Light Years

Brian Clegg
(Piatkus, £14.99)

This immensely likeable work of pop science traces "man's enduring fascination with light", from Aristotle's plans for a death ray (burning enemy ships with a giant array of mirrors) through to a recent experiment that seems to have sent Mozart's 40th Symphony faster than light, and thus back through time. Clegg is very good at explaining the bizarre properties of light, especially the head-scratching wave-particle duality; it is only a shame that much of the book consists of the standard modern pop-science method of looking over the shoulders of great men. Though Clegg performs his thumbnail biographies of luminaries such as Bacon, Newton, Galileo, Planck, Einstein and Feynman with a certain élan, we've seen many of these details, and much of this style of ersatz historical drama, before. Clegg's style and lucidity when he is talking directly to the science, especially in the concluding speculations about information-crammed crystals and teleportation, make one rue the lack of a more adventurous construction.

Alchemy & Alchemists<BR. Sean Martin
(Pocket Essentials, £3.99)

Alchemists - they were just idiots, weren't they? Crazy hermetic wizard types blinded by greed. Well, not according to this brief history. Martin refers to alchemy with portentous respect as "the Art". He argues not just that alchemy has had a profound influence on science (alchemists appear to have invented much standard laboratory equipment, and Newton, of course, was much taken with it), but further that it has mystical psychological benefits (see Jung), and that the study of the hermetic art might "unleash. . . the mind's hidden powers". Hmmm. Seduced by occultism, Martin bravely insists that wherever there are two possible interpretations of an anecdote, he will favour the "magical" one, which ensures that his book is marginal to the "orthodox history" he mocks.

The Death of Cinema
Paolo Cherchi Usai

(BFI, £13.99)

"This book is an elegy," writes Martin Scorsese in his preface, "to the thousands of copies of films being destroyed every day, all over the world, due to the lack of a global conservation strategy." Not enough films are being restored and preserved in refrigerated vaults, and irreplaceable acetates are crumbling away. Usai offers a deliciously provocative, aphoristic text, illustrated with film stills, that shores up a fragmentary metaphysics of the vanishing cinema experience. As he gestures Cassandra-like towards the future, he always uses the chronological measure of the Long Now Foundation (so that JFK was assassinated in "01963"): if his beloved films are not saved, he seems to be saying, they will be gone for a very long time.