A thoughtful analysis of today’s unprecedented pace of change and what the future may hold.
The future is almost here, and it won’t be that bad, according to this mostly optimistic forecast from an engineer.
Since the primitive stone hand ax from 40,000 years ago, technical innovation—i.e., engineering—has driven progress, writes Browne (The Glass Closet: Why Coming Out Is Good Business, 2014, etc.), the former CEO of BP, president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and chairman of the Tate Gallery. Throughout the centuries, he emphasizes, each new innovation has been controversial in some way. Socrates denounced writing as a destroyer of memory. Observers warned that the printing press would overwhelm the world with nonsense, a critique also applied to the internet. Both criticisms have merit, Browne points out, but there are advantages. “The way people choose to use an innovation will determine its impact on society,” he writes. “But every engineered product will also generate its own set of consequences, both intentional and unintentional, as well as constructive and destructive….Progress is not delivered with an instruction manual spelling out the safe and responsible use of new inventions.” Unlike the usual overview of innovation, the author skims the Egyptians, Romans, Renaissance, and Industrial Revolution, stopping in the mid-20th century when digital technology caught everyone’s attention. Few deny that computers are transforming our lives, and critics claim this will produce mass unemployment. However, Browne points out that this has been the doomsayer’s mantra since the 1960s, and so far, automation has created many jobs and eliminated far fewer. DNA manipulation, big data, and high-tech imaging will make us smarter, healthier, and longer lived, although not yet. Despite the spread of nuclear weapons, the world is becoming less violent; mutual assured destruction is being replaced by mutual assured disruption through cyberwarfare and terrorism.
A thoughtful analysis of today’s unprecedented pace of change and what the future may hold.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-212-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
The author of the authoritative but controversial German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power (not reviewed) here answers his critics and expands on several themes having to do with Nazism and science. The book's opening essays deal with Nazi physicist and Nobel laureate Johannes Stark, who tried to banish Einsteinian physics from Germany; with Werner Heisenberg, the brilliant young theorist who had to defend himself against Nazi charges of being a ``White Jew''; and with the Nazis' political subordination of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. In the concluding chapters, Walker analyzes the ``Farm Hall reports,'' secretly recorded and transcribed conversations among leading German scientists held captive at a British estate right after the war. The author's observations are sensitive and penetrating, and for the most part he defends himself ably against critics who have accused him of overstating the competence of nuclear physicists who did bomb-related work for Hitler and of being too forgiving of their moral failures. Walker's efforts are marred, however, by a stubborn streak: He greatly understates the gravity of the errors Heisenberg made at Farm Hall in his first critical-mass calculations, and he is much too easy on Heisenberg's friend and collaborator Carl Friedrich von WeizsÑcker, who argued that the German scientists had ``withheld'' from Hitler a bomb they could have built. The book also suffers sometimes from inexact diction, which has made Walker vulnerable to gratuitous criticism before and will continue to give rise to misunderstandings. As the author himself points out, the debates over the Nazi atomic bomb have persisted beyond all reason, considering that they came nowhere near building one. But for the true Nazi nuclear- physics junkie, this latest work will provide a high-octane fix.
Pub Date: May 30, 1995
ISBN: 0-306-44941-2
Page Count: 315
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
A whopping life of Thomas Huxley (182595), who did much to bring Victorian-era science to a lay audience. History has tended to remember Huxley as a stalking horse for Charles Darwin, a man who popularized evolutionary theory but did not himself contribute much to it. Desmond (Darwin, 1992), a biologist and historian of science, does much to correct this view- -albeit somewhat breathlessly. It is true, he writes, that Huxley, a physician born into a family of decidedly modest means, spent much of his time speaking to workingmen's associations and other working-class groups about ape ancestors and cave men; it is also true that he popularized the word ``scientist'' and coined the term ``agnostic,'' and that he wrote the first article on evolution for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Yet Huxley made several important advances in the study of the polyp- and medusa-bearing animals, the Coelenterata. Like Darwin, he saw the wonders of the natural world at first hand, having sailed as ship's doctor and scientist on a Beagle-like voyage that introduced him to odd creatures and ecological mysteries; he was thus equipped to appreciate evolutionary arguments concerning the great variability of species over time and space. Huxley was in many ways Darwin's equal, Desmond suggests, but was marshaled as a lieutenant into the cause of natural selection after abandoning his anti-utilitarian view of nature, an abandonment that made him a follower, not a leader. Desmond is too fond of overwrought prose (he describes a dissecting-room cadaver as ``a cold body and a dead brain that had once glowed with hopes and desires''), but he makes a compelling case for our viewing Huxley as a crucial figure in the 19th-century social transformation toward the modern world. This is an unfailingly interesting contribution to the history of science. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-201-95987-9
Page Count: 848
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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