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Back when I was in school our physics teacher disappeared. Literally – one day he just stopped coming into school. So we ended up with a replacement for a couple of months while waiting for someone new to take the job permanently. Mr Green was an interesting guy, but he found it impossible to stick to the subject he was meant to be teaching. A random question would set him off on a rambling discussion of something entirely perpendicular to the curriculum. It wasn’t long before people started doing that on purpose, because Mr Green’s rambling observations were a hell of a lot more interesting than how a spring works.

The Velocity of Honey is like that. There’s no overarching theme here, no point that Ingram’s trying to make except maybe that science is full of interesting stuff and, well, here’s some of it in handy book form. It’s not serious science trying to do serious things, and it’s fascinating. The focus is a little narrow, but Ingram addresses this in his prologue: “I chose the topics based on the appeal of their science, which really meant their appeal for me. (For some unknown reason, there seems to be a lot of psychology and physics, with not much in between.)”

If you’re happy to let Ingram ramble at you on 24 different subjects this this’ll work well. I’ve read quite a lot of pop-sci and these kind of books have a tendency to cover the same ground – but I never noticed this in The Velocity of Honey. Ingram’s both original and interesting, which is quite an achievement. I had fun reading it.

The greatest tragedy about Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science is that the people who need to read it the most won’t. It’s a sustained argument against nonsense masquerading as science, but as Goldacre himself says: “You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.” And this is an eminently reasonable book.

I like science. I’m not a scientist, but I like to think that I understand it pretty well for a non-scientist. Most of what gets taken for science is actually engineering. The Large Hadron Collider? Engineering. The space programme? Engineering. It’s the process of ideas being tested that give us the ability to build things like the LHC and space rockets and mobile phones and medicines. Science is essentially the set of methods we’ve developed over the last thousand or so years to test ideas rigourously. Humans are easily fooled and science is the best way we know how to not decieve ourselves.

Goldacre uses subjects like homoeopathy and nutritionists to demonstrate the many ways in which people fool themselves and fool others. He effectively takes apart the claims of homoeopaths and nutritionists like Gillian McKeith as a demonstration of how such claims can be taken apart. In other words, it’s a training manual to spot this kind of nonsense-presented-as-fact and argue against it effectively. It’s the exact reverse of these self-appointed authorities’ intent – Goldacre is trying to empower the reader, not deceive them. Because Goldacre’s background is in medicine, his examples are exclusively health related, but health is the field of science that most directly impacts people’s lives.

This is really only one of two threads that the book is weaved from; the other is a critique of the media’s tacit role in the acceptance and promotion of nonsense, the misrepresentation and dumbing down of science in public life. See, for example, Language Log’s many posts about the poor science reporting of the BBC, and Goldacre’s own blog for many, many examples. This culminates in an analysis of the 9 year MMR vaccine debacle, where British media – and especially British newspapers – waged a campaign against the MMR vaccine as a cause of autism for the best part of nine years, on the basis of very little and very poor evidence.

Goldacre doesn’t take an entirely uncritical view of science. He draws attention to the ways that scientists have screwed up, making the wrong decisions. He also examines the way that science is sometimes distorted by powerful financial interests. The point is that these are things that scientists have fixed or want to fix, whereas the promoters of nonsense have no such desire.

Much of the material has its roots in Goldacre’s Guardian column of the same name, but it’s more of a distillation of it than a compilation. In many ways it’s a manifesto. Bad Science is one of the best science books I’ve ever read. It’s stunningly relevant, clearly written and often funny – although as a humanities graduate, I’m not entirely sure that Goldacre’s ire against humanities graduates is entirely warranted. Nevertheless, it explains what science is and why it does it far more clearly than any science lesson or textbook. It’s important stuff. If you know why homoeopathy and vitamin pills and detox are bad things then you should read this book to better understand the extent of the problem. And if you take homoeopathic remedies and your multivitamins and follow a detox plan twice a year, you should read it to understand why you’re wrong.