The most traditional of this batch is A History of Inventions, part
of the Panorama series, by Peter Lafferty, created and designed by David
Salariya (Macdonald, ÂŁ10.99, ISBN 0 7500 1875 5), but here traditional in
the best sense of the word. From the inventions of 600 000 BC to
high-temperature superconductors, this book fascinates from start to finish. The
pictures complement the text exactly and bring everything to life. Each
invention is well chosen and important.

Lafferty has the rare gift of explaining processes succinctly, so that
everything you need or want to know is there and anything extraneous or dull is
not. This is the sort of book I loved as a child, but better than any I can
remember.

Laurence Anholt’s The Forgotten Forest is altogether different
(Frances Lincoln, ÂŁ4.99, ISBN 0 7112 1141 8). A picture book with only a
couple of lines of text on each page, it tells a simple story about a world
where all but one of the forests have been cut down to make way for cities. The
last remaining forest is threatened with felling—but saved by the children
who play in it. A little elegiac for some tastes perhaps, but a lovely book to
read to younger children and one which many older children will want to read for
themselves.

Incredible Plants is that almost impossible thing, an exciting book
about botany. Photosynthesis, flower structure and pollination are explained in
a way that is streets ahead of the average. Using a familiar Dorling Kindersley
format of white space and bold illustration accompnaying text, Barbara Taylor’s
book opens up flowers to show what goes on (ÂŁ8.99, ISBN 0 7813 5499 6).
The spread on animal pollination is particularly well done, with a cross section
of a bucket orchid showing exactly what bees get up to inside the
flower—and how they get in and out, thus answering one of those
challenging children’s queries that usually leaves adults floundering. The
sections on plants without flowers and fungal spores are welcome, given that
most botanical books for children tend to dwell only on flowering plants.

David Phillips is professor of physical chemistry at Imperial College,
London, where he specialises in light and lasers. Unlike many academics, he
writes with an easy touch. His Light Up Your Life (Portland Press,
ÂŁ6.99, ISBN 1 85578 090 9) is a wonderful book, getting across ideas and
discoveries that lesser writers might think children were incapable of
understanding.

Ably helped by Mic Rolph’s jolly illustrations, Phillips manages to explain
lasers to 10-year-olds in a way so entertaining and simple that I foresee a
queue outside the Imperial College admissions office in eight years’ time. This
is the kind of expert, thrilling science book that we should be getting to
children everywhere.

Planet Ocean is in the same series and follows a similar format.
Brian Bett is a marine biologist at the Southampton Oceanography Centre where
his main work is studying the effects of environmental change on deep-sea
creatures. Again illustrated by the excellent Rolph, Planet Ocean
(ÂŁ6.99, ISBN 1 85578 094 1) takes readers to a depth of 5000 metres and up
again, explaining every oceanographic layer as it passes. Much of the text
is heavy stuff, but it is difficult to see how any writer could make it much
clearer. All the weightier oceanographic information is spiced up with nice
touches.

Take, for example, the account of the gulper eel and its huge stomach. This
acts as a portable larder so the eel can gulp down as much food as it can find.
And then we encounter the siphonophores—which include the Portuguese
man-of-war—with stinging tentacles several metres long.

All these books show that at last we are giving children what they
deserve—the best. Academic excellence, good writing, fine illustration and
production combine seamlessly. These are books for children that fire
imagination, curiosity and a longing to find out more . . . which is what
science is all about.

Many old friends appear here: the plasma globe, the ball that balances on a column of air and the zoetrope. They were all busy entertaining the usual mix of children and adults. But captions are poor, explaining little or no science behind the tricks and failing to show how the scientific principles seen at work here relate to everyday life.

Among the missed opportunities is an absolutely wonderfully interactive vertical rotating drum, into which you can throw bean bags and watch them defy gravity thanks to centrifugal force. But it carries a legend commenting that as the drum slows the bag will “float” at the top of its arc “as if it were weightless”, losing many points for not explaining that it is weightless, in free fall like an orbiting astronaut.

There is one absolutely gorgeous exhibit: a disc of clear material – the size of a coffee table – is filled with a fluid that swirls into beautiful patterns produced by turbulence as the disc rotates. The caption did point out the similarity of some patterns to the markings on Jupiter, but missed an opportunity to mention spiral galaxies.

The astronomical connection, though, is what will (if all goes well) one day make this a gem of a science centre. Plans are already in hand to refurbish and bring into use the 26-inch refractor, with other instruments to follow. The buildings have great potential for lectures and demonstrations, the staff are friendly, and the setting is superb. Large areas of grass provide space for children to let off steam or picnic. After paying ÂŁ2.50 each (the family ticket at ÂŁ7 would be a bargain for larger families), we were disappointed to learn that to get to a tea room we would have to pay as much again to visit the grounds of Herstmonceux Castle.

At present, you would need to visit both to make a decent outing, and that means this is a fair weather jaunt. But there is an excellent network of public footpaths around and through the castle grounds. In spring, this includes a superb bluebell wood, at no extra charge.

Overall, a decent family outing even now, made by the setting, if you take your picnic and boots; but not worth taking a school party on a long journey for.

But Stannard has done his job particularly well. Even in this conventional mode, very few writers have his gift of never underestimating the reader and never failing to inform and entertain.

Young readers will be attracted to the layout, which is bright and clear, with informative diagrams and entertaining illustrations to break up the text. Each chapter finishes with a quiz that asks questions that make readers think about what they have read and work out proper solutions to proper problems instead of regurgitating some half-remembered fact. Even better, the excellent quiz answers at the end talk through the problems logically but never stoop to “I told you so” smart-aleck solutions.

Stannard never allows himself to ramble on too long or wander off at a tangent. Because the information he provides is so clear and focused it can easily be used for reference, and will be especially useful in schools. Throughout the text, key words in bold link to the splendid glossary.

Overall this book has everything about the Universe that a beginner could want to know. A keen astronomer might quibble about some of the simplifications, and near the end of the book Stannard does get himself in a tangle by first saying that it is meaningless to ask what happened “before the Big Bang” and then going on to discuss oscillating universe models. But these are minor imperfections, given the likely audience. The book doesn’t actually tell us exactly who it is aimed at, but it would certainly be great for readers aged 10 and upwards, while a keen 8-year-old who was a good reader would enjoy it too.

Our Universe is never condescending but always fun. Any Russell Stannard book is welcome, and this one stands up well as a conventional reference source. I just hope it won’t be long before he gets around to writing more about the adventures of Gedanken.

First, the good news. Human Being deals largely with matters that could
loosely be described as medical, from the way muscles work through health and
disease to sexuality and interpersonal relationships. The formula is the tried
and tested one of presenting two-page spreads on specific topics, with
adequate (though not inspired) illustrations and textual boxes on detailed
items.

By and large, Youngson is comfortable with this biological material,
although not always entirely reliable – in his discussion of evolution, for
example, he tells us that the suggestion that evolution does not proceed
smoothly and steadily was “first mooted in, the early 1970s”, when in fact
this was a revival of a much older proposal of the idea. In spite of these
minor flaws, the book is a useful family guide to the body. And, like its
companion volume, Human Being is well served by a “Factfinder” section, a
mini-glossary of (in this case) biological and medical terms.

The bad news? For a start, neither book has an index. And the very bad news
is that Youngson is far from comfortable with physical sciences, so that
Science could not be recommended to any young reader or for family reference
use. The history itself is often vague and woolly, with even the historical
context of the work of Albert Einstein (hardly a minor character) presented
inaccurately.

In a classic howler, Youngson tells us that the atmospheric “greenhouse
effect” works in the same way as a garden greenhouse (which it does not),
while diagrams representing parabolic mirrors are drawn as sections of
circles, the story of the discovery of quarks is garbled, and a veil is best
drawn over the account given here of the development of modern cosmology. Best
(or worst) of all is the account on page 128 of how nuclear fusion inside
stars occurs because of the gravitational attraction between individual atoms
as they bounce off one another. This ignores discussion earlier in the book of
the relative strengths of the fundamental forces, and gives the impression
that whole atoms are indeed bouncing around inside the Sun.

Although there is quite a lot of quite adequate stuff in Science, it simply
is not good enough. What would have made it good enough would have been a
careful line edit from somebody with a background in physics rather than
medicine; perhaps the publishers can carry this out before the next edition
appears.

In the wake of the National Curriculum, guides to basic science are
two a penny, and largely interchangeable. But not this one. Christopher
Cooper and the Dorling Kindersley/Science Museum team are not content with
run-of-the-mill explanations of the differences between solids, liquids
and gases, but go into lavishly illustrated and clear accounts not just
of this, molecules and atoms but also the subatomic world.

Splitting the atom and nuclear fusion are simple stuff for these people,
who happily drop a Feynman diagram into the discussion of subatomic particles,
and whisk the reader through a guide to the four forces of physics before
closing with a brief resume of the life and death of the Universe, with
a nod towards the works of Fred Hoyle and Stephen Hawking.

But don’t run away with the impression that it is all esoteric stuff
here. Nothing is neglected: Cooper goes back to Greek ideas about the five
elements, alchemy, William Wollaston’s wooden models of the way atoms might
form crystal structures, and the good old phlogiston theory of combustion.

A double-page spread on living matter manages to encompass the carbon
cycle, synthesis of urea, the work of Louis Pasteur, the structure of DNA
and the nature of viruses and amino acids. It does all this in a main text
of 130 words and a series of illustrations, none with a caption more than
70 words long.

This is typical both of this book and of the increasingly familiar Dorling
Kindersley approach, which draws readers (or viewers?) in with the gorgeous
pictures, then painlessly drip feeds information.

This book could be digested (probably devoured) by a bright eight-year-old,
but is equally enjoyable for an adult with a doctorate in physics. Our only
complaint is the ludicrous price. How can a company as astute as Dorling
Kindersley be so crass as to think we are fooled by making the price ÂŁ9.99
instead of a nice, round ÂŁ10?

John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin are the authors of Too Hot to Handle?,
published by Corgi.

On a bright spring day there can be few museums that could rival the
Old Royal Observatory at Greenwich for a grand day out. Set high on a hill
overlooking parkland and some of the best architecture in London, it is
spectacularly beautiful. The new Time Gallery, which opened at the end of
February, is a brilliant excuse to visit the old Royal Observatory.

Children are amazed by the whole concept of measuring time, and the
Time Gallery sets out to explain the concept of time passing and the different
methods people have devised to measure it. The setting is appropriate, since
it is, after all, Greenwich from which the world takes its standard of
time. The famous pips may now come from Rugby, but the time they tell is
still Greenwich Mean Time.

It is a small gallery and elegantly laid out. There is little in it
to attract children immediately: no buttons to press, no videos and no spectacular
working models. But the exhibits’ clear layout and informative, but unstuffy
written information reward closer inspection.

The proximity of the Time Gallery to The National Maritime Museum and
the Cutty Sark makes it an ideal stopping place for school trips. But if
you visit the Time Gallery with more than a tiny group of children, I would
recommend dishing out some fairly hefty worksheets to make sure that they
settle down.

The Time Gallery lifts the veil from such mysteries as why there are
60 seconds in a minute and 24 hours in a day, and displays timekeeping devices
from hourglasses to quartz watches. At first sight, the display is a little
dull. But closer investigation reveals a diminutive (bonsai?) Japanese sundial
and a six-foot tall replica of Big Ben. With the added bonus of an opportunity
to straddle the Greenwich Meridian, with one foot in the western hemisphere
and one in the eastern hemisphere, and a series of informative leaflets
on aspects of time, few school parties are likely to be disappointed.

All the staff at the Old Royal Observatory are friendly to children.
On my visit, the place was overrun with endless school parties but everywhere
the staff were smiling and patiently answering questions.

Mary Gribbin is a teacher and writer of science books for children.

*National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London SE10 9NF. Tel: 081-858
4422