Skip to main content

Innovators - Donald Kirsch ***

This was a difficult review to write. The idea is a good one - sixteen innovative scientists whose ideas were first doubted but came to be mainstream thinking. Donald Kirsch does a good job of making their work accessible. The focus is heavily biased towards medical science (reflecting the author's background) with the likes McClintock, Semmelweis, Rous, Prusiner, Cushman and Ondetti, Sehgal and Warren and Marshall. If most of these names are unfamiliar, I'd also suggest that most aren't as transformative as the likes of Galileo, Planck, and Wegener, but they still provide interesting stories.

I'm not sure I would have included Rachel Carson, who despite being a scientist isn't well known for visionary science (and whose advocacy resulted in the abandonment of DDT, even in controlled fashion that could have saved many lives). But my big concern about the book is the result of two others names already mentioned above. These are the ones I know a significant amount about - and both are flawed. Admittedly that's just two out of 16 - but I can't help but wonder if there are aspects of other subjects that are equally problematic. My bugbears are Galileo and Planck.

Although Kirsch is mostly historically okay on Galileo, the piece on him totally misses the point any historian of science would make that his major contribution to science was nothing to do with the Copernican system, but his physics book Two New Systems. While Galileo did make a couple of first astronomical observations, notably the Galilean moons of Jupiter, his support of the Copernican system was just one of many, with most of his observations already made by others (and his observations actually could just as easily have supported the Tychonian system). The only reason, to be honest, this part of his work is of such interest is the story of his trial, not his science. And, of course, it wasn't his original idea.

By contrast, the Planck piece demonstrates over and over that the author has no clue about quantum physics, or physics history. Just to give a couple of examples, we are told ‘Einstein published his theory [of relativity] in 1905 and received the Nobel Prize in 1921, reasonably quick acceptance for such a totally revolutionary idea.’ Admittedly he did publish his special theory of relativity in 1905, but his big one, the general theory was published in 1915 (and the text makes it clear the author is referring to both theories). Most damningly, Einstein got his Nobel Prize for a totally different piece of work on the photoelectric effect - it had nothing to do with relativity. Another example: we are told that Schrodinger’s cat experiment ‘is binary… it happens that all computing is binary, based on strings of ones and zeroes…’ and uses this as an explanation of quantum computing. But the whole point of Schrodinger’s cat is that is in a superposed state - and quantum computing is not based on zero/one bits, but on qubits, which aren't  binary.

I've never read (or written) a book without a few small errors, but I’m afraid these are too big to overlook.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support our online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all reviews and Brian's online articles or subscribe free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Beyond Belief - Helen Pearson *****

Apparently it comes as a surprise to many that medicine was not particularly scientific until the end of the twentieth century (to be honest, it's no surprise to me - we had a GP who used homeopathy in the 90s). Instead it was based on anecdotal guidance - the kind of thing that appeared to work. Evidence-based medicine has since improved the field, trying where possible to base decisions on evidence, ideally based on randomised controlled trials. The first part of Helen Pearson's book covers this well - though I think it's by far the least interesting part of what we discover. Instead what's truly fascinating is the rest of it, looking at a wide range of other fields where evidence was rarely properly used and that are only now starting to dip a toe in the water. These include social policy, policing, conservation, business and education. The main part of the book gives us examples of how bad these areas have been in terms of basing decisions on what's always been ...
Post a Comment
Read more

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting.  Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more