| Title | : | The Faber Book of Science |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0571163521 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780571163526 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 528 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1995 |
The Faber Book of Science Reviews
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Easily the best compendium of scientific writing I have ever read. I also have The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, edited by Richard Dawkins, no mean science writer himself. It’s pretty good, but this beats it hands down. I borrowed it from a library; now I have to buy it.
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This is my kind of science book : split in to short chunks and easy to read.
This anthology of writing spans about 500 years and includes the writings of scientific luminaries such as da Vinci, Newton, Faraday, Freud, Feynman, Sagan and Dawkins. It also includes science writing from literary writers which include Updike, Twain, Steinbeck, Levi, Orwell and Nabokov.
The real beauty of this book is the wonder, curiosity and determination conveyed by the writers and the challenging work a lot of these scientists had to endure, sometimes against all odds of success.
My favourite sections include :
Surgeon William Beaumont's (d1853) account of a patient with a gun shot wound to the stomach which allowed the doctor to observe directly, through a hole, for 8 years the interior of the stomach and its effect on bits of food which he placed inside tied to a piece of string.
Ronald Ross (d1932) whose discovery of the origins of malaria saved millions of lives despite the fact that he received no help or encouragement from any authority and met with many failures in his experiments. The screws on his microscope were rusted with sweat from his hands and forehead and his last remaining eye piece was cracked but still Ross proved that mosquitoes carried the parasite.
The son of peasant farmers, self-taught naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre (d1915) in around his 50th year gave up teaching and retired to his 'hermit's retreat' living on fruits, vegetables and a little wine and began observing the insects in front of his house. Fabre's accounts of the creatures grew in to a ten-volume 'Souvenirs entomologiques'. To V.Hugo he was 'the insects homer', to C.Darwin an 'incomparable observer'.
Marie Curie's daughters biographical account of her mother and father's laborious quest to discover Radium in pitch-blende (one part to approx ten million of the ore) is an ode to hard work and determination. "I sometimes passed the whole day stirring a boiling mass with an iron rod nearly as big as myself. In the evening i was broken with fatigue." said Marie. The Curies worked for 4 years in these conditions from 1898 to 1902. -
The book was a super useful summary of basically all of the major scientific discoveries that have been made the last couple of millennia. John was able to simplify some very complex concepts that the scientists have come up with the majority of which I'm sure you will have heard of already but the way he's able to explain them in layman's terms is really useful. Why I didn't give it five stars is because some of the topics just genuinely didn't interest me but I'm sure they will interest other individuals. So for example he talks about quantum mechanics and sea cucumbers and green molds and the story of the carbon atom for example. All explained and written up about in very detailed and interesting ways but I just didn't find the concepts that interesting and don’t have the brain power to understand all of them. Having said that some of the topics covered in the book was super cool and had me going to Google to double and triple check things.
Anyway here are some of the best bits from the book:
Francis Bacon at the start of the 17th century who saw that perfect pure objective science was impossible, not only because we are forced to use language, or some kind of numerical notation, which does not naturally belong to the objects we name or number, but also because we seek patterns, shapes and symmetries in nature which correspond to our own preconceptions not to anything that is really there.
Perhaps because it assumed that the poetic imagination is superior to the scientific so poets simply need Not bother with science. Certainly this used to be a favorite idea. I believe the souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newton's would go to the making up of a single Shakespeare or a Milton pronounced Samuel Taylor ColeRidge.
Hans lippershey. There is a story around that around 1600, two children were playing with lenses in his shop and found that by holding two together they could magnify the church weathervane. This led him to construct a simple telescope.
“Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death” proclaimed William Blake.
Jenna had invented the Latin name variolae vaccinae. The English word vaccination was not invented until 1803 by Richard Denning. Following the publication of his paper, vaccination swiftly spread through Europe and America, earning him worldwide fame. He became in his own lifetime the acclaimed survivor of thousands of Germans, Spaniards, Italians and Russians. Ironically the English were slow to follow suit. Whereas in early 19th century Vienna where an intelligent vaccination program was enforced became virtually smallpox free, in London the speckled monster still claimed 1700 lives each year.
Close all the shutters and doors until no light enters the room except through the lens and opposite hold a sheet of paper which you move forward and backward until the scene appears in his sharper detail. There on the paper you will see the whole view as it really is with its distances, its colors and shadows and motion, the clouds, the waters twinkling, the birds flying. By holding the paper steady you can trace the whole perspective with a pen, shaded, and delicately color it from nature.
Yet, in many ancient paintings, foiliage hides more than Adams genitalia: a wandering vine covers his navel as well. If modesty enjoined the genital shroud, a very different motive: mystery: place to plant over his belly. In a theological debate more pretentious than the old argument about angels on pin points, many earnest people of faith had wondered whether Adam had a naval. He was after all, not born of a woman and required no remnant of his non-existent umbilical cord. Yet, in creating a prototype, would not God make his first man like there all the rest of follow?
Man is the rival of other men: he delights in competition and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness. These latter qualities seem to be his natural and unfortunate birthright. It is generally admitted that with women the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man, but in some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.
In 1830 a swampy settlement by one of the Great American lakes had a population of under 100; by 1890 it was the city of Chicago with a population of 1,000,000.
If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age: and anybody would perceive that the skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I don't know. Maybe not.
Express more ideas do not show themselves productive with those who suggest them or apply them for the first time but with those persevering workers who feel them strongly and put all their faith and love in their efficiency. From this point of view, it may be affirmed that scientific accomplishments are creations of the will and rewards of ardor. Realizing that I had discovered a rich field, I preceded to take advantage of dedicating myself to work, no longer merely with earnestness, but with fury.
When I'm dead, you can boil me down, burn me come round me, scatter me: but you cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy vengeance. Death can do nor more than kill you.
The rigid rod is shorter when in motion then when at rest, and the more quickly it is moving the shorter is the rod. The rod will shrink only in the direction of its motion. Its length will diminish, but its thickness will remain identical to what it was at rest. Einstein asks us to imagine a clock on the train. The time that elapses between two successive ticks, when it is stationary, is exactly one second, and to the passenger on the train, seated by the clock, the interval will still be one second when the train is moving. But to the watcher on the embankment the interval, Einstein states, will be greater.
It is customary to express the equivalence of mass and energy though somewhat inexactly by the formula E equals MC squared. In which C represents the velocity of light, about 186,000 miles per second. E is the energy that is contained in the stationary body: M is it's Mass. The energy that belongs to the mass M is equal to this mass, multiplied by the square of the enormous speed of light, which is to say, a vast amount of energy for every unit of mass. But if every gram of material contains this tremendous energy, why did it go so long unnoticed? The answer is simple enough: so long as none of the energy is given off externally it cannot be observed. It is as though a man who is fabulously rich should never spend or give away a single cent, no one would tell how rich he was.
Yeah I find that I must continue to write about it, if only to prove how utterly inadequate language is to translate vividly, feeling and sensations under a condition as unique as submersion at this depth.
This was indeed a find worth recording : it has been demonstrated that a species of penicillium produces in culture a very powerful antibacterial substance, Fleming put down on his notes. It is a more powerful inhibitory agent than carbolic acid and it can be applied to an infected surface undiluted as it is non irritating and non toxic.He christened his remarkable substance “penicillin”.
Pastor would have applied his now famous saying that chance only favors the mind prepared for it. Fleming himself once said: do not wait for fortune to smile on you, prepare yourself with knowledge.
Since uranium atoms undergoing fission would also emit neutrons, it occurred to Fermi and others that a chain reaction might occur, the emitted neutrons hitting other uranium atoms and splitting them, thus emitting other neutrons which would hit and split other atoms, and so on a process that would release a huge amount of energy.
The rest of the story is well known. Eugene wigner the Hungarian born physicist who in 1939 with Szilard and Einstein had alerted president Roosevelt to the importance of uranium fission, presented Fermi with a bottle of chianti. According to an improbable legend, wigner had concealed the bottom behind his back during the entire experiment. All those present drank from paper cups, in silence, with no toast. Then all signed the straw cover on the bottle of their chianti. It is the only record of the persons in the squash court on that day. This describes the first atomic pile that was built in a squash court in a university in Chicago.
It is not scientific but takes the familiar course of an initial idea, a selective search through the literature for corroborative evidence, ignoring most of the facts that are opposed to the idea, and ending in a state of auto intoxication in which the subjective idea comes to be considered as an objective fact.
It stands to reason that if two plates are moving away from each other in one place, they will be crashing against something else at the other, leading end, and this is what happens. In many cases, where two plates collide, there is a subduction zone, where one or both of them descend back into the mantle. When the edge of the plate is subducted to a sufficient depth, its material reaches temperatures high enough to bring about at least partial melting, which in turn produces chambers of magma that tend to rise up. The volcano then erupts at the earth’s surface.
Chinese concern with earthquakes is understandable, even at so early a time in history. These violent upheavals are common there and have taken a tremendous toll on the middle kingdom's huge population. The state seismological Bureau of the People's Republic reported that in 37 years from 1949 1976, some 27 million people died and 76 million were injured as a result of 100 earthquakes.
The eagle has landed, indicating that the lunar module from Apollo 11 spacecraft had touched down on the moon, in the area known as the “sea of tranquility”. Armstrong's heart rate at touchdown had risen to 156 beats a minute. The landing was the culmination of a $24 billion space program, money that critics protested should have been spent on reducing world poverty instead.
Stepping off the dish shaped landing pad onto the moon at 9:56 PM Houston time America he uttered the usually misquoted sentence: “that's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. On the moon the two astronauts collected rock samples, erected an American flag with a metal strip woven onto its top edge so that it would appear to fly despite the windless conditions on the moon surface.
Molecules are composed of atoms. Atoms, although named from the Greek for “uncuttable”, are made of nuclei with electrons around them. Nuclei internal comprised neutrons and protons, as physicists began to understand around 1932, when the neutron was discovered. Now we know that the neutron and proton are themselves composite: they are made of quarks.
The Gaia hypothesis was the brainchild of the scientist J. E. lovelock, but its name was suggested by his friend, the novelist William Golding. Gaia was the Greek earth goddess also known as Ge, and the hypothesis states that the biosphere i.e. the whole region of the earth surface, the sea and the air that is inhabited by living organisms, is a self regulating entity with the capacity to keep our planet healthy by controlling the chemical and physical environment.
The earth’s present stock of uranium contains only 0.72% of the dangerous isotope U235. From this figure it is easy to calculate that about four eons ago the uranium in the earth’s crust would have been nearly 15% U 235. Believe it or not, nuclear reactors have existed since long before man, and a fossil natural nuclear reactor was recently discovered in Gabon, in Africa. It was an action two eons ago when U 235 was only a few percent. We can therefore be fairly certain that the Geo chemical concentration of uranium for eons ago could have led to a spectacular display of natural nuclear reactions.
It was not the Egyptians or the Greeks or the Romans who first invented the 0, but the Maya Indians of yucatan. It is known that they had a 0 sign and positional values of numbers by the time of the birth of Christ. Quite independently the Hindus made these inventions in India some 5 to 7 centuries later.
The meteorologist Edward Lorenz pioneer chaos theory in the 1963 paper, though he did not call it chaos theory, the name was invented in 1972 by the mathematician James York. Studying weather systems, Lorenz attributed their unpredictability to the fact that a very small initial difference could enormously change the future state of the system. This became known as the butterfly effect from the title of lorenz's 1979 paper “predictability: does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” -
A brilliant book, that splits up the great discoveries in Science into individual stories and articles allowing bite size consumption of the sciences in a well written and memorable style.
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Despite the title this isn't really a science book – more a collection of thoughtful observations, extracts and essays on what happens when you look carefully, and think about what you're seeing. It's a book that praises the process of stopping to really consider what the world is and how it works, rather than being about science per se. So even if you won't learn much about genetics or quantum mechanics from this book, you will perhaps pick up that there is value in taking the time and patience to not know something, and to be receptive to the possibility of knowing, regardless of how endless that process might be.
Summary: pretty good for dipping into. The 1990s content is looking a little dated in places but hey. -
A history of scientific discoveries. This book has been amended previously and has been highly recommended by others. However, I found the read not engaging. I am interested in biology and portions of chemistry but this book had a strong focus on the hard sciences. I would recommend it for people with an interest in physics. Although, I finished the book I would not highly recommend it. I had read Lisa Randall, Dark matter to understand some basic concepts of hard science; and she had modern views on the hard science. In comparison, the writing was different but many of the concepts are similar.
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Some entries much more informative and interesting than others.
Quite a few chapters had irrelevant info that I just had to skip through.
Poorly structured but worth the read for the few gems of information among the trivial rocks. -
A really nicely organised collection, which you can delve into as the fancy for a topic or length of essay takes you. However, many of the pieces being original, they tend not to trip off the tongue, and I rather prefer Martin Gardner's "Great Essays in Science".
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Some real gems in here, but it feels like the Editor went out of his way to exclude the writing of, or about, female scientists and scientists of color. It makes for a much weaker collection.
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er að lesa þessa í enskuáfanganum mínum í haust. skemmtilegar sögur og fjölbreyttar
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Awesome compilation of evolution of Science as we see it today...
