Margaret Harris reviews Science But Not As We Know It by Ben Gilliland
For nearly a decade, British commuters who read the free newspaper Metro on their way to work could regularly expect a shot of science with their morning coffee. The man responsible for this was Ben Gilliland, a graphic designer whose weekly “MetroCosm” science column began in 2005 and ran until mid-2014, when Metro’s chieftains made the much-derided decision to cancel the popular feature (it was eventually replaced with excerpts from New Scientist magazine). Now, after a gap of many months, commuters who miss Gilliland’s scientific stylings can finally get their fix.
Science But Not As We Know It is essentially MetroCosm in book form: a series of short, graphics-heavy summaries of scientific ideas, heavily skewed towards space, physics and astronomy and usually printed on a sharp black background. The main thing that’s changed is that the book format allows Gilliland to group his explanations loosely together by theme, with topics such as “How big is the universe?” and “Mercury’s secrets” classed under “Mysterious Universe” while “The story of the atom” and “Higgs boson: a bluffer’s guide” appear in “Teeny, Tiny, Super-Small Stuff”. Clearly, physicists aren’t the main audience here, but the book would make a great gift for a science-mad pre-teen, and those who work on public outreach may well be inspired by Gilliland’s tireless enthusiasm for communicating big ideas.
- 2015 Dorling Kindersley £9.99hb 192pp
