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seekingferret.livejournal.com1). Five Equations That Changed The World by Michael Guillen
This is a book I rather wish had been written when I was 13. I grew up with a decidedly similar book by Isaac Asimov, a collection of ten-page stories about important scientists that presented their great discovery in historical, social, but most importantly in personal context. It's one of the most treasured books in my collection, even though I've long outgrown the storybook approach to history. I'm pretty sure it's the book that turned me into a scientist. Asimov transformed these great scientists into heroes. He wrote of Lavoisier braving the mobs in the French Revolution to achieve scientific breakthroughs, and Marie Curie risking her own life to study radium. And despite the focus on the individual, despite the pat reductionism, Asimov kept his eye on the prize, drilling in through rote repetition the ideal of the Scientific Method.
Guillen's book, as I said, is remarkably similar in scope and style. He tells the story of five scientists: Newton, Bernoulli, Faraday, Clausius, and Einstein. And I think that's a very telling set of five names. Newton and Einstein are obvious, but the other three, while important, are not quite the household names. These are quite clearly Guillen's personal heroes. And his text is an act of beatification.
He focuses, for example, in the story of Michael Faraday's beautiful law of electromagnetic induction, on the class boundaries that separated Faraday and his mentor Sir Humphry Davy. And recalling the more memoirish elements of the other Guillen book I've read, where he describes his childhood in a working class Chicano family in California, I kept seeing the parallels Guillen was building in. And again and again, as he develops the story of these equations, Guillen spends time exploring the way the religious beliefs of these scientists shaped their thinking about scientific discovery. Family life is important, too. Loves and lost loves, brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and sons and daughters litter the pages. These are very intimate portraits, painted with enthusiasm and extreme care.
2)The Edge of Physics by Anil Ananthaswamy
Part travelogue and part modern physics explanation, this was a hell of a lot of fun.
A few years ago, an astronomy geek friend told me of her plan to travel around the world to visit radio telescopes and write a book about it. A couple years after that, she reported to me half-crestfallen that someone had beaten her to it. Only half-crestfallen, though, because she said the book itself was terrific. This is that book.
It describes a pilgrimage (The first site visited is a California observatory known as The Monastery. The last site visited shares a mountaintop with a Buddhist temple.) to the remote sites around the world where cutting edge physics is being done in unusual places whose geography has given it value, as the ambition of our scientists has grown to the point where we need lab structures bigger than we can build. The 'labs' the book describes include mineshafts deep beneath the Earth, mountaintops high in the sky, a vast swath of Lake Baikal, the South Pole, and others.
Ananthaswamy makes the science so clear and moreover, makes it so clear why it matters. He never loses sight of the real world, of politics, economics, culture. When he visits South Africa he explores the way apartheid intersected with astronomy. When he visits Chile he shows the climate change and its associated changes in weather patterns have presented new challenges for the observatory.
And he tells the stories of the little heroes with energy and sympathy. The human calculators, many of them women who were barred from doing 'real science', who made some of the important early 20th century discoveries in astronomy because they were the ones who got their hands dirty with the data. The researchers who drifted out of doing calculations into administration and became the ones who enabled the increasingly massive instruments to be built. The drillers braving the subzero temperatures at the South Pole to allow instruments to be placed deep inside the ice. The graduate students working long, hard hours doublechecking results while their PIs present them to universal acclaim. The Edge referred to in the title doesn't just refer to the locales he visits, but also to people who have forsaken comfortable lives in academia or industry for the challenge of pushing the boundaries of our knowledge. And as Ananthaswamy stumbles to the peak yet of another mountain whose thin air makes it hard for him to breathe, you appreciate just how arduous a task they have taken on as scientists.
This is a book I rather wish had been written when I was 13. I grew up with a decidedly similar book by Isaac Asimov, a collection of ten-page stories about important scientists that presented their great discovery in historical, social, but most importantly in personal context. It's one of the most treasured books in my collection, even though I've long outgrown the storybook approach to history. I'm pretty sure it's the book that turned me into a scientist. Asimov transformed these great scientists into heroes. He wrote of Lavoisier braving the mobs in the French Revolution to achieve scientific breakthroughs, and Marie Curie risking her own life to study radium. And despite the focus on the individual, despite the pat reductionism, Asimov kept his eye on the prize, drilling in through rote repetition the ideal of the Scientific Method.
Guillen's book, as I said, is remarkably similar in scope and style. He tells the story of five scientists: Newton, Bernoulli, Faraday, Clausius, and Einstein. And I think that's a very telling set of five names. Newton and Einstein are obvious, but the other three, while important, are not quite the household names. These are quite clearly Guillen's personal heroes. And his text is an act of beatification.
He focuses, for example, in the story of Michael Faraday's beautiful law of electromagnetic induction, on the class boundaries that separated Faraday and his mentor Sir Humphry Davy. And recalling the more memoirish elements of the other Guillen book I've read, where he describes his childhood in a working class Chicano family in California, I kept seeing the parallels Guillen was building in. And again and again, as he develops the story of these equations, Guillen spends time exploring the way the religious beliefs of these scientists shaped their thinking about scientific discovery. Family life is important, too. Loves and lost loves, brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and sons and daughters litter the pages. These are very intimate portraits, painted with enthusiasm and extreme care.
2)The Edge of Physics by Anil Ananthaswamy
Part travelogue and part modern physics explanation, this was a hell of a lot of fun.
A few years ago, an astronomy geek friend told me of her plan to travel around the world to visit radio telescopes and write a book about it. A couple years after that, she reported to me half-crestfallen that someone had beaten her to it. Only half-crestfallen, though, because she said the book itself was terrific. This is that book.
It describes a pilgrimage (The first site visited is a California observatory known as The Monastery. The last site visited shares a mountaintop with a Buddhist temple.) to the remote sites around the world where cutting edge physics is being done in unusual places whose geography has given it value, as the ambition of our scientists has grown to the point where we need lab structures bigger than we can build. The 'labs' the book describes include mineshafts deep beneath the Earth, mountaintops high in the sky, a vast swath of Lake Baikal, the South Pole, and others.
Ananthaswamy makes the science so clear and moreover, makes it so clear why it matters. He never loses sight of the real world, of politics, economics, culture. When he visits South Africa he explores the way apartheid intersected with astronomy. When he visits Chile he shows the climate change and its associated changes in weather patterns have presented new challenges for the observatory.
And he tells the stories of the little heroes with energy and sympathy. The human calculators, many of them women who were barred from doing 'real science', who made some of the important early 20th century discoveries in astronomy because they were the ones who got their hands dirty with the data. The researchers who drifted out of doing calculations into administration and became the ones who enabled the increasingly massive instruments to be built. The drillers braving the subzero temperatures at the South Pole to allow instruments to be placed deep inside the ice. The graduate students working long, hard hours doublechecking results while their PIs present them to universal acclaim. The Edge referred to in the title doesn't just refer to the locales he visits, but also to people who have forsaken comfortable lives in academia or industry for the challenge of pushing the boundaries of our knowledge. And as Ananthaswamy stumbles to the peak yet of another mountain whose thin air makes it hard for him to breathe, you appreciate just how arduous a task they have taken on as scientists.
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