Two years after his death comes the English translation of what one is tempted to describe as Lorenz's goose song, his last formal statement on his beloved greylag geese. A lifetime of observation—which led to the important concepts of critical times in development, of imprinting and innate releasing mechanisms, of ``vacuum activity'' (in the absence of the releasing mechanism), and of the many complex variations and recombinations of behavior patterns or ``ethograms''—is summed up here in detailed descriptions of individual geese as well as in theoretical constructs. Why greylags? Lorenz says it's because when he was a child he wanted to be an owl, but reading Selma Lagerlîf's tale of wild geese convinced him that geese had more fun. Soon followed his first experience with a duckling who became imprinted on him—an event that in retrospect, Lorenz says, led to him being imprinted on birds forever. For the most part, the book is a primer on the behavior of these most social creatures (an isolated greylag is a cripple) with all the titillating tales of pair-bonding and breaking, of ardor and jealousy and hate that make critics cry ``anthropomorphism.'' Lorenz makes no bones about it: For him, geese are analogues to human behavior—their triumph ceremonies, their lamentation cries, their distance calls, and other complex vocal and motor behavior exemplify a philogenetic convergence in evolution. Like humans, geese are aggressive, struggle for rank, show ardor, bravery, and vengeance, are ever-mindful of their fellow creatures and ready to react. It's all told here in the deeply personal terms characteristic of this ardent Austrian. Gooselovers of the world, unite; this is the book for you.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-15-140056-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1991
Categories: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself, 1999, etc.), a man who knows how to track down an explanation and make it confess, asks the hard questions of science—e.g., how did things get to be the way they are?—and, when possible, provides answers.
As he once went about making English intelligible, Bryson now attempts the same with the great moments of science, both the ideas themselves and their genesis, to resounding success. Piqued by his own ignorance on these matters, he’s egged on even more so by the people who’ve figured out—or think they’ve figured out—such things as what is in the center of the Earth. So he goes exploring, in the library and in company with scientists at work today, to get a grip on a range of topics from subatomic particles to cosmology. The aim is to deliver reports on these subjects in terms anyone can understand, and for the most part, it works. The most difficult is the nonintuitive material—time as part of space, say, or proteins inventing themselves spontaneously, without direction—and the quantum leaps unusual minds have made: as J.B.S. Haldane once put it, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” Mostly, though, Bryson renders clear the evolution of continental drift, atomic structure, singularity, the extinction of the dinosaur, and a mighty host of other subjects in self-contained chapters that can be taken at a bite, rather than read wholesale. He delivers the human-interest angle on the scientists, and he keeps the reader laughing and willing to forge ahead, even over their heads: the human body, for instance, harboring enough energy “to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.”
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science into perspective.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-0817-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Categories: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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Undeterred by a subject difficult to pin down, Italian theoretical physicist Rovelli (Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, 2017, etc.) explains his thoughts on time.
Other scientists have written primers on the concept of time for a general audience, but Rovelli, who also wrote the bestseller Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, adds his personal musings, which are astute and rewarding but do not make for an easy read. “We conventionally think of time,” he writes, “as something simple and fundamental that flows uniformly, independently from everything else, uniformly from the past to the future, measured by clocks and watches. In the course of time, the events of the universe succeed each other in an orderly way: pasts, presents, futures. The past is fixed, the future open….And yet all of this has turned out to be false.” Rovelli returns again and again to the ideas of three legendary men. Aristotle wrote that things change continually. What we call “time” is the measurement of that change. If nothing changed, time would not exist. Newton disagreed. While admitting the existence of a time that measures events, he insisted that there is an absolute “true time” that passes relentlessly. If the universe froze, time would roll on. To laymen, this may seem like common sense, but most philosophers are not convinced. Einstein asserted that both are right. Aristotle correctly explained that time flows in relation to something else. Educated laymen know that clocks register different times when they move or experience gravity. Newton’s absolute exists, but as a special case in Einstein’s curved space-time. According to Rovelli, our notion of time dissolves as our knowledge grows; complex features swell and then retreat and perhaps vanish entirely. Furthermore, equations describing many fundamental physical phenomena don’t require time.
As much a work of philosophy as of physics and full of insights for readers willing to work hard.Pub Date: May 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1610-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
Categories: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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