Higgs's decay; follows the seven-month lead-up to the discovery; and speculates about what it all might mean for other areas of exploration, such as supersymmetry. A lucid, deft and engaging summation of dogged determination and “heroic engineering”.

The Human Quest: Prospering Within Planetary Boundaries

Johan Rockström and Mattias Klum. Stockholm Text 314 pp. $9.99 (2012)

In 2009, Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and his colleagues set out in Nature nine 'planetary boundaries' — numerical limits for processes that affect Earth's capacity to support human life, such as freshwater use and climate change. This lavishly illustrated e-book — with a foreword by former US president Bill Clinton and video clips from photographer Mattias Klum — extends this idea, laying out pressures and tipping points. Paramount among the changes needed, Rockström says, is a big shift in behaviour.

Lost Antarctica: Adventures in a Disappearing Land

  • James McClintock
Palgrave Macmillan 256 pp. £16.99 (2012)

The sight of 50,000 king penguins on the Crozet Island Archipelago in the early 1980s sparked marine biologist James McClintock's fascination with Antarctic fauna. Now a veteran of the extreme south, McClintock shares the otherworldly wonders unveiled by decades of research. The book is packed with joys, from soft-coral 'trees' that replant themselves to the snoozing Weddell seal, stinking of putrid fish, that the author encountered in a dive hut. Running like a chill current through all is the climate-driven decimation of the ice on which these ecosystems depend.

Before Galileo: The Birth of Modern Science in Medieval Europe

  • John Freely
Overlook Press 352 pp. £18.51 (2012)

A thousand years before Galileo, the transmission of knowledge that survived the burning of the ancient Library of Alexandria began. Physicist John Freely traces this “tenuous Ariadne's thread” of classical learning that unspooled from Egypt through Byzantium and the Islamic world, finally emerging as Latin texts. Focusing on the trailblazers through this extraordinary millennium — from Bede, Averroës and al-Khwarizmi to Adelard of Bath, Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon — Freely ends with a coda on Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo himself and Newton. Shoulders of giants indeed.

The Scientists: An Epic of Discovery

Edited by:
  • Andrew Robinson
Thames & Hudson 304 pp. £24.95 (2012)

The human face of scientific breakthroughs from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries is spotlit in this sumptuously illustrated volume. Science writer Andrew Robinson, editing contributions from a stellar team of authors, groups 43 greats into six broad areas: Universe, Earth, Molecules and Matter, Inside the Atom, Life, and Body and Mind. From Alan Turing and Marie Curie to William Harvey and Chandrasekhar Venkata Raman, this is a sampler of the driven, complex, fascinating characters who fomented scientific revolutions.