How to Win a Nobel Prize

"This book was the big hit in my family. Everybody put it as their number one. What’s nice about it is that it gives you some insights into how science evolves and works and very often it’s not somebody waking up one morning going, ‘I think I’m going to become a scientist and win a Nobel Prize.’ It’s often very accidental. Some of the big discoveries are opportunistic: it isn’t what somebody set out to do in the beginning. I think that’s really encouraging for young people, to see how scientists and scientific careers evolve and that there’s not one way to do this. Some of these people got Nobel prizes very late in life, some people quite early. Some people got them in disciplines that were a bit outside of what they were working on. Even Einstein: he was working in a patent office when he published his early papers on relativity. “We wanted to try and have some books that might reach out to children who are maybe a bit intimidated by science or don’t think they’re very good at it” The story is very nicely told, through the eyes of a young girl who meets Barry. By travelling through this special door, they get to meet Nobel laureates from the past. There’s also references to women like Rosalind Franklin, who probably deserves a Nobel Prize. So the book also points out some people who were overlooked. Then, another thing I really liked about this book is that at the end of each chapter there was a little experiment you could do that demonstrated aspects of what the Nobel Prize winners won the prize for. The one that really stuck with me is that just by melting chocolate in a microwave, you can actually work out the speed of light. These really basic things were really fascinating. And it’s very readable. It’s very well written. Again, when I picked this book up, I thought it’ll be okay, it won’t be great, but actually it was really, really good."