A broad and revealing study of a little-known and often unflattering chapter of science.
An examination of the scientific fad of collecting brains of the famous in hopes of discovering the key to their genius.
Burrell (Mathematics/Univ. of Mass, Amherst; The Words We Live By, 1997) begins with the famous scene from the film Frankenstein where a scientist compares the brains of a genius and a criminal—a scene that appears nowhere in Mary Shelley’s novel but neatly suggests the prevailing attitude toward brains. The notion that the size and shape of a brain was key to its thinking power came originally from phrenology, and, tracing the careers of the early phrenologists, Burrell points out that despite the failure of their program of using skull shape to diagnose mental capacity, they nonetheless carried forward the radical notion that the mind is a direct consequence of physical structures of the brain. Later scientists removed, preserved, and examined the brains of both of those geniuses and violent criminals in an attempt to discover the structural differences underlying behavior. Many of those researchers—among them a number of American doctors and scientists—formed clubs with the object of donating their own brains for postmortem examination and the benefit of science. Sadly, little useful scientific work was done. Walt Whitman's brain was accidentally destroyed before it could be examined, and others got only perfunctory analysis. Worse yet, as in the case of the Italian criminologist Lombroso, some of the scientists’ work was later taken out of context and used to justify genocide and racism. Or, in the case of Lenin’s brain, the examining scientist cynically used the opportunity to gain funding for other work. In a useful concluding chapter, Burrell points out that, even today, the gains of brain science are at best controversial.
A broad and revealing study of a little-known and often unflattering chapter of science.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-50128-5
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Well, of course E = mc2; that's the last in chronological order of the five favorites that Guillen extols in this lively exposition of science for the layman. Good Morning America's science host and a Harvard instructor in physics and mathematics, Guillen (Bridges to Infinity, not reviewed) actually goes to great lengths to spare the reader the mathematical details of his equations. Instead, in showing how scientists developed these laws, he spices each chapter with emotional fervor and probes the innermost thoughts of his heroes in a way that scholarly biographers normally eschew. So, for example, we read that Isaac Newton, settled with an intellectual family after unhappier foster homes, ``just that suddenly had the inkling of what it was like to feel normal,'' or that the younger of the Bernoulli brothers (Daniel) was ``raring to flex his intellectual muscles,'' or that to Faraday ``facts were as sacred as scriptural voices.'' Add to the hyperbole the bits about our heroes' childhoods, marriages, scientific rivalries, and feuds (for which the Bernoullis were justly famous), and the result is a crowd- pleasing kind of book designed to make the science as palatable as possible. In fact, Guillen succeeds. With all the juicy bits and spoon-feeding (even using words in equations before symbols), he nicely explains: Newton's law of universal gravitation (with an epilogue on space travel); Bernoulli's law of hydrodynamic pressure (with epilogue on why planes don't fall down); Faraday's law of electromagnetic induction (with epilogue on dynamos); Rudolf Clausius and the second law of thermodynamics (epilogue on entropy and the Krakatoa explosion); and Einstein on special relativity (with epilogue on the atom bomb). Great for high schoolers, the math-anxious but curious, and others who want to knowbut not too much.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-7868-6103-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
A journey along the edge of human comprehension: accessible and even elegant, but a bit overstuffed.
A New York Times science writer contemplates the human compulsion to search for order and purpose in the origin of the universe and the development of life on earth.
Johnson (In the Palaces of Memory, 1990) chooses the spiritually and geologically multilayered landscape of New Mexico as the setting for this impressive meditation. The gnarled terrain is home to a seemingly motley collection of ideologies: the Roman Catholicism of the Spanish conquistadors, the pioneering science of the nuclear physicists of Los Alamos, the mushy crystal-gazing of transplanted New Agers, the overlapping cosmologies of different groups of Tewa Indians. But as Johnson proceeds to show, all these groups share the uniquely human drive to find patterns, to explain reality, to find a comforting reason why we are here. At bottom, is the Big Bang any more comforting or provable than the creation myths of the Tewa? By the time Johnson has finished his own tour of quantum physics, the menagerie of atomic particles begins to seem like nonsense, invented for the convenience of physicists whose experiments needed them. The progress of science turns out to be "a house of cards, each [layer] resting on a shakier foundation and each testifying to our theoretical bravado.'' No matter how ingenious we are, we are still here, stuck on a microdot in the universe. Johnson takes us through some of the best theories: the concept of information as a fundamental force; various attempts to explain the origin of life; the question of whether human complexity is a miraculous fluke of natural selection or an inevitable and repeatable evolution. Johnson's careful and deliberate explanations make you think, which is rare and wonderful, but the blizzard of concepts and scientists may eventually glaze a fascinated reader's wide eyes.
A journey along the edge of human comprehension: accessible and even elegant, but a bit overstuffed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41192-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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