Slow in spots, but a compelling look inside big science at one of its least admirable moments.
Blow-by-blow account of how a Bell Labs researcher scammed his colleagues and the physics community.
Former New Scientist editor Reich looks at the career of German researcher Jan Hendrik Schön, who claimed to have built electronic chips that performed amazing feats. Supposedly made of crystallized organic materials, the chips promised radical breakthroughs in computer technology. After graduating from the University of Konstanz, Schön came to the attention of Bertram Batlogg, a highly respected Bell Labs manager who specialized in superconductivity. In 1998, searching for a junior researcher to work with organic crystals he hoped might replace silicon as the basis of chips, Batlogg took Schön on the recommendation of Ernst Bucher, who had overseen Schön’s doctorate thesis. Reich is undecided whether Schön was already fabricating data from his experiments, but the author does show that he already had a habit of fudging calculations to make his results resemble the most probable curve. He also hated to disagree with his colleagues. This, Reich argues, led him to exploit the margin of error in his experimental results to make his findings match expectations. But in the fast-paced atmosphere of Bell Labs, something beyond the ordinary was expected. Schön began to publish a series of papers in leading journals, claiming increasingly spectacular results: an organic laser, a light-emitting transistor, even a transistor made from a single molecule. All were faked. Reich meticulously documents Schön’s rise to stardom, the doubts when others failed to replicate his experiments and his exposure as a fraud. Along the way, she examines the culture that permitted him to succeed for as long as he did.
Slow in spots, but a compelling look inside big science at one of its least admirable moments.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-230-22467-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
A tiny book, not much bigger than a pamphlet, with huge potential impact.
A collection of articulate, forceful speeches made from September 2018 to September 2019 by the Swedish climate activist who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Speaking in such venues as the European and British Parliaments, the French National Assembly, the Austrian World Summit, and the U.N. General Assembly, Thunberg has always been refreshingly—and necessarily—blunt in her demands for action from world leaders who refuse to address climate change. With clarity and unbridled passion, she presents her message that climate change is an emergency that must be addressed immediately, and she fills her speeches with punchy sound bites delivered in her characteristic pull-no-punches style: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.” In speech after speech, to persuade her listeners, she cites uncomfortable, even alarming statistics about global temperature rise and carbon dioxide emissions. Although this inevitably makes the text rather repetitive, the repetition itself has an impact, driving home her point so that no one can fail to understand its importance. Thunberg varies her style for different audiences. Sometimes it is the rousing “our house is on fire” approach; other times she speaks more quietly about herself and her hopes and her dreams. When addressing the U.S. Congress, she knowingly calls to mind the words and deeds of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy. The last speech in the book ends on a note that is both challenging and upbeat: “We are the change and change is coming.” The edition published in Britain earlier this year contained 11 speeches; this updated edition has 16, all worth reading.
A tiny book, not much bigger than a pamphlet, with huge potential impact.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-14-313356-8
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
McPhee (Irons in the Fire, 1997, etc.) winds up his artful geohistory of the US by going deep into the heartland—Kansas, Nebraska—in pursuit of deep time: the Precambrian. Included in this collection are his four previous forays into geology—Basin and Range (1981, which, to encapsulate, delineated plate tectonics), In Suspect Terrain (1983, Appalachian geohistory and some broadsides at plate tectonic theory), Rising from the Plains (1986, Wyoming curiosities and environmental conundrums), and Assembling California (1993, a showcase for active tectonics). Here he adds "Crossing the Craton"—craton being the rock basement of the continent—delving into the realms of "isotopic and chemical signatures, cosmological data, and conjecture," in the company of geochronologist Randy Van Schmus. McPhee has a way of making deep structures seem freestanding, right there to ogle: "the walls of the rift are three thousand feet sheer," they're also 600 feet below the surface. Dexterous as ever, McPhee takes on the creation—early island arcs and vulcanism and microcontinents—and tells it with all the power and simplicity a genesis story deserves.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-10520-0
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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