How to make a tornado by the New Scientist review - Science literature

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How to make a tornado by New Scientist - mad science gone wrong

New Scientist Magazine's How to build a tornado

How to make a tornado was a Christmas present, so it was always going to be difficult to write a bad review about it, but luckily it turned out to be filled with genius, so it has spared me making up a good review.

The New Scientist don’t really do a very good job of selling the book in the introduction, but if you ignore that and read through the first couple of chapters you’ll find a collection of some of the craziest scientific experiments, breakthroughs and failures in history.

Taken from back issues of New Scientist, How to make a tornado hones in on the madder world of science to pull together a who’s who of nutty, wild and insanely unfeasible science.

It’s broken up into sections like mad research, the yuck factor (mainly faeces based stories, although whale snot does put in a good cameo) and love sex and all that stuff (essentially rude science, so sperm, average willy length and orgasmatrons a go go).

You’ll find out how to make a tornado (obviously), but you’ll also discover the temperature of heaven & hell, how it feels to die by a number of different death methods, the weight of a soul (although the conditions involved meant that the findings might not necessarily be accurate) and the general extremes that scientists will go to to test their theories.

How to make a tornado is funny, interesting and not completely pointless, despite telling you that it is at the very beginning. Even if you’re not a boffin, you should still enjoy the madness of scientist. if there’s one thing that I’ve learnt, it’s that they’re not to be trusted with science.

4.2/5