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| 1400052173
| 9781400052172
| 1400052173
| 4.12
| 750,884
| Feb 02, 2010
| Feb 02, 2010
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it was amazing
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Henrietta Lacks has probably saved your life. If not yours, then almost certainly that of someone you know. And you don't even know who she is. Or, rath Henrietta Lacks has probably saved your life. If not yours, then almost certainly that of someone you know. And you don't even know who she is. Or, rather, who she was. The original Henrietta Lacks was a black woman who lived near Baltimore, grew up in poverty, worked hard, and died in 1951, overcome by a cancer that started in her cervix and spread out to take over her whole body. She left behind five children, a husband, and a legacy that would forever change our understanding of biology and medicine. When she first went to Johns Hopkins Medical Center and was diagnosed with cancer, her doctor took a small sample of cells from the tumor and sent it to his colleague, George Gey. Gey had long been in the pursuit of what seemed like and impossible dream: to culture human cells and keep them alive in the lab. By doing so, he hoped to create new ways to test medicine and study human biology without all those pesky patients getting in the way. Unfortunately, his work had thus far been a failure. Human cells, no matter how hard he tried, simply would not survive outside the body for very long. Gey tried all kinds of media and methods, inventing some machines that have become invaluable to cell culture research, but he simply watched culture after culture die in the lab. All of that changed when he got HeLa. The cells from Henrietta Lacks, which were known as "HeLa," not only didn't die - they thrived. They were so robust that Gey and his staff soon had more HeLa cells than they could keep, much less use, so they started sending them off to any researcher who asked. With HeLa, researchers around the world began to make discoveries that would save lives and change the world. But with this ever-growing cell line - which was baked, boiled, frozen, irradiated, cloned, cut up, and sent into space - it was very easy to forget that there was once a woman named Henrietta Lacks, with a family and a legacy of her own. Plenty has been written about HeLa in the last fifty years, and any researcher who works with cells is probably well aware of its existence and importance. But very few people know about Henrietta, and it was this oversight that Rebecca Skloot is trying to correct in this book. She began her quest with a simple question: "Who was Henrietta Lacks?" The fact that she got the right name was surprising enough, actually. HeLa had previously been identified as Henrietta Lakes, Helen Lane, and Helen Larson in various publications. Skloot believed that there was more to the story than just a bunch of immortal cells, and was determined to find Henrietta's surviving relatives and learn more about this woman who had somehow become so important to the world. Skloot wouldn't be the first, however. A writer for Rolling Stone, a con man, and the BBC had all attempted to look into the life of Henrietta before, and found that the surviving Lackses were not only unaware of what their mother had become, but largely unaware of why it was important. The children and grandchildren of Henrietta Lacks had grown up in the Baltimore area, mired in the poverty of being black in the end of the twentieth century. Drug abuse, alcoholism, and a lack of education meant that their lives were full of hardship and struggle, and not likely to get any better. When they found out that Henrietta's cells were not only unique to science but being sold all around the world, this was news that they weren't all prepared to cope with. Some saw it as a religious visitation, others as a massive conspiracy, and still others as just a way to make money off some poor black folk from the city. The center of Skloot's narrative is Deborah, Henrietta's youngest daughter and the one Lacks who seemed most determined to find out what had happened. Deborah wanted so hard to find out what had happened to her mother that it almost killed her. The stress of not knowing - or, even worse, knowing but not understanding - took a heavy toll on her physical and mental health, and she was reluctant to talk to anyone at all about her mother. But it was Deborah that Rebecca had to convince if she was going to write this book, and in order to do that, she had to promise that the book would be about the woman Henrietta was, not just the cells she was famous for. That's probably what makes this book as readable and engaging as it is. While the science is handled well and smoothly, it's not nearly as fascinating or emotionally gripping as the stories that she tells about the Lacks family. She shows us a family that is held together by the strength of their faith in their God and each other, and who are desperately trying to understand their place in the world and how Henrietta came to be what she was. When the original cells were taken from Henrietta, it was done without her consent. She also had no say in what happened to those cells and how they were used, nor did any of her family find out the truth until years later. In an era long before the phrase "informed consent" was even coined, the medical establishment made massive scientific and financial gains, and in the meantime the Lacks were mired in poverty. As several of her children note, Henrietta has changed medicine forever, but her children can't go see a doctor. The struggle to understand must have been enormous. One of the moments that was most surprising and illuminating to me was when Henrietta's son Zakariyya asked Rebecca, "What's a cell?" Just like Rebecca, I had to take a moment to absorb that question, and it put into sharp perspective the vast assumptions that I had made, coming from a well-educated white background. I thought that everyone at least knew what a cell was, but that assumption couldn't have been further from the truth. Deborah and her family are people of minimal formal education who are trying to understand a topic that people study for their entire lives. Their dedication to this quest is so strong, and the struggle is so great that their attempt is nothing less than heroic, to my way of seeing things. The story is still unfinished. HeLa is still out there, making news and causing trouble. The Lacks family is still living in poverty, although the new generation has been able to go to school and are aiming at a brighter future for themselves. And while patients' rights to control what is done with their bodies and their tissues is improving, the law is still on the side of the doctors and hospitals. Medical ethics is a lot better than it was, but the fight is fierce, especially when there's money involved. This book is not just the story of cells or of science. It’s the story of a woman and her family, and how sometimes people get lost in the inexorable movement of scientific progress. Some parts are infuriating, some are heartbreaking, but the book is an illumination into what is sometimes sacrificed in pursuit of a better world. ----- "When I saw those toenails, I nearly fainted. I thought, Oh jeez, she's a real person. I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we'd been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman. I'd never thought of it that way." - Mary Kubicek, assistant to George Gey ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 08, 2012
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Jul 10, 2012
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1560258691
| 9781560258698
| 1560258691
| 3.95
| 558
| Oct 24, 2006
| Oct 04, 2006
|
really liked it
|
There are a lot of reasons to want to build a time machine. To learn the truth about historical places and events, to see creatures that have been ext
There are a lot of reasons to want to build a time machine. To learn the truth about historical places and events, to see creatures that have been extinct for millions of years, to kill Hitler - always a favorite. You could go to the Library of Alexandria and save the works of great scientists and philosophers that have been lost to history. You could document the Crucifixion or watch the fall of Rome first-hand. You could see Jimi or Elvis or Janice or Kurt in their heyday, watch the original performances of Shakespeare's plays, or talk engineering with DaVinci. With a time machine, the whole of history is open to you, and your options are just about limitless. All Ron Mallett wanted to do with his time machine was see his dad. This book is not just about how one man went about figuring out how to travel through time. That in itself would be interesting, since time travel has been a dream of mankind ever since we figured out that time was a thing. There's a lot of complicated science that goes into not just manipulating time, but figuring out that it can be manipulated, and it takes half a lifetime to master. A lot of popular science books focus on the science, unsurprisingly, and talk about how certain things were discovered and what can be done with them in the future. That's all well and good, but this book adds an extra element that's often missing from other popular science texts. It talks about why. When Ron Mallett was ten years old, his father died of a heart attack brought about by a combination of smoking, poor dietary choices, and a genetic inclination towards heart problems. Overnight, the man that young Ron loved and idolized was gone, leaving him directionless at an age when having a father can be so very important. With the loss of a beloved parent, it's entirely possible that Ron could have seen his life crippled from that day onward. It might have been, if not for H.G. Wells and his famous book, The Time Machine. After he read this book, the notion that time could be navigated became the center of his life. His first attempt at a time machine - built of pipes and wires in his basement - was unsuccessful, of course. But he was undeterred, and realized that if he was going to make this dream come true, he would have to buckle down and start learning some science. Just the idea that he might one day build a machine to travel through time was enough to give him direction and purpose, and it set him on a course that would go on to define his life. The book is a memoir of his own travels through the world of physics and relativity, moving from one point to another as new ideas and discoveries signposted his route towards a theory of time travel. Initially guided by Einstein, Mallett went from being a young academic to programming computers for the Air Force, to becoming a full-fledged academic at the University of Connecticut. He makes sure that the reader can not only follow all the steps that he took, but that we can also see why he took them. What chance encounters and lucky finds pushed him forward, or what unfortunate incidents slowed him down. He reminds us all throughout the book of why he has chosen to do science, and never lets us forget this motivation. At the same time, he is sure to tell us about two rather significant obstacles to his progress. The first, of course, was that he felt he couldn't be honest about why he was studying what he was studying - relativity, black holes, lasers, that kind of thing. For fear that he would be labeled a crackpot and denied the opportunities he would need, he revealed his ambition to build a time machine only to those he felt he could absolutely trust. As far as anyone else was concerned, of course, he was just another theoretical physicist trying to figure out how the universe worked. The other challenge he faced was that he was African-American in a field that was very, very white at the time. He had to deal with racism in both its overt and covert forms, and work even harder to prove himself to those who couldn't - or wouldn't - see past his skin color. He doesn't dwell on it in this book, since that's not what this book is about. But I'm sure if he wanted to write about what it was like trying to break into physics academia as an African-American in the 60s and 70s, he probably could. What's most important, though, is that he continually reminds us of why he's doing what he's doing. He talks about his father, and the memories he had of him. He keeps his non-academic life in view, letting us in on his personal triumphs and failures, his struggles with depression and his joys at advancing towards his goal. The end result is a book that is not only about science, but about a person. The emotional thread that runs through this book is strong, and even if you can't quite follow the science, you can still follow the passion that Ron Mallett has for this project. The book, while fascinating, is technically unfinished. He has yet to build his time machine, and there's no proof that the ideas he's come forward will actually work, even if the math says they should. As the book finishes, he has a plan, and he lays out the way he thinks his machine should work, but we'll have to wait to see how that works out. Whether he succeeds or fails, though, he has built up a lifetime of research that has expanded our understanding of space and time in such a way that Einstein - and Ron Mallett's father - would no doubt be proud of. ------------------ "Time stopped for me in the middle of the night on May 22, 1955." - Ron Mallett, "Time Traveler" ------------------ ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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May 23, 2012
|
Jun 04, 2012
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1596594322
| 9781596594326
| 3.97
| 5,673
| Jul 17, 2008
| Jul 20, 2009
|
really liked it
|
Imagine, for a moment, one of our early human ancestors. A first-generation Homo sapiens, exploring his world with an amazing brain that would be the
Imagine, for a moment, one of our early human ancestors. A first-generation Homo sapiens, exploring his world with an amazing brain that would be the envy of the animal kingdom. If they understood envy. He, and his children, and their children and grandchildren will spread across the Earth as hunter-gatherers, the first beings (so far as we know) who can look at the world and attempt to pass it on. Their threats were simple: survive or don't. Find food or starve. Hunt or be hunted. And those fantastic brains did such a bang-up job that their descendants are still walking around, thousands of generations later. Now, take that Paleolithic man - swift of foot, sharp of eye, strong of hand - and drop him in the middle of modern-day Times Square. And, as his minder, give him a bored, easily distracted teenager - one who knows the world, but can't be bothered to do the work to make decisions. Congratulations. According to Daniel Gardner, we have just constructed a fine metaphor for how the human brain works. Part of it is very old, able to make decisions in an instant. The other is newer, more rational and savvy, but doesn't have the sheer speed and force that is prehistoric partner has. And as much as we want it to be true that the rational, modern part of our mind is in charge,the sad fact is that out inner caveman has far more influence over us than we care to admit. Gardner begins the book with an interesting story about the most terrifying thing to happen in the last decade - the attacks of September 11th in the United States. By the time the towers fell, people around the world were watching, and anyone who didn't see it live would surely see it soon enough as it was replayed over ands over again. It was truly terrifying to watch, unlike anything Americans had seen before in their country, and it scared the ever-loving he'll out of people. Many people, as a result, chose to forgo air travel in favor of driving. Now, as Superman famously told Lois Lane, flying is statistically the safest way to travel. In fact, the most dangerous part of any trip that involves flying is actually the drive to the airport. But, in those days and months after the attacks, people were scared to fly. So they drove instead. And, according to a five year study of traffic fatalities in the U. S. After 9/11 by German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, 1,595 people died on the roads who otherwise would not have. They were across, and that's understandable. But they were afraid of the wrong thing. Gardner sets out in this book to figure out why it is that people in the healthiest, safest, most prosperous nations on Earth - in the healthiest, safest, most prosperous era of human history - live in a state of near-constant fear. A lot of it, as the intro implies, comes down to the fact that our brains, which evolved over millions of years to be very good at judging risks that might be found on the savannah, are simply not prepared to do the same in a modern technological world. Our brains can't tell the difference between risk in fiction and reality, between something that happened to us and something we saw on the news. When it comes to risk, our brains play it very safe, which is great out in nature. Is that shadow in the bushes a tiger? Maybe, maybe not, but either way it's probably a good idea to get the he'll away from it. We can't say the same thing of that guy sitting on the bus who looks like maybe he might be a Muslim. We also tend to assume that if we've heard of something recently, then it must be more common. Again if you're out in neater and you saw a bear yesterday, there's a decent chance that the bear is still around today and you might want to be wary of that. But what if you see constant news coverage of a high-profile child abduction? It's on every show, being talked about on every blog - does that mean that the chance of your child being abducted has increased? Of course not, but your brain doesn't see it that way. One more thing: we don't get numbers. The news tells us that the rate of certain risks is up by 10%, but they don't tell us what the original figure was. We hear about millions of starving children in Africa, but don't do anything unless we get a personal story of one. We don't understand probability at all, we can't deal with randomness, and this lack of innate numeracy (compounded by an educational culture that makes it hard to teach kids to become numerate) costs us billions. Or more, as the recent economic. Clusterthing has shown. We think that correlation equals causation. We believe stories over facts. We think we don't have biases that we clearly possess. We assign high risk to things we don't like and low risk to things we do, regardless of how risky they actually are. And on top of all that, we know how to exploit others' fears in order to gain money and power for ourselves. It's easy to do, and it works like a charm. Reading this book won't make you into a magically unflappable person, mainly because all of this stuff is pretty well hard-wired in our brains. Even Gardner, who should have known better, tells a story about hunting through the slums of Lagos in the middle of the night to retrieve a photo of his children from the wallet that had been stolen from him. He had plenty more, but at that moment, his brain was convinced that losing the photo meant losing his children. Irrational, yes, and it nearly got him killed, but that's just one example of what a powerful force this primitive brain is. The good news, though, is that you can strengthen the newer, more recent brain - the lazy teenager from the initial example. By knowing how you make mistakes, how you can be fooled into fearing things that you don't need to fear, you can better understand your own reactions to events and make better decisions. You can educate yourself about the things that are actually dangerous, and stop losing sleep over the things that are not a threat. Being afraid is not your fault - it's an ingrained biological feature. Staying afraid, on the other hand, is something over which you have control. Are there terrorists who want to destroy the United States? Sure. But they won't, because doing so is indescribably harder than certain politicians would have you believe. Are there strange child molesters who want to abduct and defile your children? Yup. But the chances of that actually happening are so low that the odds of any specific child becoming such a victim are nil. Are there angry teens who want to come to their school and kill everyone they see? Of course. But when you look at the incidence of school shooting compared to how many kids go to school every day, you can see that the odds of your children being caught in a school shooting are slim to none. In fact, your children are probably safer in school than out of it. There are real risks in our modern world, but they're not spectacular and they're not viscerally terrifying. A car accident, a heart attack, a diabetic death - these things don't make the news. Imagine a 9/11-style attack happening every three days, 3,000 dead each time. It would be an outrage, a national disgrace, and people would be scared to their bones. But it would take just about 233 attacks to equal the number of deaths in 2001 that occurred from cardiovascular disease in the United States. The nearly nonexistent chance of being killed by terrorists is enough to get people to submit to any number of indignities and intrusions on their persons and liberties when they travel, but the very real risk of death from a heart attack isn't enough to get people to go take a walk once in a while or stop eating junk food. So enjoy that delicious moment of irony the next time you go through the TSA molest-a-thon and get a seriously overweight screener taking liberties with your person. "Anyone who has spent time in a Victorian cemetery knows that gratitude, not fear, should be the defining feeling of our age. And yet it is fear that defines us. We worry. We cringe. It seems the less we have to fear, the more we fear." - Daniel Gardner ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Jan 06, 2012
|
Audiobook
| |||||||||||||||
| 0452295467
| 9780452295469
| 0452295467
| 3.97
| 5,673
| Jul 17, 2008
| Jun 24, 2009
|
it was amazing
|
Imagine, for a moment, one of our early human ancestors. A first-generation Homo sapiens, exploring his world with an amazing brain that would be the
Imagine, for a moment, one of our early human ancestors. A first-generation Homo sapiens, exploring his world with an amazing brain that would be the envy of the animal kingdom. If they understood envy. He, and his children, and their children and grandchildren will spread across the Earth as hunter-gatherers, the first beings (so far as we know) who can look at the world and attempt to pass on what it knows and learns. Their threats were simple: survive or don't. Find food or starve. Hunt or be hunted. And those fantastic brains did such a bang-up job that their descendants are still walking around, thousands of generations later. Now, take that Paleolithic man - swift of foot, sharp of eye, strong of hand - and drop him in the middle of modern-day Times Square. And, as his minder, give him a bored, easily distracted teenager - one who knows the world, but can't be bothered to do the work to make decisions. Congratulations. According to Daniel Gardner, we have just constructed a fine metaphor for how the human brain works. Part of it is very old, able to make decisions in an instant based on the slimmest of clues. The other is newer, more rational and savvy, able to put together reasoned, logical arguments, but doesn't have the sheer speed and force that is prehistoric partner has. And as much as we want it to be true that the rational, modern part of our mind is in charge,the sad fact is that out inner caveman has far more influence over us than we care to admit. Gardner begins the book with an interesting story about the most terrifying thing to happen in the last decade - the attacks of September 11th in the United States. By the time the towers fell, people around the world were watching, and anyone who didn't see it live would surely see it soon enough as it was replayed over and over again. It was truly terrifying to watch, unlike anything Americans had seen before in their country, and it scared the ever-loving hell out of people. Many people, as a result, chose to forgo air travel in favor of driving. Now, as Superman famously told Lois Lane, flying is statistically the safest way to travel. In fact, the most dangerous part of any trip that involves flying is usually the drive to the airport. But, in those days and months after the attacks, people were scared to fly. So they drove instead. And, according to a five year study of traffic fatalities in the U. S. after 9/11 by German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, 1,595 people died on the roads who otherwise would not have. They were afraid, and that's understandable. But they were afraid of the wrong thing. So they died. Gardner sets out in this book to figure out why it is that people in the healthiest, safest, most prosperous nations on Earth - in the healthiest, safest, most prosperous era of human history - live in a state of near-constant fear. A lot of it, as the intro implies, comes down to the fact that our brains, which evolved over millions of years to be very good at judging risks that might be found on the savannah, are simply not prepared to do the same in a modern technological world. Our brains can't tell the difference between risk in fiction and reality, between something that happened to us and something we saw on the news. When it comes to risk, our brains play it very safe, which is great out in nature. Is that shadow in the bushes a tiger? Maybe, maybe not, but either way it's probably a good idea to get the hell away from it. We can't say the same thing of that guy sitting on the bus who looks like maybe he might be a Muslim. We also tend to assume that if we've heard of something recently, then it must be more common. Again if you're out in nature and you saw a bear yesterday, there's a decent chance that the bear is still around today and you might want to be wary of that. But what if you see constant news coverage of a high-profile child abduction? It's on every show, being talked about on every blog - does that mean that the chance of your child being abducted has increased? Of course not, but your brain doesn't see it that way. Your brain thinks that your child will be taken from you the moment you look away, and all the reasoning in the world won't change its mind. One more thing: we don't get numbers. The news tells us that the rate of certain risks is up by 10%, but they don't tell us what the original figure was. We hear about millions of starving children in Africa, but don't do anything unless we get a personal story of one. We don't understand probability at all, we can't deal with randomness, and this lack of innate numeracy (compounded by an educational culture that makes it hard to teach kids to become numerate) costs us billions. Or more, as the recent economic Clusterthing has shown, when you have people who are good with numbers deliberately exploiting this flaw in order to profit. We think that correlation equals causation. We believe stories over facts. We think we don't have biases that we clearly possess. We assign high risk to things we don't like and low risk to things we do, regardless of how risky they actually are. And on top of all that, we know how to exploit others' fears in order to gain money and power for ourselves. It's easy to do, and it works like a charm. Reading this book won't make you into a magically unflappable person, mainly because all of this stuff is pretty well hard-wired in our brains. Even Gardner, who should have known better, tells a story about hunting through the slums of Lagos in the middle of the night to retrieve a photo of his children from the wallet that had been stolen from him. He had plenty more, but at that moment, his brain was convinced that losing the photo meant losing his children. Irrational, yes, and it nearly got him killed, but that's just one example of what a powerful force this primitive brain is. The good news, though, is that you can strengthen the newer, more recent brain - the lazy teenager from the initial example. By knowing how you make mistakes, how you can be fooled into fearing things that you don't need to fear, you can better understand your own reactions to events and make better decisions. You can educate yourself about the things that are actually dangerous, and stop losing sleep over the things that are not a threat. Being afraid is not your fault - it's an ingrained biological feature. Staying afraid, on the other hand, is something over which you have control. With enough will power, even you can overcome great fear. Sorry. Nerd moment there. Are there terrorists who want to destroy the United States? Sure. But they won't, because doing so is indescribably harder than certain politicians would have you believe. Are there creepy child molesters who want to abduct and defile your children? Yup. But the chances of that actually happening are so low that the odds of any specific child becoming such a victim are nil. Are there angry teens who want to come to their school and kill everyone they see? Of course. But when you look at the incidence of school shooting compared to how many kids go to school every day, you can see that the odds of your children being caught in a school shooting are slim to none. In fact, there are many parts of the country where your children are probably safer in school than out of it. There are real risks in our modern world, but they're not spectacular and they're not viscerally terrifying. A car accident, a heart attack, a diabetic death - these things don't make the news. Imagine a 9/11-style attack happening every three days, 3,000 dead each time. It would be an outrage, a national disgrace, and people would be scared to their bones. But it would take just about 233 attacks to equal the number of deaths in 2001 that occurred from cardiovascular disease in the United States. The nearly nonexistent chance of being killed by terrorists is enough to get people to submit to any number of indignities and intrusions on their persons and liberties when they travel, but the very real risk of death from a heart attack isn't enough to get people to go take a walk once in a while or stop eating junk food. So enjoy that delicious moment of irony the next time you go through the TSA molest-a-thon and get a seriously overweight screener taking liberties with your person. The fact is that we have it damn good compared to our ancestors. We live longer, we live better, even in parts of the world that are still developing, and it looks like the future will progress that way. But we still insist on needing to be afraid, even as we have less and less to actually fear. So put down the newspaper, turn off the 24-hour news, and take some time to figure out what is actually a threat. Give that bored teenager something to do with his time and let the caveman go back to his cave. -------------------------------------------------- "Anyone who has spent time in a Victorian cemetery knows that gratitude, not fear, should be the defining feeling of our age. And yet it is fear that defines us. We worry. We cringe. It seems the less we have to fear, the more we fear." - Daniel Gardner, The Science of Fear ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 13, 2011
|
Jul 17, 2011
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0520261992
| 9780520261990
| 0520261992
| 4.23
| 591
| Apr 01, 2010
| May 05, 2010
|
liked it
|
Moffett knew from a young age that he wanted to be a field biologist – traveling the world in search of the most interesting animals he could find. An
Moffett knew from a young age that he wanted to be a field biologist – traveling the world in search of the most interesting animals he could find. And ever since his childhood, he’s had an abiding interest in ants. And who could blame him? There are thousands of species of ants, found all around the world, and once you get down and really look at them, they display some amazing behaviors. They communicate through a series of smells, functioning almost as a group organism to take care of the nest, forage for food, and move from place to place. Some species of ants live their whole lives without touching the ground, while others ravage the ground they walk on, devouring everything in their paths. Ants are nature’s workhorses, utterly communistic in their behavior and presenting a model of order that humans should envy. We follow Moffett as he travels around the world to find the most interesting representatives of ant-dom. In India, he found the marauder ant, a vicious species of ant that goes on raids to find food near its nest. Connected by a complex system of trails, the marauder sends out every able-bodied ant it can muster, from the tiny workers to the (comparatively) giant soldier ants. They find, subdue, and dismember their prey with frightening efficiency, and carry it back to the nest, all without a leader to give them instructions or make sure they’re going the right way. Each ant just knows what her job is, and just does it. In that way, the ant super-organism takes care of itself. In Africa, he hunts the famous African army ant, a species that is famous for its terrifying raids and voracious appetites. They swarm out around their nest, devouring anything in their path, sometimes raiding other nests for food and larvae. When army ants come, the lucky prey gets out of the way. Ants are not confined to the ground, of course. The weaver ant is a tree-borne species that has mastered its domain with harshness and efficiency. The Amazon ant kidnaps pupae from neighboring nests and raises the young ants as their slaves. The leafcutter ant invented agriculture fifty million years before humanity even walked the earth, and the Argentine ant lives in supercolonies that cover hundreds of square kilometers and engage in violent, no-quarters war with each other. The sheer variety of ants on this planet is astounding, and Moffett shows an unstoppable enthusiasm for the little critters. What’s more, he’s an outstanding photographer, who has developed his technique and equipment to be able to get some remarkable shots of these tiny, tiny creatures in action. The hardcover edition that I have is printed on nice, glossy paper, pretty much in order to showcase Moffett’s photographic work, which he has regularly done for National Geographic Magazine. What’s more, he continually seeks to find connections between ants and humans, who have more similarities than one might expect. We both live in large, complex societies, where individuals take on specific roles that often last that individual’s lifetimes. We engage in wars, slavery, and varied communal activities that benefit both the individual and the society at the same time. Like us, the ants build highways and infrastructure, communicate over distances, tend gardens, hold territory, plan for the future and learn from the past. And they started doing all this thousands of millennia before we even thought about standing upright. We are not the same as ants, of course – ants are unmoved by things such as status, greed, or ambition, but their instinctual dedication to the greater good of their colony is probably something that we could use a good dose of. For all that, however, I don’t think this was the right ant book for me. Written by a person who truly loves ants, I think that would be the best kind of person to read it. I don’t have a particular fondness for the little buggers, and there were a lot of times where I had to stop and start over, or where I found myself looking for anything else to do rather than continue reading, which is never a good sign. It isn’t Moffett’s fault, I think. He put a lot of work and detail into this book, assuming that the reader would find ants just as fascinating as he does. And I don’t. Oh sure – I find them fascinating in abstract, but not quite fascinating enough to get into the down-and-dirty details about how they construct trunk trails out of their nests, or the exact division of labor that exists between one class of ant and another. I’m not sure what I thought the book would be when I saw Moffett on The Colbert Report, but it wasn’t quite enough for me to sit down and devour the way I hoped it would be. If you like ants – or you know someone who does – this is a great book, and it gives an excellent insight into what it means to be a field biologist (lots of staying in one place, apparently). For anyone who really loves insects in general, and ants in particular, this book will be a welcome addition to their bookshelf. --------------------------------------- “Is [an ant] intelligent? To my way of thinking, yes. We know a worker can evaluate the living space, ceiling height, entry dimensions, cleanliness, and illumination of a potential new home for her colony – a masterly feat, considering that she’s a roving speck with no pen, paper, or calculator.” - Mark Moffett, Adventures Among Ants ...more |
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Mar 29, 2011
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Mar 29, 2011
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Hardcover
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| 0316051640
| 9780316051644
| 0316051640
| 3.93
| 52,342
| 2010
| Jul 12, 2010
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really liked it
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One of the prettiest books I have on my shelves right now is Theodore Gray's The Elements, a visual collection of all the elements that make up the ph
One of the prettiest books I have on my shelves right now is Theodore Gray's The Elements, a visual collection of all the elements that make up the physical universe. "Everything you can drop on your foot," as he says. In it, he provides wonderful pictures and descriptions of the elements that we know, arranged as they would be in the periodic table. It's a gorgeous book, one that everyone should have - especially if you have children. If you want your kids to become interested in science and investigating the world around them, you could do far worse than to have this book on your shelves. Eventually, though, they'll be old enough and canny enough to ask, "Well, how do we know all this? Where did we find these things, and how? And why are they in this order?" That's the point where you hand them The Disappearing Spoon, sit back, and let Sam Kean take over. The story of the elements, and our understanding of them, is governed just as much by personality as by p-shells, as much by competition as by charge, as much by ego as by electrons. While the elements themselves don't pay any attention to human affairs, the quest to understand the building blocks of matter have sent us to the hearts of stars, the depths of the earth and, for various reasons, Ytterby, Sweden. [1] Kean starts with how he got into the elements, with a story that would horrify modern-day parents: mercury. When he was a kid, his mother would collect the mercury from broken thermometers and keep it in a little bottle on a high shelf. If they were lucky, she would let her children play with it for a while, swirling it around and watching while this shiny liquid metal split apart and fused back together perfectly, never leaving a bit of itself behind. It was a metal that flowed like water, and it was fascinating. If he had known at that age that ancient alchemists thought there were spirits living in mercury, he would not have been surprised. Keeping an eye out for mercury, he learned that modern scientists are able to follow the expedition of Lewis and Clark using mercury. The explorers carried with them a good quantity of Dr. Benjamin Rush's Bilious Pills, a "cure" for any illness that mainly contained mercury chloride. It was vile stuff, poisoning everyone who took it, but without an FDA around to stop this kind of nonsense, Rush made plenty of money. It probably didn't hurt his credibility that he was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. In any case, he gave samples to the Lewis and Clark expedition, and their latrine sites can still be found today by the unusually high levels of mercury that were deposited there as the men's bodies tried to get rid of the heavy metal as quickly as possible. Mercury also taught Kean about mythology - the Roman god of communication, modeled on the Greek message-bearer. It taught him etymology - the chemical symbol for mercury is Hg, which is derived from the Latin hydragyrum, which means "silver water." It informed him on literature, especially the Mad Hatter of Alice in Wonderland, who was based on the poor crazies who used to breathe in the fumes of mercury while setting felt for their hats. This one weird, eerie element was a door into so many other topics that he figured there must be others. And so he started work on this book, a collection of histories and tales, gossip and hearsay, all centered around the 118 physical elements that make up our universe. "As we know," he writes, "90 percent of particles in the universe are hydrogen, and the other 10 percent are helium. Everything else, including six million billion billion kilos of earth, is a cosmic rounding error." Within that rounding error, though, some amazing things have been found. In the 19th century, the Russian Dimitri Mendeleev examined the common properties of different elements and was able to sort the elements in such a way that took advantage of their similarities. The violent alkalies along the far left, which will explode if given half a chance, and their cousins, the halogens on the far right, some of the most reactive elements in nature. Separating them are the noble gasses, which don't react with anything unless pushed to extremes. Without knowing about electron shells and the weird quantum things that happen on the atomic level, Mendeleev managed to put together a table so good that he was able to leave gaps in it that corresponded to elements that hadn't yet been found. And by telling the world that these gaps existed, the race to isolate and discover the elements was on. Kean's book is a great look at the way science works on a human level. How the search for high-quality porcelain led to the discovery of an entire class of elements, how Marie Curie would get into trouble by dragging her (male) colleagues into dark closets to show them how radium glowed, how nitrogen kills with kindness and lithium quiets an unsettled mind. The competition to not only find these elements but to name them and find uses for them has driven science forward in all fields, from geology to neurology, for the last two hundred years. Those 118 squares on the periodic table have driven men to travel the world, to create economic and political empires, to love, to hate, and to murder. If this kind of thing were taught in high school chemistry class, there would probably be a lot more kids interested in science as a career. The book is very readable, even if it does drift from time to time into more technical areas. One of my colleagues, who doesn't have an extensive background in science, said she was a little slowed down by talk of electron shells and quantum jumps, which I guess were not aided by Kean's elevator similes. But it did get her asking the right questions - how do we know atoms exist if we can't see them? How can we be sure that what is in this book is true? Those are the questions that Kean tries to answer in the book, but it's also the kind of book that may bring up more questions. It's "gateway science," one of those books that pulls away the cold, rational veneer of the scientist and his or her endeavors, and shows what an exciting, weird, messy and dramatic place science can be. What's more, it shows how science is deeply ingrained not only into our technology, but our language, history and politics. An understanding of science, even at an amateur level, is a wonderful way to open your eyes to the great, complex and bizarre world in which we live. ----------------------------------------------------------- "We eat and breathe the periodic table; people bet and lose huge sums on it; philosophers use it to probe the meaning of science; it poisons people; it spawns wars. Between hydrogen at the top left and the man-made impossibilities lurking along the bottom, you can find bubbles, bombs, money, alchemy, petty politics, history, poison, crime, and love. Even some science." - Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon ------------------------------------------------------------ [1] The town has the distinct honor of having four elements named after it: yttrium (Y), ytterbium (Yb), terbium (Tb), and erbium (Er). What has your hometown got? ...more |
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Feb 14, 2011
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| 0767928849
| 9780767928847
| 0767928849
| 4.04
| 10,907
| Sep 14, 2010
| Sep 14, 2010
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really liked it
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Okay, I want you to do something for me. Close your eyes. Wait. No, that won't work. Open your eyes again. Eyes open? Good. Now imagine you've closed yo Okay, I want you to do something for me. Close your eyes. Wait. No, that won't work. Open your eyes again. Eyes open? Good. Now imagine you've closed your eyes, but don't actually close them because that will rather impair your ability to read this review. So, you're imagining that your eyes are closed. Now imagine you're on a cruise ship. It's a lovely place - blue water, blue skies, the faint scent of salt in the air, the waves lapping up against the hull of the boat in a soothing rhythm. It's a perfect way to spend a vacation. You get a daiquiri and lean on the railing, looking out towards the horizon. This is nice, you think. Just what I - Wait. What is that? You shield your eyes from the sun to get a better look and see what looks for all the world like a shadow on the horizon, stretching long and with flecks of light shimmering off its top. As it gets closer, it gets bigger, and you can feel the boat drop under your feet. The water gets higher and higher, and you know this can't possibly be happening because for the wave to be that high, it would have to be at least sixty or seventy feet. In thirty-five foot waters. A shadow is cast over the boat as the wave crests above you, and the last thing you think before the top comes down, shattering the cruise ship like it was made of so much balsa wood, is, "I wonder what it would be like to surf that...." It has often been said that we know more about the surface of the moon than we know about our own oceans. I have no idea who first said it, or in what form it was said, but reading this book drives home that it is absolutely correct. What's more, that ignorance may well kill us. The oceans are full of relentless mysteries and hypnotic beauty, but also terrors and dangers the likes of which we shorebound humans have trouble understanding. The sea has always been a dangerous place, really. We know that. What we don't know is what all of those dangers are. Tales of giant waves have been around since antiquity, but until recently, people didn't really believe them. It defied everything that was known about the ocean - to say nothing of common sense - to have waves appear out of nowhere, rise to heights of up to a hundred feet or more, wreak havoc on oceangoing vessels, and then vanish. These were the tales of sailors, whom everyone knew could not be trusted to tell the truth about their journeys. Perhaps that is why Casey chooses to open with a scene from a research vessel in the North Atlantic. The RRS Discovery was on a routine mission to gather data about the sea between the British Isles and Iceland when it found itself under attack by the ocean itself. The ship was hit over and over again by waves reaching up to sixty feet, then dropped down into the void between waves and lifted up again, over and over for five days. Things that weren't bolted down flew in mad directions all over the ship, and many things that were bolted down - like lifeboats - were ripped off their moorings. It was so terrifying that the scientists on board, after they had gotten home, wrote one of the very few research papers that included a note at the end thanking the captain for bringing them back alive. Only great skill and good luck saved that ship from oblivion in waters that seemed to have risen up for the sole purpose of destroying it. No one - no weather forecaster or meteorologist, oceanographer or climatologist - no one thought that waves of that size could exist under those conditions. And yet there they were, and the Discovery's instruments captured it all. Scientists who study the oceans are just beginning to understand how waves work on the ocean, but the almost infinite number of variables that contribute to making waves is so overwhelming that it's hard to conclusively predict where and when these rogue waves will appear. Other people who work with the sea - salvage operators, ship captains, insurers - know that this kind of thing is possible, and that the sea carries risks with it that no other form of transportation faces. Every year, dozens of ships are lost, and with them go many lives and countless dollars worth of merchandise. Some of these losses come from human error, but others come because the ocean is an inherently dangerous place for us to be. It is vital for our safety and our economy that we know how the ocean works, but we are nowhere near being able to do that. What's worse, the onset of climate change could make current models obsolete as the seas become higher, rougher, and more unpredictable. We are racing against the clock - and losing. But for all the scientists who are trying to map the behavior of waves, there is a community of people who seek them out. People who know the waves intimately, even if they can't write an equation to tell you what it is they know, exactly. These people are the surfers, and if there was ever a group of people more attached and attuned to the sea, they'd have to be mermen. Casey spends a lot of time with surfer Laird Hamilton. I wanted to say "the famous Laird Hamilton," but I didn't know the man existed until I read this book, which makes him one of those people who is very famous, but only to the kind of people who would find him famous. Now that I know more about him and his community, though, I can certainly understand why he has the prestige that he does. Among big-wave surfers, he is a legend. And that takes some doing. To ride a regular wave, you see, you get out there with your board, get behind the point where the waves start to break, and paddle to catch up. With the big waves, though, they're moving much too fast for a paddler to get into position, so the big-wave riders have someone on a jet ski to pull them along. Once in position, the jet ski goes down the back of the wave while the surfer heads down the front where, hopefully, he won't be killed. If he falls off, his partner has to come in, find him, and get them both out before the next giant wave - and where there's one wave there are always more - comes in to crush them both. Regular surfing has its share of dangers, but the perils of big-wave surfing are orders of magnitude worse. There is a whole community of surfers looking to ride these great waves. They travel across the world on the mere possibility of great surfing, heading to places with names like Jaws, Mavericks, or Egypt, all in the hope of catching the biggest waves. Injuries are common, and sometimes terrible. Death is always an option. But they come anyway, just for that moment of zenlike awareness of the Eternal Now that you can only truly achieve when you're riding down the face of a wave and trying not to die. I don't like the ocean, myself. I find it too big, too impersonal. It's a place that could swallow you whole and leave no trace you were ever there. It's a place that cares nothing for us puny humans and will, on a whim, try to destroy us. I certainly appreciate the ocean and what it does for us, and it's nice to look at. But I certainly don't trust it, and this book really didn't help in that regard. From tales of ships crushed by rogue waves south of Africa to waves so large and so powerful they could strip the bark off the trees they uprooted, it was a testament to the fact that the moment we underestimate the ocean is the moment it kills us. What's more, with climate change being what it is, our problems with the ocean are going to turn into new and different ones. The models we have now - good though they are - are incomplete, and the changes that are coming in the future will keep scientists on their toes for years to come. As Casey notes, wave science is a very young discipline, but it is one that needs attention if we're going to safeguard our coastal cities and global commerce. This book is an exciting read about a topic you've probably never given much thought to. You fear for both the surfers and the scientists, and in the end realize just how much there is about the ocean that we still don't know. I don't know about you, but it kind of freaks me out.... -------------------------------------------------------------- "If you can look at one of these waves and you don't believe that there's something greater than we are, then you've got some serious analyzing to do and you should go sit under a tree for a very long time." - Laird Hamilton -------------------------------------------------------------- ...more |
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Dec 12, 2010
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Dec 18, 2010
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Hardcover
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| 1579128149
| 9781579128142
| 1579128149
| 4.43
| 5,259
| Oct 01, 2009
| Oct 01, 2009
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it was amazing
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When I was a kid, my father had the entire Time/Life science series. For you young whippersnappers, Time/Life books were educational series that cover
When I was a kid, my father had the entire Time/Life science series. For you young whippersnappers, Time/Life books were educational series that covered all kinds of topics - history, science, literature, you name it. The idea was that you sign up and they send you books, once a month, until the series was finished or you decided you no longer wanted to receive it. The Science series focused on, of course, science, with books devoted to every facet of physics, medicine, chemistry, biology.... It was a fantastic compendium of human knowledge in those pre-internet days, and I just loved it. I learned about how traveling at lightspeed squashes things by reading a story about spies chasing each other on the Lightspeed Express. I learned about how different drugs affect the mind and body. I learned about how important the wheel was, what water could do, and how the food we eat determines almost everything about our lives. My favorite volume of all of them was titled Matter, and it was about all the stuff there is. At the center of it was a pictorial representation of all the elements known to science in 1968. Everything from Hydrogen to Uranium and beyond. I could pore over those pages for hours, amazed by the idea that these things were all there was, made up everything around me. Learning that just six of them (Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Calcium and Phosphorus) made up most of, well, me was just mind-bending. I don't know where that book is now - probably in a box at my mother's house - but the effect that it had on me has lasted ever since my childhood. In fact, as I was researching this review, I found the place that sells coins stamped from elemental metals and got completely distracted by the struggle to not buy any of them. So that's how Time/Life made me into a science nerd. Nevertheless, I was thrilled when I saw this book, and had to snap it up as soon as I could. It cost a whole lot less than a 1/10 troy ounce Rhodium coin Theodore Gray is an element hunter - something I didn't even know existed when I was a kid. He has made a hobby of trying to collect samples of every element that is is possible to (legally) own, and he's even built a special table to hold them all. A periodic table, as it were, which won him the IgNobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002. He and Nick Mann went through the collection to make outstanding, high-quality photographs and compile them into a fantastic book about "everything you can drop on your foot." It starts, of course, with a basic rundown of what an element is - a substance made of only one type of atom - and what the Periodic Table is - an organization of the elements by their common properties. There's also a page explaining the physics behind the shape of the table, what an "electron filling order" is, and why the atomic emission spectrum is so important. Fortunately for us non-professionals, he does this is a way that is amusing and understandable. Gray knows that his audience isn't professional chemists or grad students - it's people like me. People who are fans of science, but who, for one reason or another, never got into the real nitty-gritty of it. All of this means that it's a book you can enjoy even if you remember nothing from high school chemistry other than "BIFF=WANG." [1:] The book starts, of course, at hydrogen, the element that makes the sun burn ("Even at night," alleges the author, but I'll believe that when I see it) and ends with Ununoctium, which will no doubt get a proper name once those crazy kids in the high-energy physics lab get around to assembling it. It includes the spectre of the modern age, Uranium, and its evil twin Plutonium. There's Carbon, without which none of us would be here, and Arsenic, which does a fine job of seeing to it that we cease to be. There's Iron, which we use in abundance, and Dysprosium, which has almost no uses that you've ever heard of. Cesium tells us what time it is, and Krypton, which used to tell us how long things were (before we figured out the speed of light.) Strontium and Calcium, Sodium and Americium, Gold, Silver, Copper and Lead - every element is in here, waiting for you. They're accompanied by wonderful photographs that illustrate the applications of each element, as well as diagrams showing its emission spectrum, crystal structure, and other information that you may or may not be interested in. Regardless of how much you know about chemistry, you should find this to be a fascinating and enjoyable book. Moreover, if you have kids and you want them to be exposed to science in a way that engages their fascination and imagination, then this is the book for you. Just be ready to raise a science nerd, and if they ask for an elemental coin for their birthday, remember - Lead isn't just for toys anymore! [1:] Thanks, Mr. Hiza! ...more |
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Jun 26, 2010
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Jul 02, 2010
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Hardcover
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| 0393316041
| 9780393316049
| 0393316041
| 4.27
| 204,588
| 1985
| Apr 12, 1997
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really liked it
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A while back, I read another book by Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, and I wasn't all that thrilled with it. It was kind of disappointing
A while back, I read another book by Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, and I wasn't all that thrilled with it. It was kind of disappointing at the time. I knew that Feynman's fame came not only from his scientific brilliance, but from the fact that he was a genuinely interesting, funny and mischievous person. I had hoped that I could find some of that in the book, but to no avail. And so I gave it away so that someone else could get the pleasure from it that I could not. Still, I was not completely turned off Feynman. There are videos of him around the internet that really show his vibrancy, his energy and the passion with which he approached the world, and I knew there would come a time when I would have to give him a second chance. Thus, this book. Surely You're Joking, Mister Feynman! is the story - or rather a collection of stories - about what can happen to a person with immense confidence in his own abilities, an insatiable curiosity about the world, a willingness to make mistakes, all topped off with a generous helping of genius. First, as Feynman calls them at the beginning of the book, some vitals. Richard Feynman was a theoretical physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, taught at Caltech, and won the Nobel Prize in physics for his contributions to quantum electrodynamics. He was also one hell of a bongo player, an accomplished artist, and a self-taught safecracker. He was a joker and a prankster and a ladies' man who could bluff his way into pretty much anything he wanted to do, and was often surprised that people believed his bravado. He had a passion for mysteries and puzzles and figuring out how things worked, from combination locks to the movements of electrons to why water curves the way it does when it comes out the tap, and he didn't give a good goddamn about what the rest of the world thought of him. In other words, Richard Feynman was a pretty awesome guy. This book is a collection of Feynman's stories, the kind that he might tell at a party or with a bunch of friends traveling. They're the variety of story that might begin with, "Did I ever tell you how I joined a samba band in Rio?" and just go on from there. He starts with his youth, how he was the kind of boy who just loved to tinker with things. He would take electronics apart and put them back together, and then go to junk shops to buy parts that he could build into better radios. He did experiments with ants to find out how they communicated, and dedicated himself so hard to solving puzzles that eventually all he needed was the first line, and he could immediately come back with, "He starts by chopping every other one in three parts." He was one of those kids whose curiosity was boundless, and who never even imagined that there was anything "better" he could have been doing than exploring how the world worked. I couldn't shake the feeling that if young Feynman were around today, he'd be medicated to the eyeballs just to stop him being so "weird." But you know me. Cynic. We follow him through his days at MIT, pulling pranks with friends and discovering those interesting weaknesses in human thought processes that allowed him to get away with murder when he was young. His habits of wondering how things work carried him through his participation in the Manhattan Project, his travels to countries like Brazil and Japan, and led him through a life that was never without fascinating and entertaining discoveries. Long story short (too late), Feynman is - or at least should be - a model for young people today. While the book isn't pitched towards young people, there are several lessons in it that should be taught to every child. The first is that the world is infinitely interesting. Any kid who whines that she is bored needs to be shown the million and one ways that you can combat boredom just within a ten-foot radius of where you're sitting. Look at something - anything and ask yourself, "I wonder how that works," and then go find out. The possibilities are endless, and the potential exists that you may discover a passion you never knew you had. Feynman didn't start out wondering how electrons work - he fixed his neighbors' radios just because he could. One thing led to another, and next thing you know - BAM! Nobel Prize. The second point, and it is connected to the first, is to never say No. In his essay, "But Is It Art?" he talks about how he learned to draw. It started when an artist friend offered to teach Feynman how to draw if he would teach the artist about science. While Feynman believed that he would be an absolutely atrocious artist, he still agreed to the challenge, and he stuck with it. Eventually he became well-known as a decent artist, even managing to sell some of his works. Now obviously, there are limits and caveats to "never" - there are times when saying No is the right thing to do. But when you find an opportunity to expand your abilities, to learn new things and face new challenges, the automatic "No" may deprive you of a joy that you never knew you could experience. Third, you must know who you are. One of the problems inherent in living in a society is that there's always someone trying to tell you who you are, or at least who you should be. Your parents, teachers, friends, all have an image of you in their heads, and are all trying to mold you into that image, consciously or unconsciously. Add to that the government, media, corporations, advertisements, shysters, preachers and other deliverers of hokum and propaganda who are also trying to tell you who you really are, despite having never met you and being pretty sure that you don't already know yourself. And many people, sadly, don't. But Feynman did. He knew who he was, and that was all he needed. He occasionally let people think differently about him, but the thread that runs through this book is a rock-solid self-awareness that allowed him the self-confidence to pick up showgirls or try to turn down a Nobel Prize. The caveat to this, and a corollary to the second point, is that you can always discover new things about who you are. All through the book, we see Feynman faced with a new opportunity that he thinks he can't do because it's just Not Him. Drawing, playing music, learning languages - those skills didn't fit into the mental model of who he thought he was, a flaw that all of us possess. A lot of us, without even giving it a try, might immediately discard something by saying, "Well, that's just not me." Maybe it could be. It takes courage, and the willingness to fall flat on your face, but if you can discover a new talent or a new passion, isn't it worth it? Finally, remember that everyone else around you is just as human as you are. Don't be impressed by titles and uniforms, fancy suits and impressive business cards. Don't assume that just because someone wears a soldier's uniform or a thousand dollar suit that they are somehow "better" than you. Feynman not only resisted authority in so many of these tales, he actively worked to subvert it. Whether it's trying to sneak codes past military censors or breaking into the safe that held all the secrets of the atomic bomb, he never let a title get in the way of learning or growing. One of my favorite Feynman stories related to this last point isn't actually in this book, but I'll mention it anyway. After the Challenger disaster back in 1986, NASA was called on the carpet to explain to Congress why their shiny new space shuttle went Kaboom. The NASA managers went on and on about the O-rings, filling their talk with supercilious jargon and doublespeak, hoping that their haughty attitudes and impenetrable explanations of why the cold weather made the O-rings fail would be comprehensible enough to satisfy the committee, yet obtuse enough to avoid actually admitting that they had done anything wrong. While they were doing this, Feynman put a piece of the O-ring material into a glass of ice water and let it sit there for a while. Then he took it out, stretched it, and showed that it had lost the pliability that it needed to do its job. With a simple demonstration, he not only showed the fault that led to the Challenger explosion, but at the same time put a bunch of self-aggrandizing stuffed shirts in their places. I love that story. Anyway, if you're looking for a Feynman book to read - and who isn't? - this is the one to start with. There's not much hard talk about science in it, just lots of stories about a really interesting guy. Even if it doesn't make you want to get into quantum electrodynamic theory, I hope it still makes you look at the world in a different way. ...more |
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May 20, 2010
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May 28, 2010
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Paperback
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| 3.81
| 42,239
| Jul 10, 2007
| Jul 10, 2007
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really liked it
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Death is a bummer. I mean, here's the thing - we all know we're going to die. It's part of the human condition, knowing that sooner or later the only Death is a bummer. I mean, here's the thing - we all know we're going to die. It's part of the human condition, knowing that sooner or later the only existence that we've ever known is going to come to an end. And that'll be it - no more us. It's a creepy thought, to be honest, which is why most of us do our everlovin' best to ignore it. We all know that we're going to die, but we don't want to know it, so we ignore it. We eat our Super-Double-CheezyFries, go BASE jumping, vote Republican, willfully ignoring the inevitable truth that these things are going to end up killing us. Even when we are confronted with our mortality, we still find ways to console ourselves. We look around at our families and our friends and say things like, "No one truly dies so long as they're remembered." And we accept that even if we aren't there, other people are. The things we've done in our lives, no matter how tiny, will echo around humanity as long as it lasts. If we are truly lucky, we will have contributed greatly to our species as a whole and gained a very special place in history. But then we remember that even history is impermanent. The average species only gets to live about four million years, and we've already eaten up about a quarter of that. What's more, we seem to be doing our level best to come in below average. Science tells us one inescapable fact: nothing lasts forever. One day, maybe sooner, maybe later, the last of the humans will die. Perhaps we'll be replaced by another intelligence, one that can continue our work. Or perhaps we'll just leave everything behind. All that will be left will be artifacts, objects that tell the story of humanity. And that cheers you up a bit. We're good at leaving marks, after all. We built a wall that's so big it's practically landscape. We split two continents apart in the name of commerce. We have girded our land masses in iron and asphalt, erected great cities of glass, concrete and steel. We have lowered mountains and raised seas, extracted the blood of the earth and bent the rivers to our will. Even if the human race vanished tomorrow, some far-future alien archaeologist would still be able to come here and know that a brilliant and puissant species once walked this world. Yeah. About that.... This book was inspired by a very simple question: what would happen if all the humans just... disappeared? How it happened doesn't really matter. Maybe aliens, maybe Jesus, perhaps some strange, species-specific quantum Critical Existence Failure. Whatever the cause, the sun rises in the morning and humans just aren't there anymore. How would the world handle our disappearance? Would it even notice? What has humanity wrought that would last? It's a simple question with an incredibly complex answer. In order to even begin to know what would happen upon our disappearance, we need to know how the world works. We need to look at the forces that drive evolution and species propagation. What is it that allows life to spread and to flourish, to adapt to changing circumstances and make the best of a hard situation? What do we know from our studies of the unimaginably distant past that will help us foretell the future? In addition, we need to know what effect humans have already had on the world. We've all heard the horror stories about the species driven to extinction by carelessness or ignorance - the passenger pigeon, the moa, the dodo - but our effect has been so much greater. Weisman is willing to categorize humanity as a force of nature thanks to the effect that we've had. Our relentless conquest of the Earth has, in small ways and large, unavoidably set evolution on a path that would have been very different had we never arisen in the first place. In a way, our influence can never be truly erased, and will likely survive for as long as biology does. Finally, we need to know about the things we're leaving behind. What is our world made of, and how well would it survive the rigors of time? The oceans of concrete that we've poured will freeze and thaw over and over again, and, aided by the surprising power of flowers and grass, will split, crack and crumble in time. Our massive steel skyscrapers will be undone by water and creeping vegetation. Our stonework will be worn down by wind and water, our satellites will fall, dams will burst and the wilderness will relentlessly take over the sacred places of the world. In the end, the only testament to our existence will be a handful of bronze statues and gold ornaments, and the impassive visages of the faces on Mt. Rushmore. And even they will one day fall. If you're one of those people who worries about the impact that humanity has had on the earth, this will be a heartening book. As the geologic record shows, there's pretty much nothing the universe can throw at this planet that can kill it. At least not so far. And the impact that humans are having isn't anywhere near the great extinctions of the past, in which great swaths of death cut through the biosphere in a matter of decades. Understand this: there is nothing that we can do to the earth that the earth cannot undo, given time. And that is a comforting thought. We do sometimes get wrapped up in our own awesomeness and assume that our actions have infinite consequences when, in fact, they don't. We beat our breasts about the ozone hole and the amazon, the Northwest African Cheetah and the Sharp Snouted Day Frog. We read about garbage gyres in the sea, and irradiated wastes on the land and despair over what we have done to this world. The truth is that the world will move on after humans, and the future will hardly know that we were here. That's where the book got depressing for me, though. You see, I can take or leave individuals. I think The People are, in general, dumber than a Texas schoolbook. But all in all, I like Humanity. In the two hundred thousand years or so that Homo sapiens has been wandering this world, we've done some really neat things. We've built globe-spanning civilizations, produced unparalleled art, music and architecture, and invented worlds of brilliant fiction. We've examined the universe at its largest and peered back in time to the moment it began. We have gazed into the heart of the atom to know how reality works at its smallest levels. We've danced and sang and lived. And even with the terrible things that we've done, both to each other and to our world, I still think we're a species worth knowing. We're a species that deserves better than oblivion. But the universe doesn't care about what we deserve. So if you take anything away from the book, let it be this - our existence here as a species is temporary. There's no reward for our goodness, nor punishment for our sins. But here and now, we are alive, and capable of amazing things. It is up to us to decide what those things will be, and how to spend the time remaining to us. Let's make it wondrous. ---------------------------------------------------------- "Below the surface, the oxidizing metal parts of chemical alley will provide a place for Galveston oysters to attach. Silt and oyster shells will slowly bury them, and will then be buried themselves. Within a few million years, enough layers will amass to compress shells into limestone, which will bear an odd, intermittent rusty streak with sparkling traces of nickel, molybdenum, niobium, and chromium. Millions of years after that, someone or something might have the knowledge and tools to recognize the signal of stainless steel. Nothing, however, will remain to suggest that its original form once stood tall over a place called Texas, and breathed fire into the sky." - Alan Weisman, The World Without Us ----------------------------------------------------- ...more |
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Mar 20, 2010
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Mar 21, 2010
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Hardcover
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| 0471482056
| 9780471482055
| 0471482056
| 3.27
| 114
| Oct 01, 2004
| Oct 01, 2004
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it was ok
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Last year, I reviewed Gresh and Weinberg's previous book, The Science of Superheroes and I wasn't all that impressed with it. Which, as I noted in the
Last year, I reviewed Gresh and Weinberg's previous book, The Science of Superheroes and I wasn't all that impressed with it. Which, as I noted in the review, is weird. As I'm pretty sure you're aware by now, I am a big fan of science and I loves me my superheroes. Putting those two things together should, by all rights, be just the book for me. Unfortunately, I was less than thrilled with it. I found it kind of clunky, dry, and generally dismissive of comic books due to their misuse of science. I couldn't fault them for the topics they chose - they were interesting enough. Things like the problems with characters who grow and shrink, or why the original origin for Superman made no sense - these were the things that are valid targets if you're looking for bad science, but Gresh and Weinberg were really only looking for bad science. I got this book, and I had hoped that they'd learned from their previous one. Unfortunately, they haven't learned all their lessons. To their credit, they did stop focusing on comic book history, which was a big part of why the first book dragged the way it did, but their overall attitude towards comic books and science is pretty much the same. Only this time, they're looking at the supervillains. As much as I've always wanted to be a superhero, there have been plenty of times when I've wanted to join the other side as well. I mean, how many times have you wanted to don some goggles and a lab coat, stand on your parapet (you do have a parapet, right?), backlit by lightning as you scream, "The FOOLS! They called me mad? I WILL SHOW YOU MADNESS! HA! HAHAHAHA!! HAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!!" Or something like that. Anyway, there's something to be said for the life of a supervillain, and if you're a really good one then you'll make it into the pages of history. Names such as Lex Luthor, Doctor Doom, Magneto and Sinestro - these are names that will live in the hearts of comic book fans forever. Indeed, it is said that the greatness of a hero depends on the greatness of his villain. Where would Superman be if he only had to foil a few muggings once in a while? Or Spider-Man if he were just tracking down garden-variety murderers? They might be heroes, but they certainly wouldn't be superheroes. So what can we learn from these megalomaniacs? Well, we can learn a lot, so long as we are willing to ignore a whole lot of bad science. Lex Luthor, for example, was a fan in his early days of things like weather machines that would completely change the climate of an area. Is that possible? Well no, of course not. There's no way to completely alter weather using a wooden tower and a parabolic dish. Or what about the Anti-Monitor's attempt to destroy the Infinite Earths? While it looked good in the pages of the comics, the nature of infinity is such that no matter how many Earths he destroyed, there would still be an infinite number of Earths left. And that's not even getting into the matter/anti-matter self-destruction problem. And how about The Vulture? What's so wrong with an elderly man strapping some wings to his arms and committing dastardly crimes? As it turns out, what's wrong is everything we know about flight. On the other hand, there are villains who kind of show us a goal to reach, in a weird way. Doctor Doom, for example, uses a metal exoskeleton that confers upon him great strength and endurance. Would it be possible for us to build such a thing, only not looking several centuries out of date? As it turns out, yes we can. Or at least we will be able to soon. The science of body assistance has been making great progress recently, and it's only a matter of time before we are able to augment our own bodies from the outside and do amazing things. Or look at Poison Ivy, one of Batman's recurring villains (and the only female in the book). She makes great use of plants that look like nothing Nature has ever produced. Could we, with biological engineering, do the same? It turns out we already are, just not as cool. Instead of giant venus flytraps that catch and eat human beings, we're engineering better strains of vegetables that will go towards feeding more people for less money. But if we really wanted to, we could have murderous plants in our future. All of these bad guys offer us a chance to explore science, both fundamental and cutting-edge. The Lizard, a poor, beleaguered enemy of Spider-Man's who cannot control the beast within, may give us the clues to regenerating our own limbs. Magneto offers us an understanding of how powerful and pervasive electromagnetism really is. Dr. Octopus shows us the potential of prosthetics, and Mr. Mxyzptlk is a great way to start looking at not just the fifth dimension, but the very concepts of dimensions that are beyond the paltry ones that we inhabit. So why didn't this book shine for me? Well again, it comes down to the authors' approach to the topic at hand. Other books about superheroes and science start off by accepting the reality of the comic book. James Kaklios' The Physics of Superheroes does exactly that - he grants the heroes a "miracle exception" and then moves on from there. His book is founded on the tacit understanding that comic book writers are more interested in the story than the science, but that if you look hard enough, you can find scientific lessons everywhere. Gresh and Weinberg seem to take a much more dismissive view of comics, bordering on the sarcastic in several places. More than once, they strayed from the science to criticize the villains' motives - why is Vandal Savage so hot to take over the world? Why not just invest his money, wait a few hundred years and live a life better than any human had before him? Or why would Lex Luthor do something so stupid as to drop a nuclear bomb from a helicopter? Helloooo? Ever hear of a little something we like to call "poison gas?" While those may be excellent story points, this book is not called "The Plot Holes of Supervillains." It's about the science, and trying to gain the appreciation of comic book fans by pointing out why their favorite bad guys are idiots, well.... That's probably not the best way to handle it. While I don't doubt that Gresh and Weinberg know their comics, I don't get the feeling that they really love comic books for what they are - fantasies with just enough science stuck on to make them seem plausible. Rather than looking for ways that comic books can open readers' eyes to science, they seem to be more interested in tearing down the comics themselves for trying - and failing - to use science in their stories. They're more focused on the flaws than the potential, and I found that tiring after a while. So while I can't say that I disliked this book - the chapter on the fifth dimension was really interesting, and they certainly raised a lot of good questions about the viability of comic book-inspired science - I can say that I'm somewhat disappointed. It seems to me that it's a book for people who feel slightly ashamed that they like comics, and want someone to tell them that they were right to feel that way. Well, I'm not ashamed, but I will be more considerate of my villains from now on. They may be evil, underhanded, greedy, selfish and yes - just a little crazy. But that doesn't mean they don't have anything to teach us. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 24, 2010
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Jan 28, 2010
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Hardcover
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| 0393065200
| 9780393065206
| 0393065200
| 3.87
| 7,051
| Jan 19, 2008
| Jan 26, 2009
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liked it
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What was the biggest story of 2006? The arrest of the shampoo bombers in England? Small fries. The first World Baseball Classic? YAWN! The death of Do
What was the biggest story of 2006? The arrest of the shampoo bombers in England? Small fries. The first World Baseball Classic? YAWN! The death of Don Knotts? Nothin'. No, as interesting as they were, none of these generated nearly as much public interest and argument as the much ballyhooed "demotion" of Pluto by the International Astronomical Union in August of 2006. Poor little Pluto, hanging out there on the edge of the solar system, got bumped down to "Dwarf Planet," rousing much ire from people all across the United States. And, in a way, Neil deGrasse Tyson bears some responsibility for it. To be fair, stripping Pluto of its designation as a planet was never on his agenda. No matter what angry elementary school students may have thought, Tyson had no beef against Pluto. It was just that Pluto had the bad fortune to be an oddball planet, and Tyson was working on the redesign of the Rose Center for Earth and Space in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Whether he wanted to or not - and I'm pretty sure he didn't - he became the public face of this issue, one which gripped the country. That in itself is weird. Americans are not the most scientifically literate of people. Sure, we like to use the fruits of science, but most people don't really pay attention to things like astronomy unless it's a shuttle launch or a pretty Hubble picture. What's more, the public in general has never really gotten involved in matters of taxonomy. If you went up to someone and said, "Hey, the scientific community is thinking about revising the nomenclature regarding the classification of anaerobic bacteria," they'd probably just walk away swiftly, looking back a few times to make sure the crazy person isn't following them. But tell them that the IAU is planning to demote Pluto, and what you have is a firestorm. This book is not so much about Pluto itself, but our relationship with that weird little ball of ice and rock. Tyson takes us through our history with Pluto, from its discovery back in 1930 to its demotion in 2006, and tries to figure out just what it is that has endeared it so to the American public. One possibility, of course, is the fact that Pluto was an American discovery. Percival Lowell was the one to start the hunt, and Clyde Tombaugh finally found it. While the name was suggested by a teenage British girl, everything else about the discovery of Pluto was American, and that was a point of pride. There were only three non-Classical planets in the heavens, and we had claim to one of them. So even if the average American doesn't know the history of Pluto's discovery, we still have a certain love for it. Despite its diminutive size, Pluto has loomed large in the American imagination. Perhaps there's something of the underdog love in there, too. Americans love to see the little guy win, and if you look at a lot of the pro-Pluto artwork from 2006, the theme of big planets ganging up on a little one was very popular. As odd as this perception might seem from a scientific standpoint, I think a lot of Americans were supporting Pluto because it was being pushed down by The Man, as it were. And so the country went a little nuts. Newspapers, blogs, websites - even sports reporting got in their digs on the Pluto controversy. There was something for everyone in this story, and everyone who could manage a Pluto reference did so with gusto. It was a mixed blessing, to be sure - the American public was finally excited about astronomy, but it was the excitement of a bar fight, rather than the highbrow intellectualism that many astronomers might have preferred. What was also interesting about this book was the look at the professional arguments that went on as well. Dispelling the dispassionate image of the astronomer, professionals got really worked up about this, on both sides of the issue. Grown men and women, many of whom were well-versed in many aspects of astronomy, spoke passionately about Pluto. Some called on our sense of tradition and cultural memory, acknowledging that while Pluto may be an oddball, he's our oddball. Others were more than happy to throw Pluto into the Kuiper Belt with the other icy mudballs. So often, Science is assumed to be some monolithic entity that describes the world with a unanimity of voice. It is supposed to be dispassionate and rational, and we don't really think about the reality of scientific progress. To use the analogy often given to marriage, science is like a duck - stately and sure on the surface, but with a whole lot of work going on down below. The history of science is full of more passion, debate and anger than you might suspect. In order to decide the issue, symposiums were convened, meetings were held, and finally the International Astronomical Union was forced to do something that had never occurred to anyone before: precisely define what is and is not a planet. In case you're wondering, the definition is quite simple: It has to orbit the sun, be big enough to have attained a spherical shape, and it has to have cleared out its orbit. Pluto fulfills the first two requirements, but badly fails the third. Therefore, it is not a planet. They created a new designation: dwarf planet, including Ceres in the asteroid belt and Haumea, Makemake and Eris out past Pluto. The public may not like it, but that's how it is. Tyson points out that this is not the first time we have done such a reclassification. With the discovery in the mid-19th century of objects orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, a new class had to be invented in order to keep the number of planets from rocketing into the thousands - and so asteroids were born. The Pluto case is quite similar. Long after Pluto was discovered, more objects, similar in nature, were discovered nearby - some even bigger than Pluto was. The region of rock and ice was named the Kupier Belt, and if Pluto were discovered today, it would most certainly be named as part of it. As much as it pains me to say it, the decision to reclassify Pluto was the right one. At least Tyson and I have revised the Planet Mnemonic the same way: My Very Educated Mother Just Sent Us Nachos. The rise and fall of Pluto is an interesting story, and a lesson for science educators. No matter how bad it may seem for science in the United States, people can still be surprisingly passionate about scientific topics. It's also a warning against resistance to change. With all that we are learning about the Solar System, to just rattle off a list of planets and be done with it is insufficient. There are so many other ways to look at it now, so many ways to group the hundreds of bodies out there, that perhaps Pluto is more comfortable out with the other Trans-Neptunian objects. With its own kind, as it were, instead of being shoehorned in with eight other guys that it doesn't really have anything in common with. Ultimately, of course, Pluto doesn't care what we call it. That point was often made on both sides of the argument, and they're right. We could call it Lord Snuggypants the Fourth and it would keep doing what it does out there in the cold and the dark. But it's important for us, and not just because science needs things to be organized so we know what we're talking about. Being able to reclassify Pluto is an indication of the breadth of our knowledge - had we not made such progress, Pluto's classification would never have been in doubt. The "demotion" of Pluto is a sign of our amazing achievements over the last eighty years. We have not lost a planet - we have gained understanding. So in the end, the Great Pluto Debate is one that we should look back upon fondly. ...more |
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Jan 22, 2010
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Jan 21, 2010
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Hardcover
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| 0471409766
| 9780471409762
| 0471409766
| 4.04
| 5,726
| Mar 01, 2002
| Mar 01, 2002
|
really liked it
|
What do you think you know about astronomy? For example, what causes us to have seasons? If you said that it's our distance from the sun - sorry, you'
What do you think you know about astronomy? For example, what causes us to have seasons? If you said that it's our distance from the sun - sorry, you're wrong. Or how about why the sky is blue? If you think it's that the sky reflects the sea, nope. Wrong again. Or perhaps you think that the moon's tidal effect makes people crazy, or that an egg can only stand on end if it's the Vernal Equinox or that an alignment of the planets will cause a terrible buildup of gravity that will kill us all! All wrong. But you would not be alone. For a society as technologically advances as ours (and if you're reading this, then chances are good that you live in a technologically advanced society), the general public has a big problem with science. People see it as being too hard to understand, or too removed from their daily lives. Politicians bemoan the fact that American schoolchildren are falling behind in science, but science funding is almost always on the list of cuts that can be made to save money. We love technology, but hate science, and that is a path to certain doom. Of all the sciences, though, astronomy is perhaps the worst understood. A lot of people still confuse it with astrology, which is probably a huge part of the problem right there. For millennia, we have thought about the planets and stars as celestial things, unknown and unknowable by such base creatures as ourselves. It's only in the last hundred years or so that we've been able to rapidly improve our understanding of the universe, and popular knowledge hasn't caught up with that yet. And so bad misconceptions of astronomy persist in the public imagination. Fortunately, we have people like Phil Plait to set the record straight, and that is indeed what he does in this book. While there are many educators out there who believe that a wrong idea, once implanted, is impossible to eradicate, Plait sees it as a teachable opportunity. Take, for example, the commonly held belief that on the Vernal Equinox - and only on the Vernal Equinox - you can balance an egg on its end. Many people believe this, and it's an experiment that's carried out in classrooms around the country every March. Teachers tell their students, and the local news media tell their viewers, but no one stops to ask Why. Why would this day, of all the days in the year, be so special? More importantly, how can we test that assertion? Fortunately, that's within the powers of any thinking individual, and it should be the first thing teachers do once they've finished having fun balancing eggs: try and do it again the next day. If you can balance an egg on March 30th, or May 22nd or August 12th, or any other day of the year, then you have successfully proven the Equinox Egg Hypothesis wrong. Congratulations! You're doing science!! Or perhaps you've heard the story that you can see starts from the bottom of a well, or a tall smokestack. This is because, the idea goes, the restricted amount of light will not wash out the stars so much, giving you a chance to do some daytime astronomy. Well, there's an easy way to test this one too, if you have an old factory or something of that nature nearby. What you'll discover is that no matter how much you try to restrict your view of the sky, it'll still be washed out and you won't see any stars at all. One more good one that a lot of people believe - the moon is larger in the sky when it's near the horizon than when it's at its zenith. Again, this is something that's very easy to test. Go out as the full moon is rising, looming large in the sky, and hold up an object at arm's length - a pencil is usually recommended. Make a note of the moon's apparent size as compared to the eraser. Then go out again when the moon is high in the sky and repeat your observation. The moon appears to be the same size, no matter how it may look to you. Of course, there's a lot of science into why these things are the way they are. The chicken egg thing is because there's no singular force that is only acting on chicken eggs and only doing so on one day of the year (which is not even universally regarded as the first day of spring). As for the inability to see stars in the daytime, that's because our pesky atmosphere scatters a lot of the light coming from the sun, so light appears to come from everywhere in the sky. The only thing you're likely to see in a blue sky is the moon, and MAYBE Venus, if you're really sharp-eyed and lucky. The Moon Illusion is not well-understood, actually. It's probably not the brain comparing the moon with objects on the horizon - the effect works at sea, too. It's probably a combination of competing psychological effects that deal with distance, none of which can accurately deal with how far away the moon is. Regardless, all of these things are easily testable by anyone. The problem is that so few people take that extra time to actually test them., or even think that they should. There are some myths and misconceptions that take a little more expertise to explain, such as why tides and eclipses happen, how seasons occur and why the moon goes through phases. But these explanations aren't very difficult and are well within the understanding of any intelligent adult. Unfortunately, there are a lot of myths that are stubborn, entrenched into the heads of people everywhere and very hard to get out. Not the least of these are the belief that UFOs are alien spacecraft and that we never went to the Moon. Interestingly enough, both of these rest on the same basic problem: we can't rely on our own brains to accurately interpret the data that we see. Plait recounts a story where he was mesmerized by some strange lights in the night sky while watching a 3 AM shuttle launch. They seemed to hover in place, making strange noises, and it wasn't until they got much closer that he was able to see them for what they were: a group of ducks that were reflecting spotlights off their feathers. Our brains believe things, and interpret the observations to fit those beliefs. So when the dust on the moon doesn't behave the way we expect dust to behave, some people believe that to be evidence of fraud, rather than the natural behavior of dust on the moon. We are creatures of story, which is why we like conspiracy theories and astrology. We want the world to make a kind of narrative sense, so often the first explanation we come up with is a story that sounds good. Unfortunately, just because the story sounds good, that doesn't make it true. He also takes a swipe at bad movie science, but in a good-natured manner. Even he admits that movies are more likely to favor story over science, but there are some common errors that make it into so many science fiction films - sound in space, people dodging lasers, deadly asteroid fields - these things may be dramatically interesting, but they're all bad science. And while it would be annoying and pedantic to pick out every example of how the rules are bent for sci-fi ("Please. Why would the aliens come all the way to Earth to steal water when it exists in abundance out in the Kuiper Belt? I scoff at your attempt!"), they do offer an excellent opportunity to teach people about how science works. One of the things I've always liked about Plait is his obvious enthusiasm for not just astronomy but for science in general. Here we have this excellent system to cut through the lies our brains tell us and get closer to knowing what's actually going on. Science forces us to question our assumptions, look at things from many points of view, and arrive at a conclusion that best describes the phenomenon we're observing. When Plait talks about science, he is not condescending or dry or super-intellectual, the way so many people imagine scientists to be. He's excited that he gets to use this amazing tool for understanding the universe, and he wants other people to use it. If you're an astronomy buff, like myself, you probably won't learn much new information from this book. But hopefully you'll be re-invigorated to go out there and look at the world through a scientific, skeptical eye, and you'll be willing to confront these misconceptions when next you come across them. Even better, you might start thinking about what else you think you know, and how you can go about testing it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 20, 2010
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Jan 21, 2010
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0375706208
| 9780375706202
| 0375706208
| 3.90
| 1,300
| 2004
| Nov 08, 2005
|
really liked it
|
Is it possible for a book to be utterly fascinating and yet, at the same time, a perfect cure for insomnia? I never would have thought so, until I rea
Is it possible for a book to be utterly fascinating and yet, at the same time, a perfect cure for insomnia? I never would have thought so, until I read this one. That does sound horribly contradictory, and yet it is true. Reading this book, I found myself drawn in by the power of Fortey's words and this obvious enthusiasm for the subject. He's a paleontologist by trade, but his era of expertise goes so far back that it's practically geology anyway. And geology is what this book is all about. There are those who believe that there are forces beyond our ken that shape our lives. Some believe that the universe itself is alive, filled to the brim with some kind of formless substance that wants us to have what we want. Others attribute great influence to the motion of non-terrestrial planets - just recently I saw a warning the Mercury was in retrograde, and that such apparent motion would spell disaster in communications-related endeavors. Other people believe there are gods, or ghosts, or fairies whose wishes and whims have decided who we are and who we will be. But Fortey knows what's really going on. Fortey knows it's the rocks. Not just the garden-variety ones you pick up in your garden, no - the real rocks. The gneiss and the schist and the granite, the great, lumbering tectonic plates, relentless in their motion across the face of the Earth, carrying the continents on their backs. The churning, unknowable mantle that holds it all up, revealing only the tiniest glimpses of itself through the effluvium of volcanoes. The Earth tells us who we are and who we will be, for it is the motions of the Earth that made our world what it is. It gave shape to the continents, it has raised and lowered mountains, created and unmade deserts a hundred times over. The rich and fertile fields in which we grow our crops, the barren wastelands that we avoid because we know that they are places where we do not belong - all of those were created by the engine of plate tectonics. Billions of years of relentless motion, of continents smashing into each other, coming apart and then colliding again, have conspired to create the thin, almost evanescent period of time in which we live. And it will continue, long after we are gone, without ever having bothered to notice that we are here. This book is humbling, to say the least. When you think that the Appalachians used to be mountains that rivaled the Alps and the Himalayas, that they were the product of not the most recent supercontinent, Gondwana, nor the one before that, Laurasia. The gentle, rolling hills of the Appalachians, along which thousands of summer and weekend hikers travel, were born three hundred million years ago in the creation of Pangaea. Time, wind and rain wore them down to what they are today, but they stand as evidence of Earth's deep history. Though not quite as old as the Grenville rocks of Central Park, remnants of mountains formed a billion years ago, before life was more than a thin film of algae on a hypoxic sea. Fortey writes well. It's hard to overstate how important that is when considering a book meant for the general audience. Not only can you tell that he obviously loves his subject, but you can see that he is a good and devoted writer, who spent a great deal of time thinking of ways to communicate the literally unthinkable amount of time necessary for the motions of the Earth to have put things where they are today. Geologic events are slow and hard to picture in our minds eyes, but he tries. He tries to get into your head the vast temperatures and pressures that operate just a few miles below where we sit right now, and the utterly alien environment they create. He brings to life the arguments and battles that went on between geologists who tried their best over centuries to untangle the folded and twisted stories of the rocks and figure out how they came to be the way they were. The story that Fortey is telling is four and a half billion years in the making, a timespan that we simple humans cannot truly grasp. And he does have an excellent way of phrasing his points. In talking about the hot springs of Italy in which the ancient Romans lounged, he says, "These springs were the exhalations of the magmatic unconscious." In reminding us that the movements of the Earth determine where we can live, what animals we can raise and what crops we can grow, he says, "The geological Unconscious cannot be denied, for it still guides the way we use the land, and rules the plough. We are all in thrall to the underworld." Finally, in a phrase that evoked Sagan in my mind's ear, he says, "In this way, the depths intercede in our superficial lives: there are unseen and unbidden forces, as indifferent to the fate of the sentient organisms living above them as the distant stars." The man has a way with words, that much is for sure. For all that this is the story of our world and, therefore, ourselves, it is a hard book to keep up with. Indeed, I found myself nodding off more than once, no matter that I wanted to keep reading about the manner in which the Colorado River cut through the ever-rising plateau through which it coursed. The book, I believe, skirts the edge of Popular Science and Specialist Science. Fortey doesn't skimp on the technical language, and seems to be talking to an audience that already has a pretty good grasp on the terminology and concepts of geology. The readers that he's after in this book are the ones who used to be called "rock hounds" when they were kids, and who know a gneiss from a granite. Which I, technically speaking, do not. While I do love science, and find the whole history of plate tectonics fascinating, I never got into geology as deeply as I did other sciences. And that's not to say that I never will - if anything, this book made me look more closely at the rocks I see around me and wonder at their provenance. The granite facing of buildings all the way to the simple sand of a baseball field - they're all ancient in different ways and have fascinating stories. When I read the book, though, I was lacking in a certain entry-level understanding of the science, and that was probably what made it such a tough book to get through. So if you're a rock hound, or know someone who is, pick up a copy of this book. If you like to break your brain thinking about the vast expanses of time required to make a planet on which Homo sapiens can be the species it always wanted to be, this is the book for you. If you are having trouble getting to sleep and you aren't fond of using medication to send you off to slumberland, well... This book probably wouldn't hurt. ...more |
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Sep 23, 2009
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Sep 26, 2009
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| 9780670019977
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| 4.04
| 5,225
| Oct 16, 2008
| Oct 16, 2008
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it was amazing
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I've always found the end of the world fascinating. So many cultures have put together their own ideas of how the world will end, from the Norse Ragna
I've always found the end of the world fascinating. So many cultures have put together their own ideas of how the world will end, from the Norse Ragnarök to the Christian apocalypse to the Hindu cycle of creation and destruction. We live in a world that was, for a long time, unpredictable to us and on many occasions seemed to be outwardly hostile. Our ancestors faced floods and earthquakes and disease, with no idea of where these things came from, why they happened or how to stop them. And so they made myths and stories to explain the dangerous world in which they lived. From that, they extrapolated - if the world is this dangerous now, how dangerous could it be if it really tried? And so came our myths of a world that not only succeeds in hurting us, but in wiping us out altogether. Even in the modern age we have our myths. Books, television, and movies all use the end of the world (or end of a world) to tell stories - usually about the resilience of mankind and our ability to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and rebuild human society, hopefully for the better. As good as this is for fiction, there are two problems when we try to apply these myths and stories to the real world: the world will end, one way or another, and no amount of heroics, cleverness or pluck will save us. Not in the long term, anyway. Science has accomplished what religion and fiction could not - it has seen the future and can make fairly accurate prophecies about how this world, and our civilization upon it, will die. Renowned astronomer Phil Plait is your prophet for this trip into all the ways the world will end.... In this book, Plait looks at nine possibilities for the end of the world as we know it. In order, they are: Death by Impact Death from the Sun Death by Supernova Death by Gamma Ray Burst Death by Black Hole Death by Aliens Death of the Sun Death by Galactic Collision Death of the Universe In each chapter, Plait outlines the ways in which that specific event could injure or kill us, with as much science as he can comfortably put in. He explains, for example, why we can't just send Bruce Willis up to hit an incoming meteor with a nuke (it probably won't work) and why any black holes produced by the LHC won't do us any harm. He looks at how a supernova happens, what it is about a black hole that turns it into one of the deadliest weapons in the universe, and tries - very, very hard - to make the reader understand exactly how long "forever" is. (Hint: it's a lot longer than you think. Longer than that, even. Nope, keep going....) Each chapter outlines the processes by which we could experience the destruction of our civilization or, in a few cases, the planet itself. He looks at the scientific foundations of these events, explaining in detail what it is about the sun, for example, that makes it a cauldron of chaos and torment, or why we really, really don't want to get even a smallish black hole anywhere near the planet. And I have to say, of all the unlikely ways we could be toasted, gamma ray bursts are my favorite - a deadly beam of energy from thousands of light-years away, cooking the planet all the way down through the crust and utterly devastating the planet's ecosystem so as to kill off anyone who was lucky enough to be on the other side of the world. I mean, wow. And there'd be no warning, either. By the time we knew what was happening, it'd be too late. So that chapter (with a line paying homage to Douglas Adams, even) is just mind-boggling. Probably my favorite chapter, though, is the one about supernovas, mainly because his careful, step-by-step description of exactly how a supernova occurs made me think, "What I wouldn't give to see that in person," disregarding the fact that a) the best parts would happen way too fast for me to observe and b) it would vaporize me. Still, it's a beautiful and terrifying chain reaction, which Plait describes in fantastic detail. The other chapter that evoked the same reaction was the one on the end of the universe. Despite timelines for which the word "vast" is terribly inadequate, Plait tells us what science knows about how the universe will end - the ever-increasing expansion of spacetime, the eventual death of the stars, evaporation of galaxies, the reign of the black holes and the slow, careful deaths which even they face. It all ends in darkness, all matter gone into a few stubborn subatomic particles and the eventual collapse of the very fabric of space and time. And as bleak and miserable is the future looks, I still thought, "I really want to see that." So if I can figure out how to live one googol years (that'd be a one with one hundred zeros after it [1:]) and not have my very atoms decay into nothingness, then I'll be able to... um... be really, really bored, probably. Since after that, there's absolutely - literally - nothing to do. Until the universe experiences vacuum collapse, or a brane collision, possibly hitting the reset button on the cosmos and we get to do it all over again.... Most of what's in the book isn't new to me, but that's probably because I grew up reading Cosmos, and I follow countless science TV shows, podcasts and blogs (including Plait's own Bad Astronomy blog, which is well worth keeping up with, as well as his regular appearances on SETI's podcast, Are We Alone? and occasional guest appearances on The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe - both of which make for excellent listening). For people new to astronomy, though, this will be a rather dense learning experience - and reading it will be time well spent. In addition to its user-friendly style, I really like the way it's arranged - from small-scale (relatively) to large, with "Things that are absolutely certain to happen" at the beginning and end, and with "things that probably won't happen" in the middle. And my favorite aspect of this book is that each chapter begins with a short vignette describing that particular end of the world, from the perspective of someone watching it happen. It's not something you often see in books of this nature, and I'm really glad that Plait decided to put it in there. It makes it a little less academic and abstract and more real. For all its death and destruction, the book isn't really a downer. For one thing, while things like asteroid impacts and the death of the sun are inevitable, they don't have to be fatal, and Plait describes a few ways in which - in theory - we (or our distant, distant descendants) might be able to avert or at least mitigate these catastrophes. It's not easy, of course, but saving the world never is. It's mainly a marvel at the forces that surround us in the universe. It's easy to forget, looking up at the sky from our brief, limited scale, that the universe isn't just some pretty lights drifting about in empty blackness. Things are exploding and dying, burning and freezing, moving quickly and slowly - the cosmos is replete with activity and danger. Most of the universe isn't just uninhabitable, it's actively hostile to life as we know it. And yet, without the black holes, the supernovas and the galactic collisions, without massive meteor impacts and breakaway comets, solar flares and deadly radiation - without all that, life probably wouldn't exist at all. So read this book, and take a moment to appreciate how lucky we are to be here at all, all things considered.... [1:] 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 12, 2009
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Jun 12, 2009
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Hardcover
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| 0393062244
| 9780393062243
| 0393062244
| 4.10
| 31,045
| Nov 01, 2006
| Jan 22, 2007
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really liked it
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I have often lamented the passing of my favorite popular scientist, Carl Sagan, by talking about how necessary he is right now. We are at a point in o
I have often lamented the passing of my favorite popular scientist, Carl Sagan, by talking about how necessary he is right now. We are at a point in our history where scientific illiteracy is growing, where people are not only ignorant of how science works, but are proud of their ignorance. What we need is someone who can reach the majority of Americans who are not especially scientifically literate - the people whose automatic reaction to science is to think, "That's just too hard for me to deal with." Enter Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He's appeared on countless television programs, including The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, to talk about the current state of astronomy and astrophysics. He's an engaging and entertaining man, who claims that Pluto was "asking for" its demotion, who seems to take perverse pleasure in describing all the terrible ways the universe could take us out. He knows that we're in a precarious position, here on Earth, and he revels in it rather than worrying about it. Whereas Sagan seemed to come from the point of view that the universe was a place of infinite wonder, where one could look anywhere and be awed and humbled, Tyson's attitude is more of the universe as an infinite theme park - a place where you could see your electrons stripped from your body, watch gas clouds larger than our own solar system collide and ignite, or see planets crumple under cosmic bombardment. Tyson's universe is an adventure, as big as it gets. This book is a collection of essays that Tyson wrote for Natural History magazine over a ten year period, on a variety of subjects related to science and scientific inquiry. In many ways, it's similar to every other pop science book out there - and there are so very many of them - but it is his perspective and his voice that makes this one stand out from the crowd. He's grouped his essays into seven sections, on topics ranging from the difficulties inherent in actually knowing anything about the universe to the understanding of how life went from little mindless bacteria to we clever Homo sapiens to the intersection of science and religion. Most of it is accessible to the average non-scientist, though he does get a little technical at points. But he understands that, and he tries to compensate for for the fact that, by and large, the public is intimidated by "real science." In the essay entitled, "Over the Rainbow," he discusses this particular challenge by using spectroscopy as an example. In spectroscopy, astrophysicists look at the spectrum of a star, hunting for telltale dark lines that indicate the physical properties of stars. It's like looking at a rainbow with bits blackened out of it, as though the CIA had somehow gotten to it first. Those black lines contain all the vital information about the star's composition and, more importantly, speed. Very little can be gleaned by just looking at the star, as it turns out. He notes five levels of abstraction, starting from the star itself: Level 0: A star Level 1: Picture of a star Level 2: Light from the picture of a star Level 3: Spectrum from the light from the picture of a star. Level 4: Patterns of lines lacing the spectrum from the light from the picture of a star. Level 5: Shifts in the patterns of lines in the spectrum from the light from the picture of a star. These descending levels of abstraction can apply to any branch of science, not just astrophysics. The challenge, as he notes, is getting people past level 1, which is easy to understand but is not the level at which true science is done. It is up to educators, he says, to help make people comfortable with looking at real science, and not just pretty pictures. Indeed, there are several sections of the book dedicated to the intersection between science and the public. He talks about how easily we are baffled by numbers (why are below-ground floors not labeled -1, -2, -3 etc?) and how casually we disregard actual scientific facts. He brings up some of his favorite moments in bad movie science, and how he single-handedly saved Titanic from ignominious astronomical shame. At least, on its DVD re-release. He addresses the historically shifting centers of science in human history, how things like NASA are truly a global endeavor. Without the discoveries made through history by people all over the planet - from England to Greece to Baghdad - there would be no NASA, nor any science that we recognize. And to assume that the United States will always be the center of scientific discovery is to willfully ignore history. And, of course, there's a section dedicated to the conflict between religion and science, a never-ending battle that has existed since science began. Tyson believes that there can be no common ground between the two - science relies on facts, religion relies on faith. This is not to say that one is better than the other, any more than, say, a hammer is better than a screwdriver. It's just that you can't use them interchangeably. And he points out that becoming a scientist doesn't require you to give up your faith. There have been, and still are, countless scientists who are believers in the Divine. It's just that most of them know enough not to confuse science and spirituality. The place where they meet, historically, is on the boundary of ignorance. Isaac Newton, having figured out gravity, couldn't quite work out how you could have a multiple-body system like our solar system without the whole thing falling into chaos. His conclusion - God must, from time to time, step in to keep things on the right path. Having done that, Newton went on to do other things, and it wasn't until the next century that Pierre-Simon laPlace decided that he wasn't satisfied with Newton's "Insert God Here" argument, and did the math for himself. In other words, God is a marker on the boundaries of ignorance, and the best of us are tempted to let Him answer the questions that we can't. To do so, however, impedes the path of science and stops progress in its tracks. What if Newton had said, "No, I'm going to figure this damn thing out." Would we be a century ahead in our technology by now? Maybe, maybe not. What if the Catholic Church had listened when Galileo said, "The Bible tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." Might more progress have been made? So many great thinkers have come up to the boundaries of their knowledge and, humbled by what they do not know, chose to allow The God of the Gaps reassure them. But that's the whole point of science, and it's what this book, and others like it, are trying to instill in people. The unknown is not horrible, it is not terrifying, and it's not a place to just stop. It's a place of awe and wonder and bafflement and opportunity. To say, "I don't understand it - it must be God" is short-changing ourselves and our heirs out of even greater knowledge of the universe. ...more |
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not set
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Apr 22, 2009
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Apr 22, 2009
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Hardcover
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| 0471468827
| 9780471468820
| 0471468827
| 3.60
| 390
| 2002
| Sep 01, 2003
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liked it
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By all rights, I should have loved this book. I mean look at it! It combines two of my favorite things, as you loyal readers should know: science and
By all rights, I should have loved this book. I mean look at it! It combines two of my favorite things, as you loyal readers should know: science and superheroes. I've been a big fan of science since I was a kid. I used to flip through Carl Sagan's Cosmos when I was young, just barely understanding the enormous ideas he was presenting in it. My father had the Time/Life Science Series (which I still have somewhere in a box back in my mother's house) and I spent days going through those, learning about the wheel, water, drugs, matter, time.... Science never seemed imposing or intimidating to me (at least until I started trying to get the math), but rather a celebration of the human intellect. On the other side - super-heroes. I still remember buying a copy of Crisis on Infinite Earths #10, the one with the Spectre and the Anti-Monitor facing off at the very dawn of creation, with dozens of heroes and villains trapped in a whirling maelstrom. To this day, that entire series has great meaning for me - not just because it's an incredibly dense story or because it features some of my favorite characters of all time, but because it addresses greater questions of heroism, duty and sacrifice. And if those themes were left out of the more mundane run of monthly comics, well, that didn't matter. These bright and powerful people had captured my imagination and still hold it to this day. So, with that in mind, let me tell you that I was somewhat disappointed with this book. I think part of the problem is the mission of the text: reconcile what we see in comic books with what we know of science. The trouble is very simply that we can't. Comic book super-heroes are, by their nature, not beholden to the laws of physics that we all know and obey, and the true mechanics of their powers are often unknown even to them. Has a Green Lantern ever actually asked what the power source is in the Great Battery on Oa? Does Superman know the biological process that goes on in his cells that turns sunlight into his amazing abilities? Can even the mighty mind of Reed Richards explain why his DNA and that of his colleagues was transformed, rather than ripped to shreds? Comics have tried to answer this question. In the 1990s, as part of their Invasion! series, DC Comics introduced the concept of a Metagene, a particular mutation that was carried by a small percentage of the public. Under the right circumstances - such as being struck by electrified chemicals, being at ground zero of a nuclear explosion, or being immersed in a powerful chemical bath, the gene would activate and alter the person's entire genetic structure to allow it to survive. That alteration would produce powers such as super-speed, nuclear manipulation, or extreme elasticity. But even the meta-gene idea was a kind of nudge-nudge wink-wink from the writers, who were far more concerned with telling a good story or creating good characters than they were with sticking to good science. Which brings us back to this book. Through the book, Gresh and Weinberg look at some of the most famous heroes from DC and Marvel Comics and try to see how well their origin stories hold up under the weight of established scientific truth. The answer: not well at all. The Atom, for example, has the problem of extreme density to deal with, as well as the fact that the white dwarf matter with which he activates his power should be impossible to lift. On the other end, Giant-Man shouldn't be able to move his own weight, thanks to the good old cube-square law. The Flash has a whole host of problems, starting with an anti-friction aura that curiously doesn't extend to the soles of his feet and finishing with a serious defiance of relativity. The Fantastic Four and Dr. Banner should have come out of their radioactive disasters with a severe case of death at the very least, and half of Peter Parker's powers actually have nothing whatsoever to do with spiders. Batman, on the other hand, is reasonably plausible, given the nigh-infinite resources of Bruce Wayne. The technology for most of his gadgets and gimmicks is extant and not too hard to either acquire or produce. Also, it wouldn't be impossible to re-write the Hulk's origin using an angry biochemist who has a particular talent for mixing up new and interesting steroid cocktails. The basic message of this book is that the heroes we know and love are, for the most part, scientifically impossible. But we knew that. Everybody who reads comics knows, in their hearts, that science is not in the driver's seat when it comes to super-heroes. As much fun as it would be to stand out in a thunderstorm yelling, "SHAZAM!" with a golf club in the air, I know that the only super-power I would gain would be the ability to occupy a hospital bed. If I was lucky. The good news is that the writers are themselves fans of comics, so the book is pretty light on the snark and snobbery. It makes a reasonable attempt to inject the history and theory behind the science that our heroes defy, putting it into the realm of books that handle popular science. But as a popular science book, it's rather disjointed and uneven, going into great detail in some sections but skimming over others. There's also some serious axe-grinding in chapter 9: Good, Evil and Indifferent Mutants - the X-Men. Not only do they not address the scientific nature of the X-Men's powers (which they could have done with a simple page or two of "None of these are possible"), but they spend five or six pages detailing the historical and ongoing conflict between Creationism and Evolution. While it's an interesting topic, it's not germane to the X-Men and really doesn't belong in this book. Perhaps a discussion about successful adaptations in the human genome would have been better - what alterations have occurred in Homo sapiens that have made the species better? Or perhaps how our understanding of genetics is leading us to modify our own species faster than nature would have intended? There's a little of this, but it doesn't balance out the unnecessary evolution-creationism segment. As if the book weren't crowded enough, there's a third element to it - comic book history. In an attempt to understand why the writers wrote the way they did, it is important to understand what the popular understanding of science was at the time. The heroes of the 30s and 40s were rocket-powered, often with origins that made a good, if misguided, attempt at science. The 50s and 60s were the atomic age, thus the advent of so many heroes with radioactive origins. The 90s saw the rise of bioengineered heroes. The book focuses mainly on DC and Marvel comics, and notes that, all in all, DC's science was slightly better. This could be attributed to the science fiction background of DC's early writers, whereas Marvel had more of a horror and supernatural bent. Understanding when and how certain heroes were created gives us some insight into why they are the way they are. The biggest reason is because the writers put scientific accuracy lower on their priority list than good storytelling and good characters. Yes, The Flash should never even be challenged by villains - at his speed, there's no one who should be able to even surprise him. But that makes for a damn boring comic book. And the same goes with Spider-Man. If Peter Parker really exhibited the traits of a spider, he would probably just build a web where he expected bad guys to be and spend the entire comic just waiting for them to stumble in. Then he would drop his trousers and spray them with webbing from a place the Comics Code won't let the artist draw. Science is important, but so is fiction. We willingly suspend our disbelief for super-heroes so that we can better enjoy their story. Science can tell us a lot, but it doesn't have much to say about loyalty, heroism, sacrifice and responsibility. It's hard for us to insert ourselves into science's stories - imagine being a hydrogen atom or a rock strata or a particularly interesting strain of e. coli. While science and super-heroes don't have to be incompatible, it's no great loss if they are. There's an interview at the end with a group of writers, all of whom very clearly state that story comes first. "The story always outweighs the science," says Len Wein, one of the industry's pre-eminent writers. Super-heroes aren't scientifically accurate, but they were never meant to be. By trying to combine three things - popular science, super-heroes, and comic book history, Gresh and Weinberg have created a book that has its moments, but doesn't really succeed being what it wants to be. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 14, 2009
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Apr 17, 2009
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Paperback
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| 4.23
| 12,797
| 1999
| Apr 06, 2005
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liked it
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Here's the problem with having high expectations: they're so often dashed. In my years trawling the web and being a science nerd, I've heard a lot abou Here's the problem with having high expectations: they're so often dashed. In my years trawling the web and being a science nerd, I've heard a lot about Richard Feynman. There are legends about him, that he was the Puck of physics - brilliant, untamed, and really, really funny. When I got the book, I was expecting to read a lightning-quick volley of ideas that would set my mind alight with the wonder and infinite possibilities continued within a lifetime's pursuit of science. Yeah, that didn't quite happen. Don't get me wrong - Feynman is indisputably brilliant, and far from the classic mold of the physicist. He had no patience for titles or honors, and in fact couldn't give a damn about them as long as he had science to do. He would tell Nobel laureates - men whose names were bywords for scientific brilliance - that they were wrong, without hedging or worrying about their egos. He liked to play the bongos, loved a good party, and delighted in playing tricks. One of his more irritating hobbies was safe-cracking, and by the time he left Los Alamos labs after the Manhattan Project there were no places left to hide secrets from Feynman. So Feynman was no doubt a really cool guy, the kind of scientist you would want to invite to your party without hesitation. His first interest was science, and as scientist go, he was one of the best. That doesn't mean that reading him is entirely entertaining. The book is, for me, not very readable for two reasons. The first is that it goes get terribly technical at times, and while I love science, I am not educated enough in it to grasp a lot of the technical details. Indeed, it broke my heart when Feynman said that, when it comes to physics, if you don't know the math, you don't know the science. True, yes. Humbling, yes. But still.... Were I editing a collection of Feynman's work, I would have started with the Big Ideas, defenses of science as an integral function of humanity's ultimate progress. Then, having made the reader comfortable with how Feynman thought, they could have gotten into what Feynman thought. But no, the book starts of with highly technical lectures on quantum electrodynamics and the difficulties in getting parallel computers to work. If you don't know a lot about how computers work, or you don't have a detailed awareness of atomic theory, you're going to be a little lost. Or a lot lost. Even his minority opinion on the Challenger accident, something I was especially keen to read, was far too dry to be enjoyable. The second reason why I didn't really enjoy this book is because a lot of it is transcripts of speeches and interviews. Very few people are able to speak in a readable manner, and someone with a mind like Feynman's - always moving, always active - isn't one of them. There are a lot of asides and false starts, wandering thoughts and truncated paragraphs. Even his more structured speeches aren't structured very well for the reader. Perhaps it would be different to listen to him, to sit in the audience and watch the man speak. I reckon that he had the kind of infectious energy and enthusiasm that would make it easy to gloss over structural problems and really enjoy the speech. But turning speech into print is always dangerous, and here I think it fails. For different people - people who are deeply involved in physics or who are Feynman acolytes - this book is probably a fascinating look into the mind of one of the 20th century's greatest scientists. For the rest of us, we're going to have to find other things to enjoy from the text, and it is there. One of those is, indeed, the title of the book - the pleasure of finding things out. For Feynman, science wasn't a rigor or a job, it was a joy. He attributes a lot of that attitude to his father, an unlikely fan of science. As a uniform salesman, Feynman's father was not a scientist and had no scientific training. But he raised his son to think about the world. Rather than tell him why, for example, a bird picked at its feathers with its beak, encouraged Richard to observe the bird, to form a hypothesis and then see if observations confirmed it. His father taught him to question everything, to form his own opinions about the world, and by doing so, made him into a scientist from an early age. It is that attitude which should be the dominant theme of this book, rather than Feynman's technical genius. He says, over and over, to doubt everything. Ask yourself why things are the way they are, rather than just relying on what other people tell you. Observe, experiment and test, and you're doing science. He has some disdain for social sciences, and a pretty healthy dose of misogyny in a couple of places, but if he is arrogant, then it is probably deserved. Feynman was a man fascinated with how the universe worked, all the way down to its smallest components, and that was his passion. Not awards, not titles, not praise - just the work, the discovery and the pleasure. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 09, 2009
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Jan 08, 2009
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Paperback
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| 0345409469
| 9780345409461
| 0345409469
| 4.29
| 74,828
| 1995
| Feb 25, 1997
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really liked it
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I miss Carl Sagan. Ever since I was a kid, Carl Sagan has been the face of science for me. I would watch Cosmos and feel a sense of amazement that the I miss Carl Sagan. Ever since I was a kid, Carl Sagan has been the face of science for me. I would watch Cosmos and feel a sense of amazement that the universe was as wonderful as it was. He'd be there in his turtleneck and his blazer, smiling as though he'd just heard the coolest secret and he wanted to share it with you. And he did, except that it wasn't his secret. Hell, it wasn't a secret at all - it was the combined results of thousands of years of thoughts, deductions, mistakes, missteps, experiments, accidents and achievements. Whether he was talking about the orbits of the planets or the genetics of peas, you could feel an almost palpable sense of wonder coming from him. You'd listen to him and think, "Y'know, maybe we humans aren't too bad after all...." Then the smile would fade, his eyes would get serious, and he would explain how, for all our achievements as a species, humans were still terribly fallible creatures. Our knowledge has, perhaps, outpaced our morals, and we are only a few simple steps away from losing everything that we've gained. Our mastery of nuclear technology could wipe out civilization in a day. Our carelessness with industry could do the same in a century. His earnestness was clear, as was his disappointment. It was in this latter mood, perhaps, that he wrote this book. Simply by looking at the title, one can glean his attitude not only towards science, but towards the world around it. When he looks at the world, he sees a place filled with demons - not literally, of course - the demons of irrationality, superstition and an unfortunate willingness on the part of people to believe in things that just aren't so. This book is about the advocacy of skepticism and critical thinking. In a world where people are obsessed with celebrity, where people trust their feelings over their observations, where rulers make decisions based on the predictions of astrologers, Sagan feels rather threatened. I can certainly understand why. It still angers me that now, in the 21st century, we are still arguing about evolution over creationism. It amazes me that newspapers even print horoscopes, to say nothing of the fact that there are people who take them seriously. It horrifies me that evil men are still able to use fear and superstition to convince people that they should kill in the name of God. And it saddens me that so many people have given control of their lives over to a deity rather than taking responsibility for it themselves. Sagan's premise in this book is simple: knowledge is better than ignorance. Full stop. Whether it's witches, "intelligent design," UFO abduction or anything else, it is always better to find the truth rather than to rest comfortably in a lie. The truth is hard, yes, and it may feel better to stay wrapped up in our illusions, but no matter how comfortable they are, they're still illusions. Still lies. He spends a lot of time on UFOs and abductees, actually, and uses that as a bridge into other areas of skeptical inquiry. This is because UFO abductees (and the legions of enablers who encourage them - psychologists, writers, newspapers, and conspiracy nuts) exhibit the same behavior that allows unreason to flourish: an unwillingness or inability to consider other options. Yes, the UFO explanation would be a romantic and weird one, but wanting something doesn't make it so. There is probably a reason why you saw things out your window, and that explanation is probably perfectly terrestrial. Whether you're talking about UFOs, reiki, power crystals, witchcraft, tarot cards, channeling, telepathy, past lives, Indigo Children, psychic surgery, miracles, visitations by angels, demonic possession, the hollow Earth theory... The evidence just isn't there. As interesting and entertaining as a world containing such things would be, they're just not so. Wouldn't it be better, Sagan asks, if we could all dismiss such things? If everyone could think critically about them, dismiss them, and turn their vast amount of energy and resources towards actually making the world better? If, instead of putting together high budget shows about ghosts and Bigfoot, networks made programs about scientific inquiry and achievement? Or perhaps a show about mysteries that science has solved? Instead of portraying scientists as either nerds or maniacs, why not show the scientists who are looking for ways to make safer materials, better medicines and more efficient cars? I suppose that the Discovery Channel has done a very nice job of trying to realize this dream, with shows like Mythbusters, and Penn & Teller strongly advocate critical thinking in their Showtime program Bullshit! But I reckon Sagan would want more. This is where he does come across as something of a curmudgeon in this book. You get the feeling that if Old Man Sagan had his way, there'd be no X-Files or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Flintstones. Science fiction would all be something like Contact - nothing that isn't reasonably explainable by our current understanding of science. No evil robots or planet-busting Death Stars would survive such skeptical scrutiny. Indeed, you get the feeling that he would not only disapprove of those shows, he would definitely look down on those of us who do. This is an attitude I've noticed a lot of in modern skeptics - a certain annoyance with fantasy and a rather condescending attitude towards those who haven't signed on to the skeptical view of the world. I am a regular listener of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast, and I enjoy it - except when they turn on the arrogance when talking about people who believe in things like religious revelation, UFOs and the like. I can understand the attitude towards scammers - they deserve nothing but contempt - but there are people who take real comfort in their world view, regardless of how irrational it might be. Sagan addresses this as well in his book: "All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based - or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault."He goes on later to say: "In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many ways consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped."So in other words, even if you know a lot, don't be a know-it-all. Sagan had a lifelong love of science and the wonders that scientists have performed. The world today, every part and parcel of it from that computer that you're reading this on to the fact that you didn't die before you were five years old, is attributable to the work of dedicated scientists trying to better understand the world. And that is the key message of this book: knowledge makes the world better. Science has performed wonders that aliens, witches and apparitions of the Virgin Mary have never been able to do. A well-educated, rational populace is the greatest protection we have against tyranny, and it behooves every citizen to acquaint him or herself with the methods and principles that science uses. It is the greatest tool available to us if we want a better world. Yes, there will be missteps along the way, but the errors of science can - if we act out of clarity and reason - be repaired. Teach your children, encourage them to think critically about the world and no one will ever gain mastery over them. For an educated person is a free one. And if you can spread this kind of freedom, then perhaps Sagan can rest well. ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Sep 19, 2008
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Sep 19, 2008
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Paperback
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| 0192801481
| 9780192801487
| 0192801481
| 3.29
| 876
| Apr 24, 2003
| Jun 26, 2003
|
it was ok
|
As the title says, this is indeed a very short introduction. Linguistics is a science that is well over a century old, and there's been reams and ream
As the title says, this is indeed a very short introduction. Linguistics is a science that is well over a century old, and there's been reams and reams of paper devoted to it. Most, however, is incredibly obscure and not really geared for the casual reader. This book, fortunately, is. It does get dangerously close to an insomnia cure at times, though. I figured I'd pick it up on the basis that I would soon be immersing myself in an intensive study of English, How To Teach It. I don't honestly know if knowing something about linguistics will help or hinder that study, but it seems like a step in the right direction. Anyway, linguistics: the study of language, how it works and why it works. This book covers a lot of the basic branches of linguistics - the study of structure and rules, the study of phonetics, language history, brain science and so on - without bogging down too far in the details. It also provides a nice little reading list if you're interested in reading more. Which, at the moment, I'm not. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 25, 2006
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Feb 25, 2008
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| 4.12
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it was amazing
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Jul 08, 2012
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Jul 10, 2012
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| 3.95
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really liked it
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May 23, 2012
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Jun 04, 2012
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| 3.97
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really liked it
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not set
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Jan 06, 2012
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| 3.97
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it was amazing
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Jul 13, 2011
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Jul 17, 2011
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| 4.23
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liked it
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Mar 29, 2011
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Mar 29, 2011
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| 3.93
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really liked it
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Feb 14, 2011
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Mar 13, 2011
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| 4.04
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really liked it
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Dec 12, 2010
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Dec 18, 2010
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| 4.43
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it was amazing
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Jun 26, 2010
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Jul 02, 2010
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| 4.27
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really liked it
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May 20, 2010
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May 28, 2010
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| 3.81
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really liked it
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Mar 20, 2010
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Mar 21, 2010
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| 3.27
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it was ok
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Jan 24, 2010
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Jan 28, 2010
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| 3.87
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liked it
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Jan 22, 2010
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Jan 21, 2010
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| 4.04
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really liked it
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Jan 20, 2010
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Jan 21, 2010
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| 3.90
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really liked it
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Sep 23, 2009
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Sep 26, 2009
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| 4.04
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it was amazing
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Jun 12, 2009
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Jun 12, 2009
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| 4.10
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really liked it
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Apr 22, 2009
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Apr 22, 2009
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| 3.60
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liked it
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Apr 14, 2009
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Apr 17, 2009
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| 4.23
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liked it
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Jan 09, 2009
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Jan 08, 2009
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| 4.29
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really liked it
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Sep 19, 2008
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Sep 19, 2008
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| 3.29
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it was ok
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Feb 25, 2006
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Feb 25, 2008
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