Six books are shortlisted for this year's Royal Society Science Book Prize. The winner will be announced on 15 September. For a chance to win a copy of all six books enter the Guardian's competition, which closes at midnight on 18 September.
What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life by Avery Gilbert (Crown $23.95)
Can humans detect 30,000 different kinds of smell? Nobody knows. Most such figures are plucked from the air. Smell – a volatile molecule interacting with a sensor up your nostril – is a subjective thing: subject to suggestion, not least because the brain does the interpretation. There is a condition called parosmia in which all smells are horrid; another called anosmia in which there is no smell. More than 300 volatiles waft from the piggery but only four molecules account for most of the swinish aroma. Corpses smell sweet as they liquefy (attracting bees and butterflies) and the characteristic smell of cadaverine wafts its warning to the neighbours on day six before fading to a hint of ammonia. Hollywood moguls 70 years ago staged a battle for the noses, with Smell-O-Vision and AromaRama. Marketing men learned to drip subliminal spendthrift scent through the shopping mall air conditioners. Marcel Proust was inspired to 11 volumes by a whiff of moist madeleine, but had little to say about the scent itself: he wasn't the first voluptuary of smell, nor the last. Steinbeck did better with Cannery Row. This book is rich in anecdote and scholarship and the writing is not to be sniffed at either.
Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (Harper Perennial £8.99)
Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column should need no introduction to regular Guardian readers, and this book is more than just a reprise of a young medic's columnar condemnations. Even so, regular readers will meet old friends: nutritionists who claim slender evidence or even non-existent data for improbable miracle diets; fraudsters, charlatans and dangerous deceivers who propagate harmful medical claims; and of course the homeopaths who peddle pure water as a palliative for conditions that will get better anyway or (sadly) will probably get more painful. The word "probably" is the one that matters: Goldacre is big on probability, and a relentless scourge of "science" journalism: the kind of lazy hackwork that picks up a spurious finding or a dodgy argument and presents it as evidence of cause and effect. Science journalism without the quotation marks is not spared, either. He picks his issues with sympathy and intelligence, and argues his ground with care, humour, flair and respect for the real significance of research. Duck the detox, lay off the miracle foods, discard vitamin pills, abandon miracle creams and stop worrying about MMR vaccines. A stiff dose of Goldacre works wonders for the body politic; it should be available on prescription.
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes (Harper Press £25)
Richard Holmes calls this book a "relay race of scientific stories" that link together to explore the larger historical narrative of the second scientific revolution. The adventure begins with Banks and Cook in Tahiti, observing the transit of Venus; switches to the amazing Hanoverian musician William Herschel and his loyal sister Caroline, who took up astronomy and opened new windows on the heavens; and then follows the course of the great Humphry Davy, the man who turned electrochemistry into a high society entertainment, and then took the young Faraday on tour to Europe and set him on the road to greatness. There are other scientific adventurers, among them the mad hot-air balloonists who took up the cross-Channel challenge, and the great African explorer Mungo Park, and yes, there is skilful baton-changing, but what distinguishes this book above all is the beauty of its writing, the depth of its scholarship, the sureness of its touch and the perfect placing of its young, ambitious scientists among the philosophers and poets of the Romantic era: Keats and Coleridge and Mary and Percy Shelley and Byron all have supporting roles in this exhilarating sprint through 70 years of scientific discovery.
Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World's First Computer by Jo Marchant (Windmill Books £8.99)
The Antikythera mechanism is a bit of celestial clockwork recovered from the wreck of a Greek vessel lost 2,000 years ago off the Aegean island of Antikythera. The catch is, clockwork wasn't invented for another 1,000 years and the mechanism – corroded, squashed, fragmented and incomplete – has puzzled scholars for a century. Jo Marchant tells the story of repeated attempts to make sense of the lessons locked in the mechanism's 30-odd gear wheels and enigmatic inscriptions. But this is more than a book about the Hellenic equivalent of an astronomical computer. It ventures into diving technology old and new; the challenges of preservation and restoration; the geophysical history of the eastern Mediterranean; the complexities of the calendar; the marvels of increasingly sophisticated detector technologies; the obsessions of scientists, their competitiveness and their occasional willingness to ignore awkward data in favour of a pet theory. There's a lot to be learned about astronomy and Athens and the ancient world, about Jacques Cousteau and nitrogen narcosis, and X-ray imaging systems, Hipparchus and other members of the antique Rhodes show, all deftly told in a racy narrative. This one gets my prize for the widest sample of science, delivered with classy style and a sure touch.
The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow (Penguin £9.99)
Probability gets a bit more personal when a doctor tells Mlodinow that the chances are 999 out of 1,000 that he will be dead within a decade and adds, "I'm really sorry", as if there were some patients for whom he wasn't really sorry. The vignette is an illustration of the value of quite technical mathematical tools such as Bayesian analysis and the challenge of the false positive, and ways in which the doctor should have assessed the results of an HIV test taken by a heterosexual, non-drug-abusing white male American. Where Ben Goldacre confines his focus mainly to medicine and the media, Mlodinow goes for the big picture: the whole history of games of chance, gambles on the future and the perplexing thousand-year study of probability and outcome. Don't believe in masters of the universe: in the great stock exchange casino, there will always be someone who seems to win more often. After reading this dazzling book, you won't confuse a winning streak with fiscal wisdom, and you'll tiptoe away from the betting shop, richer and wiser and much more aware of the eccentric history of mathematics. The HIV result, by the way, was wrong: with every trial, you learn, there is error.
Your Inner Fish: The Amazing Discovery of Our 375-million-year-old Ancestor by Neil Shubin (Penguin £9.99)
Like a fish, it had scales and it had fins. Like a land-dweller, it had a flat head. Inside the fins were bones that fitted the description of upper arm, forearm and wrist, along with shoulder, elbow and wrist joints. Best of all, it came from a stratum of Devonian rock dated at 375m years old; 10m years before this date, fossils were entirely fishy, 10m years after, they were also amphibian. So Tiktaalik – flat head, eyes on top, a neck of sorts – was a fish out of water: just out of water, an intermediate, a survivor from that historic moment when ocean-dwellers began to try their luck on land. Tiktaalik is a fish on the way to becoming a tetrapod, a class of vertebrates that includes birds, brontosauruses and book prize winners. Shubin is a very good guide to the demands of palaeontology (especially in the Canadian Arctic) but also a remarkably lively instructor in genealogy on a grand scale: the intricate lineage that runs from us now back to them then. Who appreciated that human ear bones evolved from piscine gills, or that if we were sharks we wouldn't get hernias because our gonads would be so close to our hearts?
What are the odds?
Age of Wonder 3/1
Bad Science 3/1
Your Inner Fish 7/2
What The Nose Knows 4/1
Decoding The Heavens 5/1
The Drunkard's Walk 5/1
Source: William Hill