A SCIENTIST IN THE CITY

Popular science author Trefil (Reading the Mind of God, 1989, etc.) turns to those technology-driven forces—more important, in his view, than social, political, and economic ones—that affect how cities grow and die. Specifically, Trefil cites three human ``abilities'': the ability to ``manipulate atoms''—that is, to make new materials, such as the steel that produced the age of skyscrapers; the ability to unlock stored energy, thus replacing muscle power with various engines; and the ability to store and transmit information electrically. His nontechnical discussion of these ``threads'' ranges from the atomic structure of glass (a ``frozen liquid'') to the binary code behind digital computers. These topics aren't necessarily urban matters except as Trefil connects them to, say, limits on building heights or the way trains and cars have changed the shapes of cities. But maintaining boldly that ``there are no longer any technological limits to the kinds of cities we can build,'' he ends by applying his three threads to four futuristic scenarios: the high-rise city (down to the plumbing in a 200-story building); the new suburban edge city shaped by smart highways and fast trains; the virtual city in which most people work at home via computer; and the space colony. Trefil's appeal, as always, is in his painless presentation of the ideas: He beguiles with felicitous analogies (in magnetically-driven high-speed trains, ``you can think of the moving magnets along the side as producing a wave and the train as riding the wave as a surfer'') and telling facts (``Today there is more office space in Tyson Corners than in downtown Miami''), not to mention trivial ones (the term omnibus comes from a hatmaker named Omnes, whose place of business was in front of a stagecoach office). Laypeople's science from one of the best in the business.