Skip to main content

Scientific Babel - Michael D. Gordin ***

This is one of the hardest books to review I've ever come across. Supertitled The language of science from the fall of Latin to the rise of English it has plenty to appeal to a science writer, for whom the combination of science and language is so important. But can it be of general interest, and what's it like as a book?

The good news is that there is plenty of genuinely interesting material in here. I found particularly absorbing the parts on the fall of Latin, the dispute over the periodic table (in which language played a major part), the development of constructed languages like Esperanto - the story of the rapid rise and fall of Ido, an Esperanto variant without sillinesses like accents, is particularly impressive - and the early material on the development of machine translation, driven as it seemed to have been, much like the space race, by the USA and the USSR's respective needs to stay on top of what the others were doing - though things seemed to get stuck at the Sputnik moment, with no equivalent of the Moon race.

Sadly, though, there's quite a lot of negative to balance the good bits. The book is far too long (and in small print at that), with a tendency to pile on detail that would not be of use for anything other than an academic tome. It could have been enjoyably readable throughout, as was true of much of my favourite sections above, but Michael Gordin repeatedly gets bogged down in the minor to-ing and fro-ing over, say, Russian publication in German journals and suddenly the pages yawn before the reader, inviting a considerable amount of skipping.

I persevered, reading the whole way through (okay, I skipped about six pages when I got particularly bored), and I am glad that did - but it was genuinely hard work in places. On the whole, the author's analysis of the rise and rise of English as a scientific language seems to make a lot of sense, although I am slightly surprised there was no real mention of the parallel rise of the internet, which it would seem would inevitably reinforce the spread of a single scientific language.

This is a subject I've never seen written about, and one that I think will fascinate many working scientists - particularly, perhaps those who have to work in English despite it not being a first language. But it isn't a book I can wholeheartedly recommend for the general reader.


Hardback 

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

  1. The universal language will be Esperanto.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Esperanto (and the arguably more logical Ido) are covered at some length in the book. But there is no doubt that currently the universal language of science (which is what the books is about) is English with over 90% of scientific papers now published in it.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that â€˜Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...