US Navy pilot Mark Hinebaugh spent three deep-frozen seasons supporting
science in Antarctica, flying junk of all kinds from camp to camp. Sometimes the
junk was human: arrogantly pushing him to risk his life in unimaginably
frightening conditions to get where they wanted to be. Most was supplies for
thousands of ordinary researchers who spend the Antarctic summer on ice.

Obviously happier facing the frigid south than the great white waste of the
wordprocessor, Hinebaugh still manages a convincing self-portrait as the kind of
unflappable bear you need when things go wrong on an Antarctic scale. His lumpy,
repetitious prose, more navy report than novel, even succeeds in echoing the
tumbled terrain he is describing.

Mostly Flying Upside Down (Naval Institute, ÂŁ24.95, ISBN
1557503895) is boys’ stuff. There are some women around—Carol the
navigator practically saves Hinebaugh’s life in one horrific landing—but
mostly in the background. Hinebaugh focuses firmly on the machines, the heavy
drinking, the daily spats with useless weather forecasters. A lot of science
that is not science, not literature, not dull.

TO CALL a book The Science of Aliens seems clever, until you think
about it. The aliens in question are, of course, beings from other worlds and
those other worlds are light years away. So how can you do science about their
inhabitants? Science is hands-on stuff, or at the very least telescope-on stuff.
It needs something concrete to work with. But if it’s aliens you’re after, then
apart from a few miserable maybe-microbes and a collection of earthly sightings
that have somehow not made it into Nature, there’s not a lot to go
on.

One solution is to extrapolate from what little science we can do in the
backyard of our own suburban Galaxy. If the laws of the Universe are as
universal as they are cracked up to be, we should be able to make reasonable
guesses about what might be possible or impossible in those unimaginable places
where aliens live. If they live anywhere, that is. The huge number of planets
and whatnot out there is not necessarily huge enough to guarantee that aliens
actually exist. No matter, write me a good enough book about them and I’ll
happily accept that those self-replicating blobs of organisation we call life
are strewn about the Universe as thickly as needles under a flyover.

Unfortunately, Clifford Pickover has not written a good enough book. In the
absence of actual aliens to talk about, he uses two main sources: earthly
science and science fiction. Though he struggles heroically to keep the two
apart, he fails.

Time and again he quotes fictional descriptions of aliens—particularly
his own—almost as if he were quoting from a refereed journal. The idea
seems to be that if you can imagine something, then, given the vastness of the
Universe, it must exist somewhere. It’s that huge numbers argument again.

Parts of the book do offer large helpings of science. There is a bit of
biochemistry and astrophysics, and a lot of less taxing descriptive
biology—lurid tales of creatures that thrive in temperatures fit to fry or
freeze any normal animal, mouthless worms from the unfathomable deep and so
on.

At some points Pickover argues that aliens would look like people: upright,
bilaterally symmetrical, sense organs at the top. At others, he muses about
organisms forming from the electrons of a dying universe, or indeed any other
collection of vaguely scientific-sounding stuff. The problem seems to be just
that he is short on the kind of hard science that produces convincing
extrapolations. Curiously, there are good general theories about structure and
process which would help: basic physics, biomechanics, computer models of
evolution—but Pickover hardly considers them. His is a romantic,
anything-goes view in which imagination usually gets the better of
calculation.

None of this will trouble hardened science-fiction buffs. They thrive on
scientific jargon undiluted by the bits that get in the way of a good story.
Nothing wrong with that. But if you want a really serious discussion of the
science of aliens, try talking to the creature that’s evolving right now from
the fluff under your bed.

WE have all, even the scientists among us, been artists at some time. We all
drew and painted as children, and probably had to do Art at school. One of the
earliest lessons we learnt was that things made by people are much easier to
draw than the people who make them. A chair and a teacher have the same
superficial complexity, but somehow in our drawings the chair looked like a
chair while the teacher resembled a sadly mutated gorilla. It may have been
psychologically accurate, but we knew it wasn’t up to the standards we set
ourselves.

Part of the problem, besides our sensitivity to the human form, is that there
are two completely independent technologies at work. The human way of making
things produces hard-edged shapes that are easy to draw; nature’s way creates a
subtle squidginess that leaves you wondering where to put your pencil. This
problem does not afflict the 100 or so line drawings in Steven Vogel’s
fact-packed, wittily written book.

A biologist who specialises in biomechanics, Vogel offers a mind-expanding
compendium of comparisons between two very different ways of turning the
materials of our planet into the gadgetry of survival.

Neither way is superior, he believes: they’re just different, and largely
incompatible, based on irrevocable decisions made a long way back. So although
we can often learn from nature, it’s not an infallible method of improving our
technology.

Vogel uses technology freely as a convenient metaphor for nature’s way of
doing things. He sometimes even refers to “natural designs”. But don’t be
fooled: his whole thrust is towards a critical, not reverential, assessment of
nature as a designer, and towards debunking the myth that countless good designs
have resulted from engineers imitating nature. It’s simply easier, at first, to
see the differences and similarities between human activities and natural
processes if you use the same words for both.

The comparison is certainly worth making. Although all the world’s creatures,
including us, have to put up with the same gravity, temperatures and materials,
humans tend to solve the problems of living in fundamentally different ways.
Nature is curvy; we prefer to go straight. Nature is wet; we like to be dry.
Nature moves things around by diffusion and smooth flows; we go for gravity and
turbulence. We like stiff materials; nature favours flexible strength and
toughness. We are addicted to structural metals; nature never uses them. Nature
pulls when we push, speeds up when we slow down. You get the picture: nature’s
way, the way of the blindly self-taught, more often turns our technology on its
head than anticipates or inspires it.

Vogel doesn’t stoop to the sixth-form debating point that everything is
natural really, that humans are just nature’s way of producing a Mercedes. The
fact is that we’re looking at two distinct technologies that have little in
common. Each is self-sufficient, even at times magnificent, but it’s harder than
you’d think for us to pinch good ideas from natural systems.

It’s sometimes difficult to believe that human and natural technologies
belong on the same planet. There are natural designs so odd that biomechanics
can’t explain them, like the long, skinny but serviceable appendages of the
crane fly (known to British kids as “daddy-longlegs”). There are natural
mechanisms that you might not want to imitate, such as the strutless but
unpredictable stiffening of the penis. And, although the flight of birds
undoubtedly inspired the Wright brothers, modern humans’ flying machines knock
spots off anything feathery when it comes to speed and efficiency.

Nature has got a few tricks we’d love to get a handle on, though. Insects
reinforce their wings with amounts of material a human engineer would consider
dangerously frugal. Muscle is wonderfully versatile, capable of finely graded
movement and available in sizes from gnat’s wing to elephant’s thigh; although
it only knows how to pull, it would be just the thing for robots if we could
find a way of making it. Fish move through the oceans with almost no resistance;
we now know how they do it, but haven’t yet produced a submarine which people
will travel in without being paid to. I could go on—but I’d be risking the
selective adulation of nature that makes Vogel cringe. Loving nature, he says,
is not the same thing as finding her perfect. That’s what his head says, but I
couldn’t help noticing an uncontrollable admiration of nature’s weird ways
sneaking in from time to time.

And why not? A biologist who wasn’t deeply impressed by what he studied would
probably not be as good as Vogel. He’s great at using the contrast provided
by human technology to clarify the detail of natural mechanisms. But he’s
careful to point out the dangers of trying to make a single terminology describe
processes that are fundamentally different.

Natural structures like bone or tendon are built up by tiny machines that are
dwarfed by what they produce, in processes that depend on exquisite feedback to
keep everything lined up under constantly changing conditions. Human products
such as cars or toasters tend to emerge from factories much bigger than these
objects, and are assembled from rigid components guaranteed to fit together come
what may.

So using an engineering term like “blueprint” to describe DNA, for instance,
is deeply misleading. A blueprint is a fixed, explicit set of instructions,
while DNA is more like a recipe, leaving a lot for the cook to interpret as
circumstances dictate. Likewise, using a biological word, “selection”, in the
context of human technology can mislead you into thinking that engineering
products evolve by some blind process driven by market forces or whatever.

Given this awareness, Vogel’s constant reference to nature’s way of making
things as “technology”, which implies a conscious purpose and knowledge that
nature doesn’t have, is perhaps a little strange. But his apparent misuse of
language is a bold and successful rhetorical device. As an engineer, I felt that
Vogel’s incisive comparisons gave me a real understanding of nature, buffeted
and constrained as it is by the same forces that trouble and determine our own
efforts. A more literal-minded approach would not have worked so well. I fancy
that those who know more about biology than engineering may well experience the
same effect in reverse.

And for those who know little of either, Vogel has provided a wonderful
opportunity to learn about the universal realities of adhesion and aerodynamics,
blimps and bones, stresses and strains, trees and transmissions, that make our
world and nature’s so different and yet so much the same. He doesn’t explain how
to draw lifelike people, but lays out a rich treasury of clues as to why it is
so difficult.

IT’S good to talk, we’re told, and good to listen too. But it’s even better
to see the world of the extraordinary Scottish-American who made the telephone
happen. Edwin Grosvenor and Morgan Wesson’s sumptuous new book about Bell,
enriched with page after page of previously unpublished photographs, is an
unmissable revelation. It piles on yet more evidence for the view, already
suggested by Robert Bruce’s definitive but now-ageing biography, that its
subject was not only a creative giant but also a man who knew how to live.

This is unusual. Many inventors, at least as portrayed by their biographers,
come over as loveless nerds or grasping obsessives. Bell was neither. He secured
the world’s first telephone patents and became a wealthy man when he was still
in his twenties, leaving him free to pursue a life whose richness bordered on
fantasy: giant kites, optical phones, early aeroplanes, medical gadgets, popular
journalism, foreign travel and, above all, a huge and boisterous family. True,
he fought for his patents like a tiger, so there was perhaps a touch of grasping
in the genes. And his wife Mabel complained more than once of his tendency to
disappear for hours inventing things, so there was maybe a wee streak of
nerdishness. But loveless and obsessive he was not. Just look at the
pictures.

The Bells and their friends seem to have been insatiable photographers.
Thanks to expert reprinting of long-forgotten negatives, we can now see Bell at
work, Bell with delightful daughters and granddaughters, Bell cosily installed
in his suburban-Gaelic mansion Beinn Bhreagh, Bell celebrating Christmas, Bell
with his beloved Mabel, Bell in old age looking like God.

The quality of these pictures is so high and the image they present so
relentlessly favourable that one catches a whiff of the spin doctor. It is as
hard to believe that Grosvenor, Bell’s great-grandson, has diligently probed
every last cupboard for skeletons as it is to accept that there could be none.
The only fault of this lovely book about a lovely man is its barely perceptible
aftertaste of saccharine.