Skip to main content

The New York Times Book of Science - David Corcoran (Ed.) ***

If I'm honest, I didn't have high hopes for a collection of newspaper articles on science, as, sadly, even the best newspapers tend not to do science very well. And these doubts were born out with the more modern articles here, which were often over-verbose (presumably in an attempt to win the Pulitzer Prize) and not very good at explaining the science. But I had reckoned without the sheer delight of the pre-1950 pieces.

 There was no attempt at clever-clever writing back then - it was good, blocky, solid, gum-chewing journalistic writing, with just that little edge of 'gee-whizz, wow!' from a time when science was perhaps more amazing to the general public than it is now.

 I won't go through a whole list of favourites, but just point out three to show the kind of thing I mean. The very first entry in the book (by no means the oldest, but they're ordered by topic first before date) is the magnificently titled 'Tut-Ankh-Amen's Inner Tomb Is Opened, Revealing Undreamed-of Splendors, Still Untouched After 3,400 Years' - and gives a detailed, factual account (if missing Carter's famous 'Wonderful things' line) up to and including the small detail of the Queen of the Belgians and Prince Leopold turning up, 'traveling incognito as the Countess de Retry and Count de Rethy' (that went well). It gives an 'I was there' feel to such a famous event.

 A second delight for me was the 1933 piece 'Star Birth Sudden, Lemaître Asserts', describing a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (it's just glorious that this got a write up in the New York Times back then) about an early version of what we'd now call the big bang theory. There's a wonderful subhead 'Eddington Brings Gasps' when we are told Sir Arthur said 'I hope it will not shock the experimental physicists too much if I say that we do not accept their observations unless they are confirmed by theory.' We are told that 'The mathematicians gasped a little and Professor de Sitter protested mildly.' They knew how to have a scientific barney back then.

 But my favourite of all are reviews on publication of The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. The general feeling is one of admiration for Darwin's cleverness and his fascinating arguments... though it is clear to the Times that he is wrong.

 In a sense, that's both my favourite and an underlining of what's missing from this book. It would have been so much better if they had cut down on the number of articles reproduced (it's a 500+ page book as it is), perhaps sticking to the much better older ones, and instead accompanied each article by a short update from a modern science writer on what to make of what you've just read. Sometimes the science is still surprisingly spot on, but at other times it was downright wrong - or, as with Darwin, The Times' interpretation of it goes well astray. 

 To give the editor his due, David Corcoran has included the Times' most infamous error, when an editorial sarcastically savaged Robert Goddard for not knowing that a rocket would not work in space. Here, at least, there is a correction, issued to mark the Apollo landing - but the way it's worded doesn't really clarify just how much the original article got wrong, and why it was so bad. So even here, some unbiassed commentary would have been far more useful than the correction proves.

 There is so much to enjoy here if you are interested in the history of science, and particularly the history of the communication of science, that it's well worth getting hold of a copy... it's just a shame that we didn't get the icing on the cake of a modern commentary on the articles.


Hardback:  

Kindle:  

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

 
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more