Deirdre Bair, JUNG. Scotland on Sunday, January 25, 2004. Review by Andrew Crumey.

CARL Gustav Jung was a guru and a psychotic, unable to countenance the thought that his theories of the unconscious might be wrong. That, at least, was the view of one of his admirers, Anthony Storr. To his opponents, the Swiss psychologist who gave us such terms as 'synchronicity' and 'New Age' was a charlatan who hoodwinked patients, disciples and the general public for much of his 86-year life, leaving a legacy tainted by accusations of Nazism.

There are many biographies of Jung, and whenever a new one appears, the first question is which side is it on. Will it paint Jung as a sympathetic monster, or merely a monstrous one?

Deirdre Bair's massive, authoritative and detailed account of Jung's life is admirable, but frustrating for its author's refusal to come down off the fence. In the introduction, she says she is often asked if she ended up liking her subject. "Liking," she says, "really doesn't enter into it for me." Perhaps, though, that is just as well, given the evidence she presents so dispassionately.

A quick portrait of Jung's domestic life gives a hint of what he was like. Married to a Zurich heiress who solved his financial worries at a stroke, Jung fathered five children and had virtually nothing to do with the upbringing of any of them. He was fond, says Bair, of "nasty tricks", such as letting off a firework under one of his daughters, leaving her deafened in one ear. This, he later complained, was one of the reasons why she went off the rails and became "embittered" with him.

Meals were silent affairs, the children taught to speak only when addressed first by Jung. One daughter had musical talent, but even her silent drumming of imaginary piano scales on the dinner table was enough to incur Jung's wrath. His daily breakfast, Bair tells us, was runny egg slurped noisily from a bowl of bread - a sight so disgusting that his wife and offspring had to look away.

Some readers will accept Bair's excuse for such behaviour - Jung was a product of the repressive society of late 19th-century Switzerland. But for a man so dedicated to the process of psychological enrichment and self -fulfilment he called "individuation", Jung seems to have been singularly inept at fostering a healthy home life.

Instead he replicated the unhappy marriage of his own parents. Born in the remote village of Kesswil in 1875, his father was a Protestant pastor, his mother a firm believer in ghosts and telepathy who referred to her split personalities as "number one" and "number two." On one occasion, a loud sound was heard in the house - a knife in a drawer was found to have shattered spontaneously. Or at any rate, that was Jung's version of the story - there was no independent witness to the event he later cited as evidence for the paranormal. Taken as a symbol, though, the broken knife neatly sums up Jung's dysfunctional childhood home.

Jung's professional career began in Zurich's Burghoelzli mental hospital. He then fostered links with Freud, first meeting him in 1907, when Jung was 32 and Freud 51. They subsequently went to America together, where Freud noted Jung's talent for attracting well-heeled converts to psychoanalysis.

The Freud-Jung relationship was exceptional: throughout his life, Jung had relatively few male friends, and virtually none from within his own profession, saying they were too "competitive." Similarly, he denounced colleagues for being "philosophical" rather than "scientific." It is not hard to see here the psychological phenomenon of projection: the pot calling the kettle black.

Freud and Jung both saw their partnership in father-son terms, but a meeting of two such massive egos was bound to end in tears. The split came in 1912, when a heated disagreement about ancient Egyptian symbolism ended with Freud fainting in Jung's arms, something Freud subsequently attributed to "unruly homosexual feelings".

The difference between Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis was evident even from their choice of seating arrangements. Freud put his patients on a couch and sat out of sight of them - a disembodied voice prompting their unconscious thoughts. Jung, by contrast, sat beside his patients and entered into conversation with them on an equal footing. Admirers and critics alike say that for Jung, individual patients were less important than the universal archetypes they brought with them. Jung's lifelong journey was into his own soul; other people helped him on the way.

Those helpers were mostly female. Jung was good-looking in early life, hugely famous in later years, and charismatic throughout, so he was never short of fans. First there were the so-called "fur coats" - middle-aged housewives who flocked to his lectures to sign up for analysis, and maybe more, in their own homes. Then there were people such as millionairess Edith Rockefeller, who offered to bring Jung to America and give him a house next to hers so she could be his patient. Instead, he persuaded her to fund the Psychological Club of Zurich, which became Jung's principal forum and, some say, the 'church' of his personality cult.

At club meetings there were three chairs of honour: one for Jung, one for his wife Emma, and one for his mistress Toni Wolff. Their triangular menage lasted for decades, and Emma put up with it in much the same way she tolerated her husband's table manners.

Bair glides too easily over Emma's evident humiliation, though when it comes to Jung's war record, Bair convincingly exonerates him of Nazi sympathies. Jung accepted the chair of a Berlin-based psychological society made vacant by an expelled Jew. In Bair's analysis, one can attribute Jung's actions to staggering naivety or overwhelming arrogance - he thought he could deal with the Nazis on his own terms.

Bair is to be congratulated for the meticulousness of what is certainly the most important Jung biography in years. Numerous anecdotes familiar from other accounts are shown here to be spurious, and Bair has made use of much new material from private journals. On the down side, there is very little discussion of Jung's work. An example is Jung's theory of the collective unconscious. Bair deals with allegations that he plagiarised it, but not with the more important point that Jung's alleged evidence was woefully flimsy. Bair repeatedly describes Jung's writings as "circular" and "obscure", but when it comes to passing judgment on them, she stays stubbornly on that fence of hers.

If you are looking for a quick introduction to Jung's life and work, this is not for you. But if you want a leisurely account of the man's life that is probably as definitive as anything published to date, buy this today. Bair has written a fascinating biography of a horrifyingly self-obsessed man, whose one redeemingly humorous feature is that when his kids reached their teens he took them camping in the wilderness, where their communal entertainment was "trying to light farts".

Francis Wheen, HOW MUMBO-JUMBO CONQUERED THE WORLD. Scotland on Sunday, February 15, 2004. Review by Andrew Crumey.

WHEN Ronald Reagan went to Geneva in 1985 for a summit conference with Mikhail Gorbachev, the US president was well prepared. The new Soviet leader's star chart had been analysed by San Francisco astrologer Joan Quigley, who later fixed the exact time when Reagan should sign the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty. An aide leaked the story, but the American public's reaction was indifference. If most of the country believed in astrology, why shouldn't the president?

In a book that is both amusing and hair-raising, Francis Wheen charts the vertiginous rise of superstition, quackery and gobbledygook in every aspect of public life over the last few decades. His "short history of modern delusions" looks at the growth of self-help books, the dot.com bubble, and the spread of postmodernist mystification among academics who can no longer recognise reality unless the word is in ironic quote marks.

A thesis of sorts emerges, but more than anything, this is a book that is pure fun to read, unless you happen to subscribe to one of the many faiths - be it homeopathy, Lacanian psychoanalysis or supply-side economics - the author aims to debunk. Witty columnist and biographer of Karl Marx, Wheen delivers a well-earned slap in the face to whaffle-mongers everywhere.

To see how much the intellectual landscape has changed, consider the words of President Woodrow Wilson in 1922, asked what he thought about Darwinian evolution. "Of course like every other man of intelligence and education I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised."

Compare that with Tony Blair's reaction to news in 2002 that a state-funded school in north-east England was teaching creationism in biology lessons: "In the end, a more diverse school system will deliver better results for our children."

Blair's comment is unsurprising, because we live in an age when truth is regarded as a relative concept, and being judgmental about other people's belief systems is seen as a bad thing; though the judgmentalism implied by a term such as "bogus asylum seeker" is all right, perhaps because those people do not have a vote to cast.

Tony and Cherie Blair embraced a bit of New Age diversity while holidaying in Mexico in 2001, where they underwent a "Mayan rebirthing ritual." Smearing watermelon and papaya over each other in a perfumed mudbath, they made wishes for world peace that evidently went unanswered, since the September 11 attacks took place not long afterwards.

As Wheen notes, Mayan rebirthing is not yet available on the National Health; but the government did recruit a feng-shui consultant who advised that "introducing a water feature would reduce poverty".

The language of non-judgmentalism leads us to speak of "alternative" therapies alongside "conventional" medicine. But as Wheen says, quoting Richard Dawkins, "if a healing technique is shown to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be an alternative: it simply becomes medicine." And quoting the late John Diamond: "There isn't an 'alternative' physiology or anatomy or nervous system, any more than there's an alternative map of London which lets you get to Battersea from Chelsea without crossing the Thames."

In much the same category as feng-shui and mudbaths, Wheen places "think -tanks" such as Demos, whose project to "rebrand Britain", led by 23-year-old Mark Leonard, came up with the notorious and short-lived 'Cool Britannia'. Then there was the Third Way - a mysterious Holy Grail "somewhere between the Second Coming and the Fourth Dimension." After writing a pamphlet on it, Tony Blair "jetted off to New York on Concorde - the only acceptable method of transport for Tertiary Voyagers - to participate in a multilateral wonkfest on this fashionable but enigmatic catchphrase".

His host, Hillary Clinton, had already told the New York Times of her desire to find a "unified field theory of life" which would "tie together practically everything: the way we are, the way we were, the faults of man and the word of God… teenage mothers and foul-mouthed children and frightening drunks in the parksa"

One senses it was religion she was looking for, not politics. Indeed Wheen's most persuasive argument is that the marrying of politics and religion is a central feature of the post-war rise of the mumbo-jumbo culture.

The United States was founded on Enlightenment principles of secular rationalism. Thomas Jefferson's proudest achievement was a statute for religious freedom that would recognise the equal rights of "the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindoo and the Infidel of every denomination", within a state that promoted no single religion.

Since 1945, however, the United States has seen politics and religion come ever closer together, and the reason, Wheen argues, is the Cold War, which made America set itself up as a force of Christianity against communist atheism. "Congress added the words 'one nation under God' to the pledge of allegiance in 1954; 'In God we trust' became the nation's official motto two years later." Communism has gone, but now Islam is perceived as the enemy.

Enlightenment rationalism is alive and well in the United States - a nation generating more scientific and technological progress than any other on the planet - but is not particularly fashionable with an electorate among whom a large proportion believe that the Big Bang never happened, and that The X Files is based on fact.

At a presidential hustings in 1999, Republican hopefuls were asked which philosopher or thinker they most admired. Steve Forbes said John Locke; George W Bush said: "Christ, because he changed my heart."

His response is touching, but it touches the heart, not the head. Wheen's book is an extended tirade against our over-therapised culture in which feelings are valued above thought, to the extent that thought goes out of the window altogether. The hysteria following the death of Princess Diana, and the nonsense written about it, is one of many exhibits raised in evidence.

It is in his attacks on self-help culture that Wheen is at his most amusing; though his book's central and suspiciously neat claim that 1979 was a starting point for the current age of mumbo jumbo is undermined by his own evidence, one of the earliest compilers of uplifting platitudes for the masses having been Enlightenment icon Benjamin Franklin.

Nobody, it seems, is immune from spouting nonsense. But we can at least learn to recognise it when we see it. Wheen's book is an excellent primer for the perplexed.

Brian Greene, THE FABRIC OF THE COSMOS. Scotland on Sunday, March 14, 2004. Review by Andrew Crumey.

EXPECTATION is everything in the book world, with publishers regularly handing over big money on the basis of a one-page synopsis, leaving suddenly -rich authors with the task of actually sitting down and delivering the goods. The futures exchange for such unwritten masterpieces is the Frankfurt Book Fair, and every year there is much speculation over which title will be the one that sends rival publishers into an auctioning frenzy.

Back in 2000, there were two contenders. In one corner, the autobiography of Victoria Beckham. In the other, a book about theoretical physics. Posh got a GBP 1m advance. The physics book blew it away with a record-breaking dollars 2m.

And now, four years on, while Beckham's Learning To Fly languishes in your nearest Oxfam shop, we are finally able to read the book that made Professor Brian Greene into a superstar.

The title alone suggests a departure from Stephen Hawking's gargantuan vision of decoding the mind of God. The Fabric of the Cosmos promises a more touchy -feely approach. Its subtitle - "space, time and the texture of reality" - even leaves you wondering if there will be an accompanying range of furniture coverings.

Hawking's response to the question "what came before the big bang?" was that the question itself had no meaning. By contrast, Greene admits that the theory "tells us nothing about what banged, why it banged, how it banged or, frankly, whether it ever really banged at all." Humility is the new watchword - Greene uses it several times in this book, often convincingly.

The fabric of Greene's cosmos is made of superstrings. If you could see the universe through a microscope with enough magnification to make an atom look as big as a galaxy, you would find, perhaps, that its smallest elements are not particles like electrons or quarks, but wiggly bits of string.

The idea has been around for a long time: 20 years ago it was hailed as the new "theory of everything" on the basis of preliminary findings rather like those one-page synopses that get publishers salivating. Two decades on, and the theory's exponents - Greene among them - have produced a lot of beautiful mathematics and some wonderful computer graphics that make excellent television (Greene fronted a recent three-part documentary). But when it comes to making predictions that anybody can actually check in an experiment, string theory - nowadays rebranded as M-theory - remains tantalisingly elusive.

Greene gave a detailed account of string/M-theory in his first book, The Elegant Universe, which became an international bestseller. Like Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time or Alan Guth's The Inflationary Universe, Greene's debut is a challenging read, even for devotees of the popular science genre. Greene's great achievement, though, was to make a highly esoteric discipline accessible to a large audience.

When US publisher Knopf forked out dollars 2m for a sequel, one guesses that what they were looking for was something a little more general and elementary. Something, in other words, that would outsell Posh's memoir. All I can say is that they should have known better.

The Fabric of the Cosmos tours through quantum theory, cosmic origins, the entropy of the universe, time machines and, most interestingly, two ideas that have come to particular prominence since the publication of The Elegant Universe.

One is the theory of 'branes' - a deluxe version of superstrings in which the wiggly entities can have any number of dimensions, giving rise to the seductive, if somewhat vague, notion that the universe itself might be just one 'braneworld' among many, like a single page in a book. Collisions between braneworlds would be the cause of big bangs in each.

The second new idea is the 'holographic principle', first proposed more than a decade ago but increasingly seen by physicists as a major advance. A hologram traps a three-dimensional image on a flat, two-dimensional surface. The holographic principle suggests that our solid, complex universe might itself be a projection of something flatter and simpler.

These are wonderfully mind-bending concepts, and Greene explains them simply and eloquently. The same can be said of his chapters dealing with recent experiments on the bizarre quantum phenomenon of 'entanglement', the apparent ability of widely separated particles to influence each other.

And yet, much as I enjoyed this book, I was still left wondering why it should be worth so much more than any number of competitors in a crowded field. The Fabric of the Cosmos, for all its alleged tactile charm, is virtually indistinguishable from anything by rival physics popularisers Paul Davies, John Barrow or John Gribbin. Much in demand on US talk shows, Greene's charisma was summed up by Newsweek magazine: "articulate, witty and totally non-geeky. His gravitational pull rivals a black hole's." That maybe comes across on television, but it gets slightly lost on the page. The writing could best be described as generic. Cultural references are invariably of the popular kind (an account of the Simpsons travelling through wormholes had me cringing). One chapter is called 'Quanta in the Sky with Diamonds'. If that is non-geekiness, it is perilously close to the border.

Greene did something entirely new in The Elegant Universe, and whenever I want to know about Calabi-Yau manifolds (which admittedly is not very often) I shall reach for that excellent tome.

Since then, though, we have had books from hip young physicists such as Janna Levin and Joao Magueijo, who interspersed scientific technicalities with accounts of their relationship break-ups and nightclubbing activities, and we have had outstanding books from Lee Smolin, J Richard Gott and Martin Rees, all of whom have made difficult ideas entertaining and accessible.

If you want a one-book guide to everything in contemporary physics, The Fabric of the Cosmos is as good as any. But I was still left wishing for less of the panoramic, and more detail and feeling.

Physics has yet to find a spokesperson who can bring to the subject the passion and eloquence of a Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould; somebody who can connect the issues to everyday life without needing to mention Bart and Homer or the crew of the Starship Enterprise.

It is said that when Einstein discovered the equation of general relativity, he was so overcome with emotion his heart nearly stopped. If anybody can write a book conveying such extremes of experience and understanding to the general reader, they will deserve whatever monster advance they receive. I advise publishers to save their cash until they see it.

Mark Pendergrast, MIRROR, MIRROR. Scotland on Sunday, March 28, 2004. Review by Andrew Crumey.

THE best side to part your hair and the sex lives of dolphins are among the unexpected topics covered in Mark Pendergrast's enjoyable "history of the human love affair with reflection".

People have been making mirrors for the past 8,000 years. The one thing everybody knows about them is that breaking one is supposed to bring seven years' bad luck, for which we have the Romans to thank since, according to Pendergrast, they thought a person's health changed in seven-year cycles. The earliest mirrors were of obsidian, a black volcanic rock that could be carved and polished. A much later Aztec example became the prize possession of John Dee, the Elizabethan mystic. Dee's overlapping interests in magic and science are shared by Pendergrast's book.

After a quick survey of manufacturing techniques from ancient Egypt to the famed workshops of Murano, we get on to the stuff that really interests the author - the use of mirrors in exploring the heavens. Despite the jacket endorsement from David Hockney - "a terrific book, filling a gap in the history of art, psychology and science" - this is really an astronomy book in disguise, with a few extras thrown in.

It is not ideal reading for those more interested in Alice Through the Looking Glass or the Rokeby Venus, rather than the optical configuration of a Cassegrain telescope. But if the science of mirrors takes your fancy, this book is a treat.

Pendergrast has previously written popular histories of Coca-Cola and coffee, and says the idea for this book came into his head during a conversation with his agent.

Even so, one gets the distinct impression that he has had plenty of hands-on experience with optical devices, and he writes fluently and authoritatively about the most perfectly made mirrors in history.

Isaac Newton proposed using a curved mirror, rather than a lens, to magnify the heavens, and reflecting telescopes are nowadays the norm. Pendergrast describes the heroic efforts of William Herschel, the German musician and composer who took up astronomy as a hobby and became famous when he discovered a new planet which he wanted to name after King George III, but which instead became known as Uranus.

Herschel's successors knew that the way to see further into space was to build bigger mirrors, polished to an exact geometrical curve. The best-known example in recent years is the Hubble Telescope, notoriously polished to a perfectly wrong curve because of a fleck of paint in the testing equipment. Less well known is Hubble's predecessor, a spy satellite of equal size whose task was to look down, not up, and which was used to photograph the American embassy in Tehran during the 1980 hostage crisis.

What about dolphins? Apparently they recognise their own reflections, just as chimps and humans do. And for all those species, mirrors and sex go inextricably together, with one randy porpoise pair adopting new positions so they could watch themselves copulating in their mirrored aquarium.

Hair partings, too, are a matter of sex. Swap a face in a mirror, a US psychologist discovered, and our perception of the person changes. Left partings are macho - adopted by most men, along with Mrs Thatcher and Hillary Clinton - while right is feminine. The psychologist wrote to President Jimmy Carter (a right-side parter) advising a change of hairstyle. The advice came too late to influence a presidency that might have been saved by a bigger mirror over Tehran.

Peter Aughton, THE TRANSIT OF VENUS. Scotland on Sunday, June 6, 2004. Review by Andrew Crumey.

ON TUESDAY morning, Venus will pass in front of the sun. Such transits are nowhere near as spectacular as eclipses, but they are considerably more rare. In fact, this week's event will only be the sixth ever to be observed by humans.

Peter Aughton's interesting book tells the story of the first, and of the extraordinary man who saw it.

Jeremiah Horrocks, born in 1618, was a watchmaker's son. He went to Cambridge and was initially meant to study law, but his real passion was for science, and at the age of 17 he returned to his Lancashire home, intent on mastering the latest theories in astronomy.

Galileo was still alive then, and falling foul of the Catholic Church with his advocacy of Copernicus's sun-centred model of the universe.

Johannes Kepler had shown that Copernicus's theory could be improved by assuming the planets followed elliptical orbits, not circular ones.

Horrocks immersed himself in Kepler's controversial theory - the first person in Britain to do so. Working largely on his own, he checked Kepler's tables of planetary positions and found flaws in the great astronomer's work.

Most remarkably, and with extraordinary good luck, Horrocks predicted that Venus was soon to pass in front of the sun. When the great day came in 1639, Horrocks projected the sun's light through a telescope, casting an image on a screen that clearly showed the tiny black disc of Venus slowly moving across the sun.

Tradition has it that Horrocks was employed as a curate, and was called away at a crucial moment to perform a service.

According to Aughton, this has no basis in fact - the story arose in the 19th century. But Horrocks certainly saw the transit, and did much else besides. In fact, the most welcome aspect of Aughton's book is that it reminds us just what a genius Horrocks was.

He figured out that the moon is effectively falling around the Earth - an idea that would later be confirmed by Newton. Moreover, Horrocks was the first person to prove that the moon's orbit around the Earth is not a circle but an ellipse, just like the planets around the sun. He also found that the planets Jupiter and Saturn appeared to influence one another - in fact he had observed the pull of their gravity.

Horrocks's only real collaborator in all this was a fellow astronomer named William Crabtree, with whom he corresponded. They arranged to meet, but Horrocks failed to show up. It was only some time later that Crabtree found out why. Horrocks had suddenly died, aged only 23. The cause remains unknown.

Horrocks had published none of his work and Crabtree set about preserving it. But then the English Civil War intervened and the Great Fire of London, in which many of Horrocks's papers were destroyed. It was not until a generation after Horrocks's death that his true worth became known.

This book's subtitle calls Horrocks the "father of British astronomy", and Aughton makes a good case for this. Horrocks was a man ahead of his time, and no doubt would have been delighted at the public interest in this week's repetition of an event he predicted and watched in anonymity.

Gerard DeGroot, THE BOMB: A LIFE. Scotland on Sunday, June 13, 2004. Review by Andrew Crumey.

ON AN August morning in 1945, an 11-year-old Japanese boy was swimming in a river with his schoolmates. He dived down to the riverbed, and when he surfaced, the whole world had changed.

"There were bodies of his friends on the riverbank, and beyond them he saw that all the houses had been knocked down. What had been a beautiful city a moment before was now a wasteland." The city was Nagasaki, where the world's second atomic bomb had just exploded, killing 40,000 people in a flash.

Gerard DeGroot's superb 'biography' of mankind's most terrible weapons does something that has rarely, if ever, been attempted. Bringing together the scientific, political, cultural and historical threads, he looks at the Manhattan Project and its rivals in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia; and he widens the net to take in the efforts of Britain, France and other members - official or not - of the nuclear club. Ranging from atomic physics to rock'n'roll, the result is a book that is pacey, readable and enormously wide -ranging.

There is also a good deal of black humour - something that comes naturally to anyone who can remember Protect and Survive, the government pamphlet pushed through every British letterbox in 1980, which advised citizens that in case of impending nuclear war, they should paint their windows white and hide under a table. The same sinister naivety afflicted propaganda films. One, called This Little Ship, is described by DeGroot as being "as if Thomas the Tank Engine had been written by Edward Teller."

Teller, the "high priest" of thermonuclear weapons, looms large in any account of the subject. A brilliant physicist, he fled Hungary for the United States, where he was instrumental in getting Einstein to sign the letter that set the Manhattan Project rolling. Often described as the real-life model for Dr Strangelove, Teller perfectly illustrates the capacity of nuclear weapons to render intelligent, rational people barking mad.

Seeking alternative uses for bombs in a post-war world that had gone off the idea of killing people, Teller was among those who foresaw nuclear locomotives or even bomb-powered spaceships. A big hole in Nevada is all that remains of his scheme to blast out lakes and canals. The obvious drawback - lethal radiation - worried him little. In an interview towards the end of his life, Teller maintained that a little radiation could even be good for you.

The same inverted logic runs through other episodes DeGroot discusses. This was how it all started - Allied physicists such as Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi didn't want to make bombs, but feared they had to have one before Hitler. At the same time, the German bomb master Werner Heisenberg was saying the same thing (or so he later claimed). Equally, the Soviet bomb programme was made necessary by the US's position in 1945 as the world's only nuclear superpower. Andrei Sakharov applied his genius to making a hydrogen bomb, only to plead that it would never be used.

One feels sympathy for the Soviet bomb makers, given that their boss was Lavrenti Beria, a psychopathic murderer who believed in dealing with insubordination using bullets, but who, in handling some of the world's finest scientists, gave way to Stalin's advice - "Leave them be, we can always shoot them later." Even so, Sakharov's own remarks, quoted by DeGroot, show he and his comrades, just like their Western counterparts, positively enjoyed the big bangs they made. It was only when a nuclear test claimed the life of a civilian that Sakharov seems to have had his first qualms. He felt "an irrational yet very strong emotional impact", asking: "How not to start thinking of one's responsibility at this point?"

Why were these brilliant minds unable to do their thinking a little sooner? In America, Hans Bethe worked on the hydrogen bomb while simultaneously writing articles denouncing the whole idea.

If people of such intelligence could be flummoxed, one can hardly blame politicians for spiralling into similarly self-defeating circles of intellectual sophistry. Indeed, one almost admires Harry Truman, who emerges from DeGroot's account as a man untouched by any moral doubts. When Oppenheimer came into his office pleading: "I've got blood on my hands," Truman told him: "It'll wash off," and gave him a handkerchief, afterwards insisting the "cry baby" be kept away.

Truman's justification of the Hiroshima bomb is still repeated to this day: it saved countless American and Japanese lives that would have been lost in a land invasion. Truman also at first described Hiroshima as a "military base", which it evidently was not. The city was only chosen because it was largely untouched by bombing raids because it was of little military significance. Nagasaki got picked because bad weather rendered the first choice unavailable, and the crew didn't want to take their bomb all the way home again. For this reason, the 11-year-old swimmer saw his world destroyed.

When it comes to nuclear madness, though, it is hard to beat the crassness of the pop-culture spin-offs that DeGroot describes, such as the mushroom-cloud shaped "atomic earrings" that went on sale after Hiroshima. Bars and motels across America took to calling themselves "Atomic", and an unfortunate child was even named Atomic Victory. Four days after the first nuclear test on Bikini Island, a new swimsuit appeared in honour of the event - and is still being worn.

Among many Hollywood examples, the most sobering DeGroot cites is an epic about Genghis Khan, filmed in the Utah desert 150 miles from the test site of a bomb called "Dirty Harry" on account of its high radiation. Of the 220 people working on the film, 91 subsequently developed cancer - the stars John Wayne and Susan Hayward both died of it.

Other causes (such as smoking) no doubt played a role, but as DeGroot says, "it does make you think".

And that, above all, is what his excellent book does, putting the whole nuclear history into a human context, and reminding us of the countless thousands of lives that have been silently damaged by it.

This is a book that really makes you think, as well as being hugely entertaining. I have read many books about different aspects of this enormous subject, but none that brings the diverse pieces together so well, in such an absorbing and truly masterly way.

Paul Bloom, DESCARTES' BABY. Scotland on Sunday, July 11, 2004. Review by Andrew Crumey.

SCIENTISTS have discovered that babies are a lot smarter than had formerly been appreciated. Stick your tongue out at a newborn, and the baby will imitate the gesture, indicating that from the moment of its birth it can see and interpret what people are doing, and has some kind of awareness of its own existence as a person.

Already the baby is showing an understanding of the two mental categories - "bodies" and "souls" - that take centre stage in Paul Bloom's readable layman's guide to psychology. The 17th-century French philosopher Rene Descartes believed bodies and souls to be actual, distinct entities. Bloom does not go so far, but says that whether or not souls exist, we instinctively behave as if they do. We cannot imagine a table being angry, but are happy to call a dog "jealous." Most of us cannot help ascribing feelings and motivations, even in cases where it might be inappropriate.

People with autism have the opposite problem, being unable to fathom what is going on in others' minds. One of the most striking moments in Bloom's book is when he recalls an incident that occurred in his teens, when he was a volunteer at a camp for autistic children. A boy walked up and placed his hands on Bloom's shoulders - an unexpected gesture of apparent affection. "But then he tightened his grip, jumped up, pressed his feet on my legs, and started to climb."

Bloom was standing next to a high shelf, and the boy was merely using him as a ladder so that he could reach a toy he wanted. The boy could perceive "bodies" but not "souls".

The most valuable aspect of Bloom's book is in its details regarding child development. Before their second birthday, for example, Bloom tells us that children can understand pictures. Empathy starts even earlier, in the first year. Just as fascinating as the findings is the way in which they have been made - experiments using infants have to get round their inability to speak, and also have to be ethical.

One dubious case involved a child whose psychologist parents "raised him without any access to pictures, television or other visual representations. Then, when he was 19 months old, they showed him a series of photographs… and asked him to name them. He did so easily."

The child was evidently a lot smarter than his cruel parents.

Two-and-a-half-year-olds can use a picture of a room to find the location of a hidden toy marked on the picture. But they fail when given a 3D model of the room - because the model is more interesting than the toy. As Bloom points out, this has important implications in the use of anatomical dolls in sexual abuse cases. The dolls are interesting in their own right, and hence unreliable as representations.

Such nuggets are where this book is at its most successful. Unfortunately, in its larger claims to unlock the human psyche it is less satisfactory. Bloom's discussions of complex human activities such as art or comedy, or of human morality, for example, leave many questions unanswered.

However, as a quick guide to the mental world of young children, it is well worth a look.

Roger Penrose, THE ROAD TO REALITY. Scotland on Sunday, July 25, 2004. Review by Andrew Crumey.

WHEN Stephen Hawking was writing A Brief History Of Time in the 1980s, his editor told him every equation he included in the book would halve its sales. Hawking's colleague and rival Roger Penrose clearly has no such fears. His new book, subtitled "a complete guide to the laws of the universe", is crammed with equations. And Hawking's emphasis on brevity - followed more recently by Bill Bryson's A Short History Of Nearly Everything - is also disregarded. Penrose's 'complete' version is over a thousand pages long. Reading doesn't get much heavier than this, unless it's a phone directory.

Not only has the book industry lost its fear of writers with brains, it is actively pursuing them, offering lucrative contracts to anyone who can turn genes or atoms into readable prose. Publisher Jonathan Cape makes no bones about Penrose's opus, which it dubs "the most important science book published this century." Hardly worth waiting around for the next 96 years, then.

I asked an industry insider if he could explain this feeding frenzy among publishers of popular science books. "They don't understand what they're publishing," was the wry response. In the case of The Road To Reality, that is hardly surprising - but at least Penrose is a safe bet, since he truly is one of the world's leading mathematical physicists.

In the 1960s, he and Hawking proved that the 'singularity' of the Big Bang - when all space and matter were somehow shrunk to a point - was an unavoidable feature of general relativity. The only way round the problem was to ditch Einstein, hence physicists (Penrose included) have spent the following decades hunting for a theory of 'quantum gravity' that will make better sense of the universe's origin. That great quest is the real subject of Penrose's book - but before we get to the nitty gritty there are an awful lot of preliminaries to get out of the way.

Most popular guides start with a gentle introduction to mind-bending ideas like curved space and quantum waves, before gradually upping the learning curve to a point where non-specialist readers either fall off completely or else are lulled into uncomprehending acceptance.

There is no such pussy-footing for Penrose. By chapter two he is proving Pythagoras' theorem from first principles and introducing non-Euclidean geometry. His initial approach, though, is seductive. An Escher woodcut graphically shows what life might be like in 'hyperbolic space', where objects change size and shape when moved around.

Linking art and science in this way is a great idea, but alas it is a rare foray. The next 300 or so pages are given over almost entirely to pure maths, making one wonder who exactly this book is aimed at. Penrose says he would like it to be accessible to people who struggled with fractions at school (in other words everyone). But I find it hard to square this with his subsequent exposition of quaternions, hyperfunctions and tensors, in which he neglects to define basic terms such as 'natural logarithm' for the benefit of any bewildered math-phobes still in the audience.

Another 300 pages do much the same for physics, making this book ideal for anyone needing to do last-minute revision for a degree exam. After that, if you can last the course, we hit the really interesting part, when Penrose airs some of his own theories and takes issue with those of his contemporaries.

Admittedly, much of this is not new. Back in the early 1990s, Penrose wrote The Emperor's New Mind, in which he applied quantum ideas to human consciousness. His views were controversial, but The Emperor's New Mind remains a first-rate book, containing the best popular introduction to general relativity I know of. Penrose more or less repeats this approach in The Road To Reality. Likewise, his take on quantum theory and its paradoxes is something of a reprise, though presented now in much greater detail. Whether that is a good or bad thing depends on your stamina, but I found it welcome.

Most interestingly, Penrose gives vent to his scepticism regarding the hip theories of inflation and superstrings. Inflation is the idea that after the Big Bang, the universe blew up at a fantastic rate - so that something the size of a molecule wound up bigger than a galaxy in less than the blink of an eye. Nasa claimed its WMAP space-probe data proved the theory - Penrose says otherwise.

But it is superstring theory that prompts his most withering comments. He is, I think, overly harsh on Brian Greene's excellent book The Elegant Universe, but is right to point out that while ideas such as 'brane worlds' and the 'holographic principle' grab headlines, they remain speculative. For many years, the champion of superstring theory has been Ed Witten, widely judged among experts to be the world's greatest living physicist. But even Einstein spent years chasing theories that were wrong, and nobody knows yet if Witten has made the same error. Penrose thinks he quite possibly has.

Penrose instead backs 'loop quantum gravity', a theory whose origins lie in work he did 50 years ago. For an accessible introduction, see Lee Smolin's Three Roads To Quantum Gravity; for the gory details, see what you can make of the last chapters of The Road To Reality.

All of this might sound like a less than ringing endorsement, but Penrose's work is genuinely magnificent, and the most stimulating book I have read in a long time. It also happens to be very challenging to read, making one wish the author had been prepared to "skim over technicalities" in the way he accuses Greene of having done.

Is it the most important science book of the century? We had better wait until 2099 to find out - but I am sure Penrose would be the first to say no. His greatest hope is that there is some young person out there - or possibly not even born yet - who will do for our century what Einstein did for the last, and who will clear up the mysteries that Penrose, Hawking, Witten and so many others have been unable to solve.

The Road To Reality ends with such a vision; and if it comes to fruition then this book will one day seem little more than a historical curiosity. In that case it will have succeeded - so let's hope it goes on library shelves everywhere and finds its way into the hands of the next Einstein, wherever he or she may be.

Marek Kohn, A Reason For Everything. Scotland on Sunday, September 5, 2004. Review by Andrew Crumey.

AS A child I wondered why salt and pepper pots have different tops, and was told it had something to do with the way they flowed more easily through one big hole or many smaller ones. Then I went abroad and found that in some countries the convention is reversed. The only reason why salt and pepper have different tops is so that you can tell one from the other.

There is a great urge to find a reason for everything, and it prompts the title of Marek Kohn's book about evolution and some of the biologists and mathematicians who have developed the theory since Darwin. Why, for example, do some trees go gorgeously red or gold in autumn? Some might say the trees' beauty was put there by God to please human eyes.

Darwin felt it was a mere accident - he could see no benefit to the trees in putting on such a display. But Bill Hamilton - dubbed by some as "the Darwin of the 20th century" - found evidence that the bright autumnal colours deter parasites.

The underlying theme of Kohn's book is an optimistic one. Many see evolution as producing a godless, soulless view of nature in which plants and animals - ourselves included - are reduced to vehicles for the reproduction of selfish genes. But evolution instead allows us to find meaning in every part of nature - if only we know how to look.

That still leaves much room for argument, and A Reason For Everything focuses on the lives and works of a small number of prominent figures who have steered the debate. The technicalities are sometimes intricate, and the subtleties of rival views may be more impressive to the specialist rather than the general reader. Of broader appeal, however, are the cast of eccentrics, egotists and obsessives Kohn lines up.

He starts with Alfred Russel Wallace, the Victorian naturalist who discovered the theory of natural selection independently of Darwin. Wallace's openness to new and heretical ideas made him "more Darwinian than Darwin", but he had no trouble accommodating evolution with spirituality.

In fact he believed evolution to be divinely steered, and in later life became an ardent spiritualist, attending seances and insisting on their authenticity, even when mediums were often exposed as frauds. Wallace, in the end, was so open-minded that his brain fell out. One of his last hobby horses was a theory that Edgar Allen Poe had written his final poems from beyond the grave.

Even the greatest of scientists can have their barmy side, and the overlap of evolution with eugenics can make such eccentricities downright sinister. RA Fisher used mathematics to merge Darwinism with Mendel's laws of heredity, but in addition to this great work he also collaborated with Otmar von Verschuer, whose research material came from Auschwitz. Kohn absolves Fisher of Nazism (while nevertheless noting his student fondness for "playing at Vikings and poring over Nietzsche"). But this example of a fine scientist showing moral blindness is far from unique.

A chilling example is Bill Hamilton (who died in 2000), imagining himself master of a desert island, saying " I would indeed with my own hands kill a defective baby." Whatever the point of such an evil deed, it could not be justified on evolutionary grounds. Individuals (other than Nazis) do not act so as to "improve the species", but so as to further their own genetic chances. Hamilton would have given himself better odds by killing healthy babies that might grow up and compete with his own offspring.

More endearing a personality, if no less bizarre, is EB Ford, described by Richard Dawkins, who knew him as a "fastidious old bachelor", and by others as a "wicked queen." Ford worked on the famous peppered moth, whose dark variety thrives in polluted cities - a classic if controversial illustration of natural selection in action. "In combining science and camp," says Kohn, Ford himself was an "exotic specimen", who liked to speak of "my friend the Pope", and enjoyed greeting his colleague's au pair with the inquiry: "How is your pussy?"

Various themes recur throughout Kohn's book. All his subjects are English males, with Oxford being their usual nesting ground. Maleness is a simple product of the bias that historically existed in higher education; but the striking dominance of the English in evolutionary theory has often been noted - by Karl Marx, Richard Lewontin and others. If there has to be a reason it could be the English love of gardens, bird-watching and butterfly collecting, which set the scene for Darwin's copious data collection.

Wildlife remains a British obsession - no item on the Today program is guaranteed to generate as much audience feedback as a story about birds or dogs - and A Reason For Everything is clearly packaged so as to appeal to the same enthusiasm. The cover shows a red admiral, a ladybird and a robin - three of the cosiest species you could imagine - over the subtitle "Natural selection and the English imagination." Readers thus lured may, I fear, be disappointed. Although Kohn makes intermittent attempts to set natural selection in a broader cultural context, this is not his true theme.

For the uses of evolution in justifying colonialism, for example, you would do better with Sven Lindqvist's Exterminate All The Brutes. And for thoughts on the way that genetics permeate contemporary thinking (albeit from a maverick viewpoint), one might suggest Richard Lewontin's It Ain't Necessarily So.

Kohn's is a detailed, well researched account that offers much on the personalities and ideas of JBS Haldane, John Maynard Smith, Richard Dawkins and others. Dawkins emerges as something of an exception, not on account of gender or nationality, or even personality (virtually all the featured scientists are of the aloof, ivory-tower type), but rather because Dawkins, unlike the others, did all his work indoors, never venturing into the field.

According to jokers, he tried it once but was chased by a wasp. Dawkins gained his insights from computer programming, realising that evolution could be seen in terms of the information coded in genes.

Dawkins' greatest crime against humanity appears to have been his insistence on scientifically proving to his six-year-old daughter that there is no Santa Claus; but his militant atheism has left many feeling that evolutionary theory must necessarily be anti-religion. Kohn's book shows the contrary to have been true, from Darwin's era to the present. In fact, it seems that evolution can accommodate all manner of bizarre ideas.

Simon Singh, Big Bang. Scotland on Sunday, October 3, 2004. Review by Andrew Crumey.

SINGH had a bestseller with Fermat's Last Theorem, a book that demonstrated his ability to make hard ideas entertaining and accessible. Applying his talents to the origin of the universe, he has produced a big book which is a breeze to read, and admirable as far as it goes. I only wish it went further.

Like many popular books on astronomy, this one starts with ancient Greece. From Aristotle and Ptolemy, we progress through Copernicus and Kepler, to Newton's realisation that gravity is what makes the universe tick.

Then it is on to Einstein and warped space-time, and Hubble's discovery that galaxies are flying away from us in an expanding universe. Now we are pretty much at the start of the Big Bang story - having taken roughly 200 pages to get there. What follows is the book's best part, as Singh describes how physicists in the 1930s and 1940s unravelled the secrets of nuclear fusion, discovering it to be the process that makes the Sun shine, and which also must have created the first atomic elements from a primordial soup of smaller particles.

Singh gives due credit to relatively unsung heroes such as Fritz Houtermans, a physicist unique for having published his own joke book, and for having been persecuted by both the Gestapo and the NKVD - Houtermans found the latter the more ruthlessly efficient of the two.

Another hero is Ralph Alpher, who predicted the famous "afterglow" of the Big Bang, but was largely forgotten until years later. Singh evokes well the acrimonious feuding that can infect academic research.

The confirmation of the afterglow in the 1960s gave firm proof of the Big Bang. The COBE satellite photographed it in 1992 - a picture that made newspaper front pages, dubbed "the face of God." And there, frustratingly, Singh just about ends. All that remains is a hurried epilogue in which he briefly mentions some of the many developments that have taken place since.

Most readers of this book will fall into one of two categories. First there will be those who know very little about science, but who want to know what the Big Bang looked like, sounded like and where it happened. They want to know what caused it, what came before it. How, they ask, can an infinite universe possibly "expand"? Singh gives too little time to such basic questions.

Then there will be those who read science articles in newspapers and watch documentaries on television. They will have heard of terms like "inflation" and "dark energy", and will have come across speculative but widely publicised ideas, such as the theory that the Big Bang may have been caused by a collision of two parallel "brane worlds".

These more informed readers will be equally disappointed by a book that fails to take account of progress made since the late 1980s. Even the COBE satellite's successor - the WMAP probe, given extensive media coverage last year - is hardly mentioned.

Where Singh's book succeeds is in its retelling of the "classical" Big Bang story - the theory's triumph over the rival "steady state" model. Singh does this excellently. However, so did Steven Weinberg, nearly 30 years ago, in his book The First Three Minutes.

Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard Hudson, The (Mis)behaviour of Markets. Scotland on Sunday, October 31, 2004. Review by Andrew Crumey.

INVESTING money, we all know, is risky. The internet bubble and resulting crash reminded everyone that things can go down as well as up.

It remains to be seen whether the housing bubble will pop too, but on the basis of this fascinating book, the answer would seem to be yes. The snag is that no one can say when.

Benoit Mandelbrot is famous as the founder of fractal theory; the mathematical analysis of intricately wiggly things such as the coastline of Britain or the convolutions of a cauliflower. In the 1960s he began suggesting that the stock market's ups and downs are fractal too. His theory remains controversial, but his message is nevertheless important.

Today's typical fund manager, he says, is "like a shipbuilder who assumes that gales are rare and hurricanes myth; so he builds his vessel for speed, capacity and comfort - giving little thought to stability and strength." Calling a financial product "low risk" is like calling the Titanic unsinkable.

Predicting risk is something people have been doing for centuries: it gave rise to probability theory, which is the starting point for Mandelbrot's picture-rich but equation-free analysis.

Imagine betting on the toss of a coin: it has come up heads three times in a row. The 'gambler's fallacy' is that another head is more likely; in fact each toss has a 50-50 chance, assuming the coin is fair.

Conventional economic theory starts from the assumption that a share value's odds of going up or down at any moment are similarly independent of past performance. The share value's meanderings are a 'random walk'. Betting on a single commodity is no more likely to make you rich than betting on a coin; but by spreading your portfolio (your bets), you can hopefully capitalise on the overall growth of the market.

Standard economic models attempt to quantify the likelihood of extreme ups or downs by fitting price fluctuations into a mathematical 'bell curve'.

Yet history, Mandelbrot argues, repeatedly shows otherwise. The 1987 stock market crash, for example, had a probability so small - according to standard theory - that it ought never to have happened, even if trading had been going on since the Big Bang.

In Mandelbrot's fractal model, big market swings are far more likely. Whether a share value rises or falls is not independent of what it has done the previous day.

A rise today does not ensure a further rise tomorrow - but it makes it more likely that people will buy, sending the share value higher. Herd instinct drives bubbles and crashes, and the resulting market fluctuations have a much 'fatter' shape than the classical bell curve.

With his co-author, economic journalist Richard Hudson, Mandelbrot offers a lively, accessible and downright worrying exposition of his theory.

Volatility, he argues, is inescapable. Boom and bust are the norm. Finding patterns in past performance is "financial astrology"; you can find patterns in anything, but you can never predict the future with them.

Mandelbrot learned risk the hard way - he grew up in German-occupied France and was once nearly shot.

The rest of us should feel lucky we have only our homes or pensions at stake.

Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare At Goats. Scotland on Sunday, November 28, 2004. Review by Andrew Crumey.

FANS of Ronson's bestselling Them: Adventures With Extremists - in which he had hilarious encounters with the likes of David Icke and the Ku Klux Klan - have been eagerly awaiting a sequel. The Men Who Stare At Goats carves out similarly weird territory, telling of secret US military experiments in the paranormal. Yet the contrast between the two books is enormous. Them was a product of the 1990s, when American fear centred on home-grown extremists like Timothy McVeigh and David Koresh. Now the world is more confusing and less funny. Ronson's new book reflects this.

The tale begins amusingly enough, back in the 1970s, when Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon proposed giving the US army a change of image. Inspired by New Age thinking, Channon advocated a "First Earth Battalion" who would carry symbolic baby lambs and give their enemies "an automatic hug." Channon ended up taking his ideas elsewhere - "nowadays he does for corporations what he did for the army," says Ronson - but a few people in the military warmed to his flaky philosophy. In the early 1980s, a Major General Albert Stubblebine reckoned troops could be trained to levitate and walk through walls. After banging his nose on too many impermeable walls, Stubblebine took early retirement.

Covert attempts at "remote viewing" - psychically penetrating enemy installations - are well documented, giving an air of credence to countless fantasists who have claimed involvement in top-level spy work. Ronson embarks on a chain of leads that take him from Uri Geller to a laboratory where goats were allegedly stared to death. He also meets a series of former soldiers obsessed with martial arts and mind control - modern-day samurai who get their terminology from Star Wars, calling themselves Jedi.

Ronson steers an agnostic course through this parade of oddballs, leaving the reader to decide whether he has uncovered the mother of all conspiracy theories or a shaggy dog story. Initially it is very funny. Stubblebine is loveably comic, even if his significance in the larger scheme of American operations is never really examined. It is as the timeline moves forward that the laughter dies down.

Channon's interest in ambient sound allegedly inspired the use of deafening rock music to dislodge General Noriega from his hide-out in Panama in 1989. Since then it has become a routine form of torture. Ronson interviews one of the Britons released from Guantanamo Bay, and an American who witnessed interrogations in Iraq. Sound torture in the latter place became a 'fun' news item when it was revealed that the theme to children's show Barney was being played to prisoners. Ronson describes the chuckles the story evoked on TV news programmes: nothing was said about what else was possibly being done to the prisoners at the same time.

Ronson's own sense of fun vanishes at this point. He introduces photographs into the text: one shows a teenage Iraqi prisoner screaming. Whether this has very much to do with the First Earth Battalion is not clear: instead one gets a sense that the people steering events are far bigger fish than Ronson's succession of retired soldiers with memories of goat-staring experiments. Conspiracies just aren't funny any more.