This week’s diary is about…. science books!
Science is incredibly important to progressive causes. Without science, we’d be wallowing in a sea of ignorance, without the most basic understanding of our world, our lives, or our bodies. In short, we’d be just the sort of pliant clay that the neo-cons love to mold into unformed and uninformed voters. Hence the title, because we can use science to un-blind us, to make us enlightened, informed people capable of sharing our knowledge and enlightenment with others.
I don’t believe it!
There she goes again!
She’s tidied up and I can’t find anything!
all my tubes and wires
And careful notes
And antiquated notions
but – it’s poetry in motion…
I’ve always loved science. As I’ve mentioned before in book diaries, my mom was a science teacher for many years, and eventually wrote the curriculum for the district. Being a geeky sort of kid anyway, it didn’t take much for my interest in science and science books to take off. Truth be told, that mostly translated into a great love of science fiction, but that’s a topic for a later diary.
There are many great science books out there. My favorite is “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking. I admire this man so greatly for his achievements in the face of adversity. His writing is eminently readable, too. I have very little formal education, and somehow I managed to stay with him all the way up to the string stuff, where I got hopelessly lost and boggled in a massive “BUT BUT BUT” phase.
My Hero
There have been many very good books written lately about science. A few years ago, I read a terrific book called “Beethoven’s Hair”, which brought out the theory that he’d died of lead poisoning. Along the way, it did a great deal of science as well as lending insight into the composer’s mind and life. Wonderful book and highly recommended, especially if you’re a music and science fan like I am.
And of course, a diary on science books would be sadly incomplete without mentioning Bill Bryson’s “A Brief History of Nearly Everything”, which, to me, is one of the best science books ever for the depth and breadth of subject matter, degree of entertainment, and overall quality. If you haven’t read it, do so. Now. You can get a pretty cheap used one on alibris.
I was also a big fan of dinosaur books as a kid. As I got older, I discovered the wonderful books of John Horner and to a lesser degree, James Bakker. Terrifically written, well-researched, and darned interesting.
So what are your favorite science books? What books of a scientific bent have you read that have made you more interested in the subject?
Did science lead you to science fiction, or vice-versa?
And as always, what have you read lately?
I’m about 50 pages from done on the C book. It has NEVER taken me this long to read a book before. Ever.
But dang, what a book it is. I’ve enjoyed every page.
We’re up early this week because we have tickets to the steeler game, and I don’t want to repeat last week’s late post-it was way too late for most folks.
Make sure you click the Stephen Hawking link. It’s one of my favorite websites!
Favorite science books – oh, my! How many electrons do you have to spare?
What got me started as a kid on science:
-Golden Nature Guides (a whole series) – Herbert S. Zim
-Isaac Asimov’s non-fiction books of science essays
-The Edge of the Sea and The Sea Around Us – Rachel Carson
-about a zillion different astronomy books
General biology:
-On Growth and Form – D’Arcy W. Thompson
The classic in its field. Written in 1916, updated 1941, and still worth reading if you never have – or even just look at the pictures and read the captions!
-Along the same lines, but more recent:
-The Self-Made Tapestry – Philip Ball, 1999
-Endless Forms Most Beautiful – Sean Carroll, 2005
(The Carroll book is still in the “must read” pile)
Books to force a creationist to read, tied to a chair if necessary:
-The Beak of the Finch – Johnathan Weiner, 1994
-Climbing Mount Improbable – Richard Dawkins, 1996
Interesting and a little more out there:
-Symbiotic Planet (a new view of evolution) – Lynn Margulis, 1998
-Gaia (a new look at life on earth) – J.E.Lovelock, 1979
-Order Out of Chaos – Ilya Prigogine & Isabelle Stengers, 1984
-Life Everywhere (the maverick science of astrobiology) – David Darling, 2001
(this last book served as an answer to “Rare Earth,” which tried to make the case that advanced life is rare in the universe and we are likely unique and alone)
Anything by Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, etc.
-Three Roads to Quantum Gravity – Lee Smolin, 2001
Uh, can I stop now?
Lots of electrons-as my email sig line says-
no trees were harmed in the production of this email, but thousands of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Gaia sounds pretty compelling. I’ll have to look that one up. I had Asimov’s physics book somewhere but I think it got lost in a move.
I hate to pick a favorite anything but if someone really insisted I pick, I probably say “The Mapmakers” by John Noble Wilford. Maps have always fascinated me and this book is an excellent history of the science and adventure of cartography.
I’ve always liked books on paleontology, too. One of my more recent favorites is “Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs” by Michael Novacek.
There are certain science writers that I like so much that I’ll pretty much read anything they write, including Natalie Angier, Marcia Bartusiak, Richard Ellis (the go-to guy for books on the ocean), and David Quammen.
I used to love his “Natural Acts” column in Outside magazine. His comments on the actions of everything from insects to whales have stuck with me over the years, and I’ve made many references to his 4-2 Rule: the further that any creature diverges from four limbs and two eyes, the more alien and frightening it becomes.
I also bought a stack of the National Geographc that had his long defense of Darwin. Keep copies on hand for a school board near you.
I read “Longitude” a few years ago-pretty interesting, but I loved Umberto Eco’s fiction take on the same subject, “the island of the day before”.
I love looking at maps. I can pore over an atlas for hours.
I’ve been lucky enough to meet Baker several times and even spend a little time with him on a dig. One of my heros (and Baker’s), John Ostrom, who practically reinvented dinosaur science, died last month. He’ll be missed. Ostrom was one of the stars of Adrian Desmond’s The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs, the book that made the change in the way scientists were viewing dinosaurs clearer to the public. His work also inspired a lot of Jurassic Park (except the miserable plotting, idiotic comments on chaos, and flat as a pancake dialog — all of that is pure Crichton).
It’s been a few years now since I’ve been out to a dig site, and I’m afraid I’ve lost my bone-spotting cred. I’m going to have to dental pick a lot of hadrosaurs out of the ground before I get back a plum role like I had with the last crew. I was the guy who got to walk the property and spot the bone beds before we settled down to excavate. Wandering around South Dakota with tattered hat and canteen, looking for outcrops of dino. Could life get better?
Oh, while I’m in the dino frame of mind, I’ll take a slight tangent and mention that I was also priviledged to meet Stephen Jay Gould on a couple of occassions. Anyone who wants to sharpen their skills for their next encounter with “Intelligent Design” could do a lot worse than to sit down with one of Gould’s collections of essays. From “The Panda’s Thumb” to “Wonderful Life,” these books are chock full of keen insights, fascinating statistics (did you ever think you’d see those two words together?), and cool baseball analogies.
Finally, as always when a book diary comes up, I am compelled to tell you that you could be reading “Devil’s Tower,” “Devil’s Engine,” or the fine News from the Edge series. Carry on.
Oh, and I should mention, I don’t like Horner. Not because he doesn’t write well, but because I’ve found him in person to be… well, something of an arsehole.
He and Bakker do share one trait: neither one would surrender one of their pet theories even if a T-Rex was muching on their toes.
you got that nailed. That’s one of the things that tickles me so much about them, they have such strong opinions about something that happened 65 million years ago.
Gould is another favorite I forgot to mention-thanks for reminding me!