The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog: And Other Serious Discoveries of Silly Science

A lively treatment about the necessity for what used to be called "Basic Research" that is studies that do not seem to be easly applicable to technological advance. Sometimes such studies are shown to be stepping stones toward more obvious advances in knowledge and technology.

From cone snail venom to the physics of mantis shrimp hunting and duck genitalia to the unsquashability of cockroaches and biomimicry, this book covers a range of "silly science" - i.e. the study of phenomena which won't immediately or obviously benefit humans.

Given my background, I was already familiar with a decent subset of the stories, but I feel like this book contains a good mix. I appreciated that the author went through several such stories to show how the knowledge they provided ultimately helped people. Although I think knowledge for knowledge sake is valuable, I know investors don't think that way and people often ask "why?" when there are so many issues in the world. Showing that it can also benefit us does become quite an show more important part of a scientist's job in my experience. The narrator does a good job of enthusiastically sharing the passion that the writer clearly has towards the subject.

There were times, that as I biologist, I wished that a bit more nuance and/or details were provided but I think the book does a good job for what it is. I also wish there had maybe been a bit more geographic diversity in terms of the researchers, but I recognise that science is not equally distributed around the world, especially silly science as it quickly loses funding when more immediately essential problems crop up.

Overall a fun book and an interesting overview of some of the "silly science" (some of which is definitely sillier than others) that has been conducted and what it has taught us.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. As always, all opinions are my own. show less