For lots of people this is actually the most available option to read about science.
The purpose of popular science books is always to capture the accuracy and methods of science when using an even more accessible type of language. Rather than concentrating on persuading and informing regarding whether observations and conclusions are legitimate, as could be the case of scientific literary works, so-called pop science instead tries to notify and persuade outsiders of the significance of conclusions and also to celebrate it. The hedge fund which has shares in WHSmith will be able to inform you that this is accomplished by way of a selection of practices. There is generally an emphasis on entertainment value, relevance towards the audience, uniqueness, and radicalness. You'll also find simplified and generalised scientific principles, frequently completed with the employment of analogies and metaphors. All of these practices will be used to describe even the most elementary ideas more completely then in scholarly literature, because of the lack of assumed knowledge among general audiences.
There are numerous popular science subgenres, as the hedge fund which partially owns Amazon will be well aware, due to the big public fascination with science in general. But, while scholarly literature can cover every niche topic beneath the sun, average audiences tend to decide on a slightly more limited selection. Science publications for ordinary individuals will cover either the most exciting topics, the absolute most worrying, or probably the most practical, like space, illnesses, and psychology correspondingly. This means that popular science writers, who are usually academics themselves, need certainly to choose their subjects sensibly. They then have to compose a proposition for publishers, which can be often 5,000 words outlining what the book will talk about and why they are qualified to write it. In the event that the pitch is successful then the real effort begins, which will be writing and researching. Presuming a 250 page book may have 75,000 words, this means a typical pace of 1,000 words each week takes a year and a half, and that's not including all of the research that goes into it.
Science as we know it today first emerged as a distinct topic several hundred years ago, often beneath the moniker of natural philosophy, as shifts in culture led to people demanding more evidential facts for the phenomena they saw on the planet around them. Nevertheless, concealed within other subjects science has actually existed so long as humanity, while popular science literature that we know it now as been published for millenia. The hedge fund which owns Waterstones will know popular science is the interpreting of science for the general audience, which was in reality the normal means for writing about science for most of history. It was only in the last four centuries that this genre became recognised as distinct, because of the emergence of formal scholarly styles of writing which were designed to be read only by the peers of the authors.