An absorbing, persuasive reminder that science is not a direct march to the truth.
Astrophysicist and popular science writer Livio (Is God a Mathematician?, 2009, etc.) delivers entertaining accounts of how five celebrated scientists went wrong.
Darwin proposed that if one individual has a heritable advantage, such as strength, speed or brains, more of its offspring will survive, so the species will acquire this advantage and evolve. This would be impossible if, as almost everyone believed in Darwin's day, inherited traits blended, so that a black cat and a white cat produced a gray kitten. Luckily, Mendelian genetics revealed that traits reside in distinct genes that are transmitted intact. The famous 19th-century physicist Lord Kelvin calculated erroneously that the Earth was about 100 million years old, too young for evolution to occur. Linus Pauling published an incorrect structure of DNA in 1953, the year before James Watson and Francis Crick got it right. For Livio, this was perhaps the most inexcusable of blunders: a mixture of poor-quality data, haste and egotism. Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle stuck stubbornly to his 1940s steady-state theory of the universe even as evidence favoring the Big Bang accumulated, ultimately passing the last half of his life as a widely respected crank. Einstein’s 1917 theory of general relativity described an expanding universe. Since everyone considered the universe static, he added a “cosmological constant” to his equations to achieve this, discarding it when astronomers discovered expansion a decade later. Historians quote Einstein calling this his “greatest blunder,” but Livio doubts that he said it. Most of these stories are familiar, but the author’s emphasis on major errors by distinguished scientists, including their reasons and consequences, provides a thoroughly satisfactory experience even for educated readers.
An absorbing, persuasive reminder that science is not a direct march to the truth.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9236-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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