Femtoreview: A Century of Nature: Twenty-One Discoveries that Changed the World
A "Femtoreview" of the book
A Century of Nature: Twenty-One
Discoveries that Changed the World edited by
Laura Garwin, Tim Lincoln, and Steven Weinberg. "Femtoreviews" are short,
extremely short reviews of books I've read, or tried to read.
Living, as we do, in Paris, France, my wife and I
have a hard time finding good English language science books. We do find them
every once in a while at W. H. Smith, but we were spoiled as grad students where
we had a really killer campus bookstore. Anyway, on a recent trip back to
Canada, we stopped into another campus bookstore
and—comment
dire?—pigged out. If I can get through
some of the other books, I'll do Femtoreviews of them
too.
The first book is called A Century of Nature: Twenty-One Discoveries that Changed the World, edited by Laura Garwin, Tim Lincoln, and Steven Weinberg. The editors have chosen 21 papers from the prestigious journal, Nature, and they reproduce each one with an introductory commentary written by someone important in the field.
OK, now it's always problematic when people make lists of Best this or Worst Dressed that. That said, David Letterman is living proof that people cannot get enough of these lists. We will count ourselves among their number and submit willfully to the pleasures of this great little book.
Anyway, what struck me as particularly amusing while I was reading this book was how short were the actual articles and how long were the commentaries. For example, the paper by Ted Maiman about the first laser was about one page in the book, while Charles Townes' goes on for pages. The other thing that was striking, was how non-used-car-salesman the old articles were. Today, even the most boring methods paper has to be written like it will change the course of history. Here we have some papers that actually did change the course of history, and they are written with cold detachment.
I am not going to tell you what I think about all the papers, there are 21 of them, and they range in understandability, while the commentaries are all very well-written and clear for a typical scientist. I'm not sure how enjoyable this book would be for a non-scientist, though. Maybe for them, they could consider the real papers as museum artifacts: to be appreciated, but let's face it, the little description of the thing is all you really need to know. The commentaries provide enough of a challenge.
I would like to point out a couple highlights:
- Davisson and Germer experiment: by far one of the coolest mistakes in science, and their description is terrific.
- Myoglobin: paper by Kendrew et al. Started it all, and with Perutz, put the LMB in a special place in the history of science. Our children will look back on this work in awe (assuming they do science!). The work required to solve the structure is so astronomically more difficult than anything people do today, it will blow your mind. Put another way: they used the first computer to help them analyze the data.
- First laser: if the number of popular science books about a subject correlated in any way to the subject's importance in our lives (or even in science), you would think that we scan groceries and send information over the internet using String Theory. Alas, this knotty notion of "physics" is so insanely oversold, I can't even stand it anymore. Even if it turns out to be "right," it's irrelevant because you have to be a freak of nature to understand all the math (and that comes from someone who is not at all unhappy in Liouville space). That said, lasers are important, they embody quantum mechanics, uncertainty and all that other jazz that purchasers of Brian Greene and, ahem, Steven Weinberg, so crave. For whatever reason, there are a hundred books on String Theory, and like two on lasers. The difference? Laser are real, testable, and useful. Hmm. This one-page paper by Maiman is worth fifty on String Theory.
- MRI: read the paper, then revisit the controversy. I guess that was last year's controversy. Anyway, you can see for yourself, on the Nobel website. Lauterbur is a clever man, a great orator, however, he is not.
- Bunch of important biological things. I hope to understand them better (that's one of the points of this site).
This book should be on your shelf. You can show the articles to students or colleagues. You'd be surprised how many people don't bother to read the original papers in their field.
I would like to start the list of papers that didn't make the cut with the following:
C. V. Raman and K. S. Krishnan, Nature 121 (1928) 501: "A New Type of Secondary Radiation"
(note that the discovery of the Raman effect predated that of the laser by 32 years.)
The first book is called A Century of Nature: Twenty-One Discoveries that Changed the World, edited by Laura Garwin, Tim Lincoln, and Steven Weinberg. The editors have chosen 21 papers from the prestigious journal, Nature, and they reproduce each one with an introductory commentary written by someone important in the field.
OK, now it's always problematic when people make lists of Best this or Worst Dressed that. That said, David Letterman is living proof that people cannot get enough of these lists. We will count ourselves among their number and submit willfully to the pleasures of this great little book.
Anyway, what struck me as particularly amusing while I was reading this book was how short were the actual articles and how long were the commentaries. For example, the paper by Ted Maiman about the first laser was about one page in the book, while Charles Townes' goes on for pages. The other thing that was striking, was how non-used-car-salesman the old articles were. Today, even the most boring methods paper has to be written like it will change the course of history. Here we have some papers that actually did change the course of history, and they are written with cold detachment.
I am not going to tell you what I think about all the papers, there are 21 of them, and they range in understandability, while the commentaries are all very well-written and clear for a typical scientist. I'm not sure how enjoyable this book would be for a non-scientist, though. Maybe for them, they could consider the real papers as museum artifacts: to be appreciated, but let's face it, the little description of the thing is all you really need to know. The commentaries provide enough of a challenge.
I would like to point out a couple highlights:
- Davisson and Germer experiment: by far one of the coolest mistakes in science, and their description is terrific.
- Myoglobin: paper by Kendrew et al. Started it all, and with Perutz, put the LMB in a special place in the history of science. Our children will look back on this work in awe (assuming they do science!). The work required to solve the structure is so astronomically more difficult than anything people do today, it will blow your mind. Put another way: they used the first computer to help them analyze the data.
- First laser: if the number of popular science books about a subject correlated in any way to the subject's importance in our lives (or even in science), you would think that we scan groceries and send information over the internet using String Theory. Alas, this knotty notion of "physics" is so insanely oversold, I can't even stand it anymore. Even if it turns out to be "right," it's irrelevant because you have to be a freak of nature to understand all the math (and that comes from someone who is not at all unhappy in Liouville space). That said, lasers are important, they embody quantum mechanics, uncertainty and all that other jazz that purchasers of Brian Greene and, ahem, Steven Weinberg, so crave. For whatever reason, there are a hundred books on String Theory, and like two on lasers. The difference? Laser are real, testable, and useful. Hmm. This one-page paper by Maiman is worth fifty on String Theory.
- MRI: read the paper, then revisit the controversy. I guess that was last year's controversy. Anyway, you can see for yourself, on the Nobel website. Lauterbur is a clever man, a great orator, however, he is not.
- Bunch of important biological things. I hope to understand them better (that's one of the points of this site).
This book should be on your shelf. You can show the articles to students or colleagues. You'd be surprised how many people don't bother to read the original papers in their field.
I would like to start the list of papers that didn't make the cut with the following:
C. V. Raman and K. S. Krishnan, Nature 121 (1928) 501: "A New Type of Secondary Radiation"
(note that the discovery of the Raman effect predated that of the laser by 32 years.)
Posted: Wed - November 17, 2004 at 05:03 PM |
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