The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything: Adventures in Math and Science, Dr Hannah Fry and Dr Adam Rutherford

Despite our clever linguistic abilities, humans are spectacularly ill-equipped to comprehend what’s happening in the universe. Our senses and intuition routinely mislead us. The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) tells the story of how we came to suppress our monkey minds and perceive the true nature of reality. Written with wit and humuor, this brief book tells the story of science — tales of fumbles and missteps, errors and egos, hard work, accidents, and some really bad decisions — all of which have created the sum total of human knowledge.

Mathematician Hannah Fry and geneticist Adam Rutherford guide readers through time and space, through our bodies and brains, showing how emotions shape our view of reality, how our minds tell us lies, and why a mostly bald and curious ape decided to begin poking at the fabric of the universe.

Rutherford and Fry shine as science sleuths, wrestling with some truly head-scratching questions: Where did time come from? Do we have free will? Does my dog love me? Hilarious sidebars present memorable scientific oddities: for example, hypnotized snails, human-sized ants, and the average time it takes most animals to evacuate their bladders. (A surprisingly consistent twenty-one seconds, if you must know.)

Both rigorous and playful, The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) is a celebration of the weirdness of the cosmos, the strangeness of humans, and the joys and follies of scientific discovery.

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About the Authors

Dr Hannah Fry is a Professor in the Mathematics of Cities at UCL, and honorary fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). She is a best-selling author, having written The Mathematics of Love: Patterns, Proofs, and the Search for the Ultimate Equation, The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus (co-authored with Thomas Oléron Evans) and Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms. She is also an award-winning science presenter and recipient of UCL Provost’s Public Engager of the Year in 2013, the Christopher Zeeman Medal in 2018 and the Asimov Prize in 2020.

Hannah regularly features on television, having recently appeared as a panellist on Have I Got News For You on BBC One, and has presented many documentaries on BBC Two and Four, including How to Find Love Online, Contagion! The BBC Four Pandemic, The Great British Intelligence Test, Making Sense of Cancer with Hannah Fry and Unvaccinated. She also co-hosts The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry on BBC Radio 4.

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @fryrsquared
Instagram: @fryrsquared
Website: hannahfry.co.uk

Dr Adam Rutherford is a scientist, writer and broadcaster, and lecturer in Biology and Society at UCL. He is a best-selling author, having written Creation: The Origin of Life / The Future of Life (2014), A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes (2016), Genetics (2018), The Book of Humans: The Story of How We Became Us (2018), Humanimal: How Homo sapiens Became Nature’s Most Paradoxical Creature—A New Evolutionary History (2019), How to Argue with a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality (2020) and Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics (2022). 

He has written and presented numerous documentaries for BBC television including Playing God, The Gene Code, Science Betrayed and The Cell. He also hosts BBC Radio 4’s flagship weekly science programme Inside Science, and co-presents The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry.

You can follow his work here:

Twitter: @adamrutherford
Website: adamrutherford.com

Dr Lillian Dyck

Dr Lillian Eva Dyck is an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Saskatchewan and former Canadian senator (retired). She was one of the first Aboriginal women in Canada to achieve an academic scientific career, as well as the first to be a senator. Dyck is both of Chinese Canadian and Cree Gordon First Nation heritage.

Dyck’s love of science began with her chemistry teacher, who encouraged her to pursue the subject. She attended the University of Saskatchewan where she obtained her undergraduate and masters degrees in biochemistry. After time spent working in jobs in horticulture and in biochemistry labs, she became interested in biological psychiatry, and returned to the University of Saskatchewan to pursue a PhD.

Dyck began to work as a neuroscientist at the University of Saskatchewan, eventually reaching full professor in the Neuropsychiatry Research Unit. Initially, she researched the biochemistry of alcoholism, because she was aware of racist myths about alcoholism amongst Indigenous people and wanted to challenge them. Her other work investigated potential drugs, exploring their mechanisms of action, in order to find out which were most appropriate for neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia. She also wrote about the uses of Indigenous medicine in treating disease, in her paper An Analysis of Western, Feminist and Aboriginal Science Using the Medicine Wheel of the Plains Indians.

She received many awards for her work, including an Indspire, formerly National Aboriginal Achievement Award, for Science & Technology, a YWCA Woman of Distinction Award for Science, Technology & the Environment, and a YWCA Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2017, Cree playwright Kenneth T. Williams wrote a play about Dyck called Café Daughter.

Following her research career, Dyck was invited to join the Canadian Senate by the Prime Minister in 2005, where she continued advocating for Indigenous women and other minority groups, serving as Deputy Chair and Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples and as a member of the Progressive Senate Group. She was awarded the Order of Canada in 2021 for her work.

Further Reading

• Lillian Dyck, Wikipedia
• Dr. L. Dyck, University of Saskatchewan
• Lillian Eva Dyck, Indspire
• Science and Native American Communities: Legacies of Pain, Visions of Promise, Keith James, 1 September 2001
• Senator Lillian Dyck, Angelina Irinici, Indigenous Works, 1 October 2013
• Senator Lillian Eva Dyck celebrates Science Literacy Week, Senate of Canada, 17 September 2018
• Café Daughter Brings Inspirational Story To Calgary Audiences – At ATP Until January 27, John Copley, Alberta Native News, 19 January 2019
• Lillian Dyck, John Boyko, The Canadian Encyclopedia, 20 July 2020
• ‘Most of my life has been about standing up for others,’: Retiring Sen. Lillian Dyck looks back at her career, Thia James, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, 25 August 2020
• ‘We had to take a very firm stand’: Trailblazing senator Lillian Dyck, first Indigenous woman to serve in role, retires, Creeson Agecoutay, CTV News, 25 August 2020
• An Interview with Senator Lillian Eva Dyck, Meagan Collins, BrainReach Montreal/Mission Cerveau, 3 October 2020
• Former Senator Lillian Dyck says receiving the Order of Canada is ’emotional’, a ‘delightful surprise’, Laura Sciarpelletti, CBC News, 29 December 2021

Dr Valerie Thomas

Dr Valerie Thomas, born in 1943, is an African American inventor and NASA scientist, famous for her ‘illusion transmitter’ and work as a computer scientist at NASA. She received many awards for her work and her activism, including an Award of Merit from the Goddard Space Flight Center and the NASA Equal Opportunity Medal.

While technology was an interest of hers as a child, she received little encouragement to pursue this or other science fields. This changed when she went to Morgan State University, where she majored in physics, one of only two women to do so.

After finishing her degree, she began to work on data analysis at NASA as a mathematician and taught herself how to use Fortran. She began her career working on real-time computer data systems that were used in satellite operations control centres.

During the 1970s, she worked on Landsat, becoming team leader for the Large Area Crop Inventory Experiment, an ambitious project which used satellites to predict worldwide wheat yield. She was also responsible for the development of the image processing system.

In 1976, Thomas was at an exhibition where she saw an illusion of a lightbulb that was shining, despite having been removed from its socket. She began designing an optical device that used concave mirrors to create such illusions and in 1980, she patented her illusion transmitter. The design is still in use at NASA and has also become more widely used in other fields such as surgery and 3D video.

Thomas became the Computer Facility manager at the Space Science Data Operations Office at NASA, and was responsible for reorganising and updating the facility. She then did the same at the Space Physics Analysis Network (SPAN), growing the number of computer nodes from 100 to 2,700 worldwide with the aim of improving scientific collaboration. Whilst at SPAN, Thomas worked on projects studying the ozone layer, Halley’s Comet and Voyager.

Outside of her scientific work, Valerie is an enthusiastic supporter of young people, especially girls interested in STEM. She was a mentor for the National Technical Association (NTA), Goddard Space Flight Center and Science, Mathematics, Aerospace, Research, and Technology, Inc (S.M.A.R.T).

She retired from NASA in 1995, but continues with her mentorship activities, inspiring the next generation.

Further Reading

• Valerie Thomas, Wikipedia
• Valerie Thomas, Biography
• Valerie Thomas – Illusion Transmitter, Lemelson-MIT
• Valerie Thomas: Inventor of the Illusion Transmitter, Beyond Curie
• Dr Valerie L. Thomas at NASA: The Face Behind Landsat Images, Yvette Smith, NASA, 10 February 2020
• Valerie Thomas (1943-), Will Guzmán, Black Past, 20 April 2021
• 78-Year-Old Valerie Thomas Invented Technology That Led to the Creation of 3-D Imaging, Sara Bey, Oprah Daily, June 2021
• Meet Valerie Thomas, Hanusia Higgins, Massive Science, 16 September 2021
• Monitoring the Earth: Valerie Thomas and Satellite Image Processing, Jana Thompson, Medium: IBM Data Science in Practice, 13 February 2022

Geopedia: A Brief Compendium of Geologic Curiosities, Prof Marcia Bjornerud

Geopedia is a trove of geologic wonders and the evocative terms that humans have devised to describe them. Featuring dozens of entries – from Acasta gneiss to Zircon – this illustrated compendium is brimming with lapidary and lexical insights that will delight rockhounds and word lovers alike. Geoscientists are magpies for words, and with good reason. The sheer profusion of minerals, landforms, and geologic events produced by our creative planet demands an immense vocabulary to match. Marcia Bjornerud shows how this lexicon reflects not only the diversity of rocks and geologic processes but also the long history of human interactions with them. 

With wit and warmth, she invites all readers to celebrate the geologic glossary – a gallimaufry of allusions to mythology, imports from diverse languages, embarrassing anachronisms, and recent neologisms. This captivating book includes cross-references at the end of each entry, inviting you to leave the alphabetic trail and meander through it like a river. Geopedia is a mix of engaging and entertaining facts about how the earth works, how it has coevolved with life over billions of years, and how our understanding of the planet has deepened over time.

Order the book on Bookshop.org.uk here and your purchase will support a local independent bookshop of your choice!

About the Author

Marcia Bjornerud is Professor of Geosciences and Environmental Studies at Lawrence University, a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Oslo and University of Otago. A contributing writer to The New Yorker, Wired, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, she is also the author of several books for popular audiences – Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth and Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World. Timefulness was longlisted for the 2019 PEN/E.O.Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing, and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in Science and Technology.

You can follow her work here:

Website: lawrence.edu/people/marcia-bjornerud-walter-schober-professor-of-environmental-studies-and-professor-of-geosciences

Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces, Laurie Winkless

You are surrounded by stickiness. With every step you take, air molecules cling to you and slow you down; the effect is harder to ignore in water. When you hit the road, whether powered by pedal or engine, you rely on grip to keep you safe. The Post-it note and glue in your desk drawer. The non-stick pan on your stove. The fingerprints linked to your identity. The rumbling of the Earth deep beneath your feet, and the ice that transforms waterways each winter. All of these things are controlled by tiny forces that operate on and between surfaces, with friction playing the leading role.

In Sticky, Laurie Winkless explores some of the ways that friction shapes both the manufactured and natural worlds, and describes how our understanding of surface science has given us an ability to manipulate stickiness, down to the level of a single atom. But this apparent success doesn’t tell the whole story. Each time humanity has pushed the boundaries of science and engineering, we’ve discovered that friction still has a few surprises up its sleeve.

So do we really understand this force? Can we say with certainty that we know how a gecko climbs, what’s behind our sense of touch, or why golf balls, boats and aircraft move as they do? Join Laurie as she seeks out the answers from experts scattered across the globe, uncovering a stack of scientific mysteries along the way.

Order the book on Bookshop.org.uk here and your purchase will support a local independent bookshop of your choice!

About the Author

Laurie Winkless is an Irish physicist-turned-science-writer, currently based in New Zealand. After her post-grad, she joined the UK’s National Physical Laboratory as a research scientist, where she specialised in functional materials. She is an experienced science communicator, who loves talking about science in all forms of media. Since leaving the lab, Laurie has worked with scientific organisations, engineering companies, universities, and astronauts, amongst others. Her writing has featured in outlets including Forbes, Wired, Esquire, and The Economist, and her first book, Science and the City: The Mechanics Behind the Metropolis, was published by Bloomsbury Sigma in 2016.  

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @laurie_winkless
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/laurie-winkless
Website: lauriewinkless.com