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Science
Review Essays of Academic, Professional & Technical Books in the Humanities & Sciences
General Science
How It Ends: From You to the Universe by Chris Impey (W.W. Norton) "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms," said poet and political activist Muriel Rukeyser. I agree. One of the greatest myths of science is that is consists of nothing more than dull, obdurate facts. The myth dissolves in the face of the powerful narrative that science has created to help us organize and understand the world. We have a story of how the universe grew from a jot of space-time to the splendor of 50 billion galaxies. We have a story of how a broth of molecules on the primeval Earth turned into flesh and blood. And we have a story of how one of the millions of species evolved to hold those 50 billion galaxies inside its head.
This is a book about endings. Science mostly answers the question of how things got to be the way they are. Yet if we stop at the present day, the job is only half done, as every good story needs an ending. Explanation is comforting but as the Danish cartoonist Storm P once said, "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." As a result, the material in this book is rooted in fact but it extends into conjecture. Scientists steer toward the boundary between what they know and what they don't know because that's where the excitement is. Despite the high proportion of speculation, I hope the reader finds the investment in fact more than trifling.
The material moves outward in scale from the human to the cosmic, and outward in time span from the familiar to the nearly eternal. In the first two chapters we confront our own deaths, and then consider the manner of our passing. The third chapter looks at threats to humanity and the fourth considers the likely fate of our species. As feisty apes with more piss and vinegar than wisdom we may not survive troubled adolescence, but visionaries are imagining ways we could transcend the limits of biology. The fifth chapter examines how we are webbed into the biosphere, and the next chapter looks at threats to the whole ecosystem. In all this, our atoms continue being part of the story.
In the second half of the narrative we move to the big picture of the future. There's no place like home for us to hop to if we mess up the planet, but beyond the Solar System there are likely to be millions of Earth clones. Going off-Earth may be the only way to keep our story going for billions of years. After considering habitable planets and the fate of the Sun, the narrative turns to our city—the Milky Way—and looks at the exotic fate of its stellar denizens. Finally, we project the fate of the universe and consider the possibility that this 14-billion-year saga might not be real, or the likelihood that it's just one of the stories that space and time have concocted.
They're esoteric, but the stories are about us. Even when considering our place among the galaxies, there are aspects of the universe that are conducive to our existence. The universe may not be mindful of us, but it turned the bed down and put a mint on the pillow like it knew we were coming. Time is the ruler for these stories. We follow it on scales from a heartbeat to the 1080 years it takes for the galaxy to dissipate. Physicist John Wheeler reminded us that we take it for granted when he said, "Time is what keeps things from happening all at once."
The writing is aimed at the general reader. I've tried to keep jargon to a minimum; essential terms are defined in a glossary. Technical details and asides are confined to the endnotes. The narrative is animated by vignettes at the beginning of each chapter, thumbnail sketches of top researchers, and even by some personal anecdotes, all of which serve as reminders that science is an essentially human activity, as complex and occasionally flawed as people themselves.
Everyone likes a good ending. But they're easier to relish when they're fictional, like the catharsis of a great movie or book, when the tension is resolved and all the loose ends are wrapped up neatly. This book is factual and it talks about the actual death of our planet, our star, our galaxy, us. It's not a cue to be glum, however, because the universe is filled with such magnificent possibility.
This project has taken me far beyond the bounds of my training and normal scholarship into chemistry, geology, biology, and sociology. I've benefited from conversations with Fred Adams, Nick Bostrom, Carol Cleland, Frank Drake, Carlos Frenk, Andrea Ghez, Richard Gott, David Grinspoon, Phil Hopkins, Lisa Kaltenegger, Michael Kearl, Ray Kurzweil, Chris McKay, Katy Pilachowski, Martin Rees, and colleagues across the University of Arizona. Any errors due to insecure grounding or over-reaching into alien fields are entirely mine.
I made heavy use of the Internet, so I thank Sergey Brin and Larry Page for keeping a billion Web pages indexed at my fingertips. If they could manage the trick of returning a search in the form of the answer to a question I asked, they'd really be onto something. I'm grateful to the Templeton Foundation for funding the project that brought many of the people in this book my way, and to NSF and NASA for funding my research on the science of endings large and small. I acknowledge the tranquil and reflective environment of the Aspen Center for Physics, where several of these chapters were written. Thanks to my agent Anna Ghosh for steering me through the shoals of the publishing world and finding good homes for my work. I acknowledge Angela von der Lippe at Norton for her expert guidance. I'm grateful to my friends, near and far, for their support and for rescuing me into the real world when I venture too far into the rabbit hole of writing.
Fossils at a Glance by Clare Milsom & Susan Rigby (At a Glance Series: Blackwell Publishing) Fossils provide a powerful tool for the study of the nearly 4-billion-year history of life, and its role in the evolution of Earth systems. Fossils also provide important data for evolutionary studies, and contribute to our understanding of the extinction of organisms and the origins of modern biodiversity. As indicators of past environments and through their ability to define a high-resolution relative timescale, fossils make a vital contribution to the earth and environmental sciences. Furthermore, fossils provide a narrative for life on Earth and reveal how life has adapted to different environments and responded to the challenges of a dynamic system. The natural experiment of life on Earth is currently the only window onto the ways in which life changes in response to external pressure, and also the only window onto how life can change a planet. More
Can a renowned mathematician successfully outwit the stock market? Not when his
biggest investment is WorldCom.
A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market by John Allen Paulos (Basic Books)
From America's wittiest writer on mathematics, a lively and insightful book on
the workings of stock markets and the basic irrationality of our dreams of
wealth.
In A
Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, best-selling author John Allen Paulos
employs his trademark stories, vignettes, paradoxes, and puzzles to address
every thinking reader's curiosity about the market-Is it efficient? Is it
random? Is there anything to technical analysis, fundamental analysis, and other
supposedly time-tested methods of picking stocks? How can one quantify risk?
What are the most common scams? Are there any approaches to investing that truly
outperform the major indexes?
More
The Nobel Scientists: A Biographical Encyclopedia by George Thomas Kurian
(Prometheus) is a biographical reference that celebrates one hundred years of
the Nobel Prize in 2001. It contains the profiles of 466 scientists and
chronicles their lives and achievements in, as far as possible, simple,
nontechnical language. Each laureate receives a separate entry, even when the
prize was awarded in a given year to two or three persons. This may mean some
overlap, but makes each entry self-contained.