The importance and pleasure of science’s multicultural history gets a proper hearing, and a stout set of legs to stand on.
The often suppressed or overlooked scientific work of non-Western thinkers is given a clear-eyed airing by science historian Teresi (The God Particle, not reviewed) and found to be deeply impressive.
Teresi thought he’d attempt to show the limited contributions of non-Europeans to the sciences. It was to be a clarifying response to the outlandish claims being posited of the capabilities of ancient sciences, but that aim, says the author, was “overtaken by the pleasure of discovering mountains of unappreciated human industry, four thousand years of scientific discoveries by peoples I had been taught to disregard.” For skeptic Teresi, science is the logical and systematic study of nature and the physical world, usually involving experimentation and theory, with a measure of falsification thrown in, so not just any circumstantial tidbit will do. That he comes up with a whole lot of good stuff in math, chemistry, cosmology, astronomy, physics, geology, and technology is a given: the early Indians’ use of zero and negative numbers, and their enduring atomist theories of matter; Sumerian algebra; remarkable Oceanic star maps and New World optical snakes; Chinese alchemists’ empirical familiarity with the conservation of mass; the vulcanized rubber of the Quechuan Indians; Andean freeze-dried potatoes. What’s at stake is Western scientific heritage and pride, which must now take its place at the table not only with Thales, Aristotle, Galileo, and Newton but with Fu His, the Ishango Bone, the Urdi lemma, and the Tusi couple. Teresi explores the importance of empirically based theorems vis-à-vis proof-based theorems—the Pythagorean triplets relative to the Babylonian triplets, for example, and their respective places in the foundation of algebra—drawing a bead on the philosophical underpinnings of proof methods in different traditions, be they intuitive, rational, empirical, constructivist, analytic, or heuristic, and demonstrating the value of different logical pathways.
The importance and pleasure of science’s multicultural history gets a proper hearing, and a stout set of legs to stand on.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-684-83718-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Weisman quietly unfolds his sobering cautionary tale, allowing us to conclude what we may about the balancing act that...
Nicely textured account of what the Earth would look like if humans disappeared.
Disaster movies have depicted the State of Liberty poking out from the ground and empty cities overgrown with trees and vines, but what would really happen if, for one reason or another, every single one of us vanished from the planet? Building on a Discover magazine article, Weisman (Journalism/Univ. of Arizona; An Echo in My Blood, 1999, etc.) addresses the question. There are no shocks here—nature goes on. But it is unsettling to observe the processes. Drawing on interviews with architects, biologists, engineers, physicists, wildlife managers, archaeologists, extinction experts and many others willing to conjecture, Weisman shows how underground water would destroy city streets, lightning would set fires, moisture and animals would turn temperate-zone suburbs into forests in 500 years and 441 nuclear plants would overheat and burn or melt. “Watch, and maybe learn,” writes the author. Many of his lessons come from past developments, such as the sudden disappearance of the Maya 1,600 years ago and the evolution of animals and humans in Africa. Bridges will fall, subways near fault lines in New York and San Francisco will cave in, glaciers will wipe away much of the built world and scavengers will clean our human bones within a few months. Yet some things will persist after we’re gone: bronze sculptures, Mount Rushmore (about 7.2 millions years, given granite’s erosion rate of one inch every 10,000 years), particles of everything made of plastic, manmade underground malls in Montreal and Moscow. In Hawaii, lacking predators, cows and pigs will rule.
Weisman quietly unfolds his sobering cautionary tale, allowing us to conclude what we may about the balancing act that nature and humans need to maintain to survive.Pub Date: July 10, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-34729-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
PERSPECTIVES
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all...
Science writer Ackerman (Ah-Choo!: The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold, 2010, etc.) looks at the new science surrounding avian intelligence.
The takeaway: calling someone a birdbrain is a compliment. And in any event, as Ackerman observes early on, “intelligence is a slippery concept, even in our own species, tricky to define and tricky to measure.” Is a bird that uses a rock to break open a clamshell the mental equivalent of a tool-using primate? Perhaps that’s the wrong question, for birds are so unlike humans that “it’s difficult for us to fully appreciate their mental capabilities,” given that they’re really just small, feathered dinosaurs who inhabit a wholly different world from our once-arboreal and now terrestrial one. Crows and other corvids have gotten all the good publicity related to bird intelligence in recent years, but Ackerman, who does allow that some birds are brighter than others, points favorably to the much-despised pigeon as an animal that “can remember hundreds of different objects for long periods of time, discriminate between different painting styles, and figure out where it’s going, even when displaced from familiar territory by hundreds of miles.” Not bad for a critter best known for bespattering statues in public parks. Ackerman travels far afield to places such as Barbados and New Caledonia to study such matters as memory, communication, and decision-making, the last largely based on visual cues—though, as she notes, birds also draw ably on other senses, including smell, which in turn opens up insight onto “a weird evolutionary paradox that scientists have puzzled over for more than a decade”—a matter of the geometry of, yes, the bird brain.
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all their diversity will want to read this one.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-521-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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