What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty edited by John Brockman (Pocket Books, £7.99)
According to Richard Dawkins, science proceeds by hunches. John Brockman's cybersalon, Edge.org, invited members of the "third culture" - the scientists whom he considers to be the "pre-eminent intellectuals of our time" - to contribute their most cherished intuitions. As Ian McEwan (a rare non-scientist here) points out, this is rather intriguing because scientists, unlike "literary critics, journalists or priests", don't just believe things. They need proof. Indeed, Simon Baron-Cohen dismisses "ideas that cannot in principle be proved or disproved". But mathematician John Barrow is happy to believe that "our universe is infinite in size, finite in age, and just one among many", all "unprovable in principle". But the nature of consciousness turns out to be more controversial. Daniel Dennett argues that animals and prelinguistic children are not truly conscious, whereas Alison Gopnik claims young children are more conscious than adults: "every wobbly step is skydiving, every game of hide-and-seek is Einstein in 1905, and every day is first love in Paris". Scientific pipedreams at their very best.
PD Smith
Space Race: The Battle to Rule the Heavens by Deborah Cadbury (Harper Perennial, £7.99)
According to Deborah Cadbury, rocket pioneers Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev spent their lives being pawns in "the struggle for global supremacy". When he worked for the Nazis, Von Braun's rockets were produced by slave labour. More people died making them than from the explosions they caused. Korolev knew what life was like in a labour camp. In 1938 Stalin consigned him to a Siberian gulag. The man who was later revered in the USSR as the "chief designer" had his jaw broken and teeth knocked out by camp guards. But he never forgot "the greatest dream of mankind" - to travel beyond the blue sky to outer space. Von Braun signed a Faustian bargain with his Nazi paymasters to realise that dream. "His quest to conquer space perhaps made him blind to the moral consequences of his work," suggests Cadbury. America was happy to forget his dark past while he built the rockets that could deliver H-bombs to Moscow and put a man into space. Korolev never lived to see the US flag on the moon; he died in 1966. Cadbury skilfully weaves together the histories of these two rivals into a compelling narrative about the dream of space exploration and the price of progress.
PDS
The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity by Amartya Sen (Penguin, £9.99)
There's nothing quite like a good row. The Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen's latest book is dedicated to the tradition of argument, scepticism and diversity of opinion in Indian thought and culture. The starting point is the rise of the Hindutva movement, whose narrow brand of Hindu nationalism has sought to create a "purified" version of Indian history. Such reductive simplification, Sen argues, directly connects India's Bharatiya Janata Party to western academics such as Samuel Clash of Civilizations Huntington. Sen sees such activity as an attempt to "miniaturise" India, and argues that instead we should be enlarging our understanding of it. We should revisit its diversity, he writes, and remember that the country has always been a product of the ebb and flow of people and ideas. Travelling through poetry, gender, time and weapons of mass destruction, Sen seeks to open our minds to the traditions of heterogeneity and argument in Indian culture. Arguments and sharing diverse opinions are what is needed now, he writes, rather than authoritarianism and acquiescence: for "silence is a powerful enemy of social justice".
Jo Littler
The First Psychic: The Peculiar Mystery of a Notorious Victorian Wizard by Peter Lamont (Abacus, £7.99)
Floating tables. Mysterious rapping. Messages from the other side. Peter Lamont's book explores the séance through the career of one of its earliest Victorian practitioners. Daniel Dunglas Home, the pale son of a Scottish paper-mill owner, married into the Russian aristocracy and rose to transatlantic fame by "contacting the spirit world" and conjuring up spooky hands that stopped at the wrist. The first person to be accorded the term "psychic", his secrets remained, unusually, unexposed by either his contemporaries or posterity. In the process, the veracity of his conjuring and levitation skills split public opinion. Dickens thought he was a charlatan and a trickster; Ruskin was desperate to be introduced; and the very mention of his name made Robert Browning foam at the mouth. Lamont's sprightly account of Home's career remains interestingly open as to whether he was a consummate conman or the practitioner of a perennially misunderstood science, although the book would have had extra mesmerising charm of its own had it included more social and cultural context in its bag of tricks.
JL
The Tribes of Britain by David Miles (Phoenix, £9.99)
Miles's history of the population is also a popular history of these islands, since demographics depend on subtle conjunctions of geopolitics (land-ownership, shelter, nutrition, health, mobility) and the mood of the times. There were suddenly more and younger inhabitants in Shakespeare's England, displaced from privatised estates, taking capital risks, migrating to cities, and the tone of their throng is almost audible in Will's work. Miles accounts for who came (covering the debate over whether Anglo-Saxons arrived en masse, or just as a few prestigious persons whose status all coveted and copied); who went forth (including a 17th-century exodus of Scots to Poland and 18th-century ditto to India); and who multiplied - not that many until the 18th century, when an upsurge of births provoked Malthus to unarguable conclusions. Miles crams the past century's additions and subtractions into a coda, almost as afterthoughts to the narratives of the bronze age Amesbury Archer, born near the Alps, and the Huguenot boat people seeking asylum in Barnstaple; 2006 is too close to be clear, I expect.
Vera Rule