If you want more books on sideways thinking, go straight to Robert Park鈥檚
excellent Voodoo Science: The road from foolishness to fraud (Oxford
University Press, 拢18.99, ISBN 0198507453) in which the author, a
physicist at the University of Maryland, takes on junk science. It鈥檚 just come
out in Britain (reviewed in New Scientist, 3 June 2000, p 50).
Also just published in Britain鈥攁nd praised when published in the US
earlier this year鈥攊s the intriguing The Blackwinged Night: Creativity
in nature and mind (Perseus, 拢17.95, ISBN 0738202053) by F. David
Peat. A physicist contemplates creativity, concluding that it cannot be taught
but that we can encourage it. Sit and watch the ants, stand in front of a
painting鈥攖ry to free your mind and you too could have that world-shaking
insight. One for the conventional friend, perhaps.
A book you might want to
hang onto鈥攁lthough it鈥檚 likely you will never finish reading it鈥攊s
the extraordinarily useful Composition of Scientific Words (paperback,
new edition, Smithsonian Institution Press, 拢19.95, ISBN 1560988487).
First written in 1927 by geologist Roland Wilbur Brown, this doorstop of a book
is where to go when you want to find the roots of a word. But it鈥檚 also the
place to go for a swift primer on the history and structure of Greek, Latin and
English.
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