Skip to main content

Women of Science Tarot - Massive Science **

The Tarot is a fascinating and often beautiful thing. A variant of the traditional card pack dating back to the fifteenth century, the four suits have an extra face card, while there's effectively a fifth suit of 21 permanent trumps and a joker or fool. There are a number of ways to play Tarot, but primarily it's a game similar to whist. A couple of hundred years ago it began to be used for cartomancy (fortune telling with cards) and this use has come to dominate popular knowledge of the card pack, including the renaming of the suits and trumps plus fool to be the minor and major arcana.

The somewhat bizarre attempt to use the Tarot to educate in this popular science pack replaces the major arcana with 'powerful ideas in science' and the minor arcana with 'important women in science.' The suits (in many traditional packs swords, batons, cups and coins) become 'nano, micro, macro and astro' to divide up the fields in which those women worked.

The cards themselves are really just an ordinary Tarot pack - despite the claim for the major arcana to be ideas in science, the pack itself just has a conventional set of Tarot trump cards, while the minor arcana cards have a picture and name, but give no information about the women featured. The cards themselves are a good size (Tarot cards are often larger than a traditional card pack) and are reasonably well illustrated, though they could have done with more colour. The only information, though, is in a pocket-sized guide. This starts with instructions on 'how to play'. Sadly these don't describe how to play the genuinely entertaining Tarot games, just how to use some of the approaches to woo-based 'readings'.

The guide then goes on to give one-page descriptions (and these are distinctly small pages) of each card. For the major arcana, we get very woffly and highly political interpretations attempting to link the traditional Tarot trumps' images to aspects of science - so, for example, 'the devil' represents corruption in the form of 'ownership, patents and corporate greed'. These cards aren't really about science at all.

The minor arcana definitions at least give us pocket bios of some great women in science, though the choices can be odd and some of the historical detail is dubious - for example the authors wheel out the old chestnut that Ada, Countess of Lovelace 'went on to write the first computer program', which isn't historically correct. The information provided is often so shallow as to be totally useless. For example, when describing the towering mathematical genius Emmy Noether, there is no mention of either symmetry or conservation laws, which are at the heart of her greatest achievement. Inevitably with such a list it's also easy to argue that there are some surprising omissions - to include Ursula K. LeGuin (great science fiction writer though she was) as a woman of science but not Jocelyn Bell Burnell, for example, seems shortsighted at best.

In the end, it's difficult to see what this pack of cards is for. A decent book on these individuals would have given room for far more information and insight than a flimsy pamphlet. The Tarot pack itself adds nothing to our understanding.

Cards:    
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

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question.  Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book
Post a Comment
Read more

The Genetic Book of the Dead: Richard Dawkins ****

When someone came up with the title for this book they were probably thinking deep cultural echoes - I suspect I'm not the only Robert Rankin fan in whom it raised a smile instead, thinking of The Suburban Book of the Dead . That aside, this is a glossy and engaging book showing how physical makeup (phenotype), behaviour and more tell us about the past, with the messenger being (inevitably, this being Richard Dawkins) the genes. Worthy of comment straight away are the illustrations - this is one of the best illustrated science books I've ever come across. Generally illustrations are either an afterthought, or the book is heavily illustrated and the text is really just an accompaniment to the pictures. Here the full colour images tie in directly to the text. They are not asides, but are 'read' with the text by placing them strategically so the picture is directly with the text that refers to it. Many are photographs, though some are effective paintings by Jana Lenzová. T
Post a Comment
Read more

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on
Post a Comment
Read more