This seems familiar:
It made Feynman think wistfully about the days before the future of science had begun to feel like his mission — the days before physicists changed the universe and became the most potent political force within American science, before institutions with fast-expanding budgets began chasing nuclear physicists like Hollywood stars. He remembered when physics was a game, when he could look at the graceful narrowing curve in three dimensions that water makes as it streams from a tap, and he could take the time to understand why.
I was somewhat disappointed in the 2003 edition of this collection, especially after enjoying so much the last three editions. Perhaps Oliver Sacks and I disagree on what makes science writing good. The two best articles were 1491 by Charles Mann about what the Americas were like before Columbus landed and the effect of the European arrival:
In North America, Indian torches had their biggest impact on the Midwestern prairie, much or most of which was created and maintained by fire. Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country. Is it possible that the Indians changed the Americas more than the invading Europeans did? “The answer is probably yes for most regions for the next 250 years or so” after Columbus, William Denevan wrote, “and for some regions right up to the present time.”
and Atul Gawande’s The Learning Curve, an article on how doctors need to learn on the job (while potentially making costly mistakes) in order to become more effective overall:
In medicine, there has long been a conflict betwenn the imperative to give patients the best possible care and the need to provide novices with expericne. Residencies attempt to mitigate potential harm through supervision and graduated responsibility. And there is reason to think that patients actually benefit from teaching. But there is no avoiding those first few unsteady times a young physician tries to put in a central line, removes a breast cancer, or sew together two segments of colon. No matter how many protections are in place, on average these cases go less well with the novice than with someone experienced.
Rhodes’ followup to The Making of the Atomic Bomb (for which he won a Pulitzer), while not as tight a narrative as its predecessor, was more interesting to me because I was less familiar with the story. In particular, the Soviet espionage effort during WWII was fascinating.
Jared Diamond has written a fantastic book that lays out in simple terms how Europeans came to dominate the rest of the world without resorting to racist notions of Europeans being intrinsically smarter or more gifted than the inhabitants of the rest of the world. Diamond’s thesis is so simple and powerful, it seems, as Erdos would say, to come from “God’s book of proofs”. An illustration of this powerful simplicity is how the orientation of the continents affected the spread of domestication of crops, animals, germs, and ideas (which in turn influenced how fast difference cultures matured):
Why was the spread of crops from the Fertile Crescent so rapid? The answer partly depends on that east-west axis of Eurasia with which I opened this chapter. Localities distributed east and west of each other at the same latitude share exactly the same day length and its seasonal variations. To a lesser degree, they also tend to share similar diseases, regimes of temperature and rainfall, and habitats or biomes (types of vegetation). That’s part of the reason why Fertile Crescent [crops and animals] spread west and east so rapidly: they were already well adapted to the climates of the regions to which they were spreading.
I’ve read so much about science that I was reluctant to pick up Bryson’s book, but I’m a sucker for good but accessible science writing, so I forged ahead anyway. The beginning of the book was interesting but nothing I hadn’t heard before, but once Bryson got to the more recent developments in everything from physics to evolutionary biology, I was hooked. I try to keep up with where science stands today by reading magazine and newspaper articles, but the big picture is hard to visualize that way. Bryson painted that big picture…the last few chapters of the book should be required reading for high school science students who may have learned that protons, neutrons, and electrons are indivisible or that Darwin had the first and final say on how evolution works.
The main thesis of Nonzero is that social complexity of human culture has been increasing since the dawn of man and will continue to do so until forever. Wright argues that non-zero sum games are the culprit: societies get more complex (moving from tribes of hunter gatherers to mutli-trillion dollar global economy) because in order to play ever more lucrative non-zero sum games with an increasing number of people, that’s the way it has to be. It makes a lot of sense.
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