Force and Motion ¦ Light ¦ Matter

When Eyewitness first came out I found them to be excellent samplers - the book equivalent of sporting highlights. Now the publishers have teamed up with the Science Museum to produce this silver-wrapped series, the effect is much the same - not much of an end-to-end read but fascinating browsing.

Flip captions and superficial descriptions don't always endear the texts to me but the photographs are what always made Eyewitnesses special and here they are a triumph. For with the Science Museum on hand to supply the examples we can see all manner of scientific firsts - Geiger's original counter (like a bean-tin on a stick), Swan's original light bulb (and you thought he only invented matches), the whistling mail-rocket which posed a serious threat to carrier pigeons in World War I, and my old mentor James Chadwick's original neutron detector and fag-packet toolkit, grimy with use.

All this demonstrates that science is, first and foremost, a human activity and not just a set of laws and principles; and while I can't agree with the publisher's claim that the series is 'indispensable' (sic) it's a grand introduction to the museum - which is.