The Man Who Organized Nature: Gunnar Broberg (trans. Anna Paterson) ****

There are some individuals in the history of science who everyone with a vague interest in the subject knows existed, but who remain shadowy figures, known for what they did but with little more to go on. One such was Carl von Linné, the Swedish scientist known far better by his Latinised surname Linnaeus.

This is no lightweight study at 410 pages with another 44 pages of notes and sources. It's arguable it does go into rather more detail than the typical popular science reader would want - but it is generally readable and certainly puts Linnaeus into an appropriate context. In fact, I was surprised just how much I wanted to come back and read more, as I often find in biographies that after a while I get fed up and would prefer to have more of the science and less of the life.

It might seem a little surprising that the one thing Linnaeus is universally known for gets relatively scant coverage. His binomial nomenclature - the species names such as Homo sapiens or Solanum tuberosum (potatoes) that are used to identify each living thing - only get a handful of mentions in the index, popping up almost in passing in the main text. This is because the two main drivers of the structure are Linnaeus's life and his publications. He produced a vast output, much of which wasn't directly linked to his series of editions of the key work giving the structure that lay behind that nomenclature, Systema Naturae (though this does get two chapters pretty much to itself) and it's interesting to see how much does go beyond this central piece of work.

I particularly liked the occasional one-page asides (with accompanying illustration), such as the 'desirable tea bush' where we discover that Linnaeus wrote 'Thée and coffe are novelties, always to be drunk hot so that by drinking we wash out our stomachs as they are truly rendered lax thereby: these concoctions bring nothing good.' Later apparently he changed his mind and became something of an addict, attempting to bring tea-growing to Sweden.

I don't deny that the book was sometimes a little hard going. There is so much detail here that it can sometimes be hard for the key elements and particularly any scientific implications to shine through. Even so, this is a striking addition to the list of key scientific biographies.

Hardback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re

Deep Utopia - Nick Bostrom ***

This is one of the strangest sort-of popular science (or philosophy, or something or other) books I've ever read. If you can picture the impact of a cross between Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach and Gaileo's Two New Sciences (at least, its conversational structure), then thrown in a touch of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest , and you can get a feel for what the experience of reading it is like - bewildering with the feeling that there is something deep that you can never quite extract from it. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom is probably best known in popular science for his book Superintelligence in which he looked at the implications of having artificial intelligence (AI) that goes beyond human capabilities. In a sense, Deep Utopia is a sequel, picking out one aspect of this speculation: what life would be like for us if technology had solved all our existential problems, while (in the form of superintelligence) it had also taken away much of our appare

Search This Blog