Book review: Great Physicists

I just finished reading William Cropper’s book Great Physicists, published in 2001 by Oxford University Press. It’s a wonderful book of the life stories of 30 of the leading figures in the field of physics, from Galileo to Stephen Hawking.

I was aware, at least marginally, of most of the people in the book, but I also encountered several surprises. My first surprise was to learn about Sadi Carnot who can, in some respects, be considered the founder of modern thermodynamics. I had never heard of him. But Cropper’s thoughtful discussion of Carnot’s ideas about devices that employ heat to produce power (like the steam engine) convinced me that his work was, indeed, original and important.

I was vaguely familiar with the name of Lise Meitner, but I was truly surprised to learn of the tremendous struggles she endured. She had the misfortune to be both female and Jewish– two disadvantages that did not serve her well during the rise of Nazism. She and her nephew Otto Frisch discovered the process by which a uranium atom could be split in two by a neutron. It was an absolutely stunning idea– one that certainly deserved a Nobel prize– but although her friend and collaborator Otto Hahn won the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission, neither Lise nor her nephew were recognized. She had great difficulty escaping from Nazi Germany during the war, and she met with many barriers to recognition and success after.

I was surprised by the stuffiness of Edwin Hubble who, in later life, exaggerated his wartime bravado (during WWI), his career as a lawyer, and his achievements as an athlete. Apparently he did that to conceal his middle class background from his wife’s wealthy relatives.

I was stunned to learn of the hostility that Sir Arthur Eddington expressed toward Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar’s deduction that stars larger than about 1.4 time the mass of the Sun cannot collapse into a white dwarf. That rule is now known as the Chandrasekhar Limit, and it has long since been accepted as a fundamental fact about stellar evolution.

I was surprised that Johannes Kepler was not included in the book. In my view, Kepler was a genius of the first rank. But I suppose you can’t write a book about everyone of importance in the history of science.

And I was puzzled and saddened to read that Ludwig Boltzmann committed suicide while he, his wife, and his daughter were traveling near Trieste. He was clearly on the forefront of thermodynamics research at the time, and he was loved as an instructor. But apparently he was also prone to severe bouts of depression.

So many of these stories are full of vitality– and a sense of wonder. That, I suppose, is the main lesson of this book. All of the subjects appear enraptured by their love of the subject. From the indomitable Marie Curie (the only person to win two Nobel prizes in two different subjects), to the casual Albert Einstein to the reclusive Paul Dirac– all of these people exhibit first and foremost a love of the quest, the search for the secrets of nature. That sense of wonder is what I think is most the most enduring lesson of this book. A very good read indeed.

Book Review: Pathogenesis

Many years ago– probably 50 or so– I read Rats, Lice, and History by Hans Zinsser at my father’s suggestion. Mr. Zinsser was a biologist who made significant contributions to our knowledge of typhus. That book, published in 1935, really opened my eyes to the impact that diseases have had on the history of the world.

I just finished reading Pathogenesis, A History of the World in Eight Plagues, by Jonathan Kennedy. In many ways it is an update to a book written by William McNeill titled Plagues and Peoples, published in 1976. (I have not read McNeill’s book.) Since that time the technology used to investigate past pathogens has radically improved and has enabled Kennedy to describe the impact that diseases have had on the arc of human history with far greater detail and precision.

The scope of the book is breathtaking. Mr. Kennedy achieves nothing less than a complete rewriting of much of history, from the paleolithic to the present. The book is bursting with detail, it is quite well written, and much of it reads like a thriller.

Why did Homo sapiens replace Neanderthals and Denisovans throughout Europe? Answer: disease.

Why are the people of Europe descended from three distinct population groups– Western Hunter-gatherers with dark skin, dark hair, and light eyes; Neolithic European farmers with olive skin and dark hair who moved into the region about 9,000 years ago; and Steppe Herders, who were tall, light skinned, and fair haired and who swept across Europe about 5,000 years ago? Answer: disease.

Why did the Athenians lose the Peloponnesian War to the Spartans and thereby pave the way for Philip of Macedon to conquer all of Greece? Answer: disease.

Why did the Roman empire come crashing down? Answer: disease.

Why did capitalism replace feudalism in England and in no other European society? Answer: disease.

Why were Europeans able to conquer the powerful cultures of the Aztecs, the Incas, and Native American Indians, despite having vastly inferior numbers? Answer: disease.

Why did the European colonies that were established in North America and the Caribbean rely primarily on African slaves, rather than indentured servants from Europe for their plantations? Answer: disease.

Why were no European powers able to establish colonies in the interior of Africa until the 1870s? Answer: disease.

Why were the slaves of what is now Haiti able to free themselves from their overlords, the French, at a time when the French military was the mightiest in the world? Answer: disease.

It’s a powerful book. It forces you to confront the fact that much of what we think of as human directed events are in fact driven by other factors– especially disease. I was already somewhat prepared for the findings of this book through other readings. But it has a depth and breadth of scholarship that goes far beyond anything I was expecting. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Book review: Hen’s Teeth & Horse’s toes

This book, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes by Stephen Jay Gould, has been sitting unread on my bookshelf for a couple of decades. I finally decided to get around to reading it. I had read an article he wrote many years ago (in Daedalus, I think) and admired it greatly. So I was prepared to be impressed. It was published in 1983.

Mr. Gould taught paleontology and biology at Harvard University. He was also a tremendous writer, and a scholar of the history of biology, geology, and paleontology. This book is a collection of essays he wrote over the course of many years. The topics covered traverse a wide range of issues from his several realms of expertise. Subjects include the parental care habits of boobies, the dazzling originality of Nicolaus Steno’s landmark work Prodromus to a dissertation on a solid body naturally contained within a solid, the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, the “Monkey” trial, the Piltdown conspiracy, the proper classification of Zebras, and the teeth of hens and the toes of horses.

These essays are masterfully written, impeccably documented, and wonderfully diverse. The one element they have in common is the theory of evolution– its principles, its evidence, its elegance, and its many critics. It’s impossible, really, to summarize this book. The subject matter is too broad and the evidence and arguments are too subtle to characterize in a brief overview.

But what emerges unquestionably from these essays is Mr. Gould’s love and mastery of his studies. He was unquestionably a scholar in the highest sense– one who was driven by boundless curiosity and who loved nothing more than learning. These essays are true models of the very best in expository writing on difficult scientific matters. I would encourage anyone to read them.

Book Review: Dune Messiah

I had read Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune many years ago, when I was in college. I even took a college class from Frank Herbert. But I had never read the second book in his series, Dune Messiah. Recently I had seen Part 2 of the new film version of Dune and had seen the director Villeneuve interviewed on TV. He said that they were considering making a Part 3 that would be based on Dune Messiah, so I decided I had better read it.

I’ll begin by saying that this is a book that sorely needs a glossary. There are a lot of words that Herbert invented for his books, and it would have been really helpful to me if it were possible to look some of them up.

By the time I was finished with the book I felt that there were a number of loose ends that I wished he had tied off. To avoid spoilers, I won’t mention them all here– but the very first character introduced in the book, Bronso of Ix, was one such dangling piece.

From a pure “writing as craft” point of view the book violates virtually everything that present day tastes dictate. For example, Herbert has many scenes in which multiple people are involved, and for which the personal perspectives of several characters are narrated in sequence. That’s called “head hopping” in contemporary parlance– and it’s considered a grave sin that proper writers should never employ. Personally, I thought it worked alright in most cases– but then I think that many contemporary standards about what constitutes proper writing today are highly contrived. I especially rebel at the rules regarding the use of numerals in written text– but that’s probably best left for another essay.

The first two thirds of the book is mostly head games. We encounter several of the adversaries of the Atreides family and we learn in great detail their motivations and impulses. To avoid spoilers, I won’t get into specifics. By about two thirds of the way in I thought I wasn’t going to like the outcome and that all of the angst and vitriol of the many personal narratives amounted to so much overblown hyperbole. But as it turned out I did like the ending. Or at least I found it a fitting ending for the story line as it was developed. It’s a very wordy book, and I personally felt that a great deal of its wordiness went off in unresolved directions. That was probably the greatest contributor to my sense of loose ends.

One curious detail: At one point in the narrative Paul Muad’Dib mentions the atrocities of several humans from Earth history. He specifically mentions Hitler and Genghis Khan, and he attributed 4 million deaths to Genghis Khan. Today’s research pegs that number at something closer to 40 million. I don’t doubt that Herbert was using what were probably regarded as the best known numbers at the time, and of course we’ll never know the true count. I just thought it odd that the number he used was one tenth the present day number. It shows, I think, just how little Genghis Khan’s impact on the medieval world was understood.

I have spoken elsewhere about faster-than-light travel. If you haven’t read that blog entry, here’s the summary: I don’t believe in it. And consequently I don’t believe in galactic empires. In Herbert’s universe traveling across a galaxy, or across the universe, is accomplished by “folding space.” That sounds very technologically cool, but there is no physical basis for such a thing. The premise of the Dune series is that there is a single emperor who presides over the entire universe. That’s possible because of human mastery of the folding of space. And since I don’t buy into the concept of folding space, I can’t really buy into the fundamental setting of the story.

Dune Messiah is about Paul’s role as emperor of the known universe– and as the figurehead of a religious cult. Regardless of whether you accept the notion of a universal empire, it’s a good premise. It’s the tension between Paul the emperor and Paul the religious figurehead that is the real driver of the narrative. Paul won the position of emperor by defeating his predecessor, but his role as a figurehead was thrust upon him by his adoring followers. Again, it’s a good tension, and one that made Paul’s character complex and engaging. But I also think this aspect of the story often got smothered by the wordiness of Herbert’s introspective narrations. It’s yet another dangling element.

In addition to the emperor/figurehead duality Paul struggles throughout the book with his prescience. Because he drank the Water of Life (in the first book) he can see into the future. But the visions he has of the future are often incomplete, or blurry. Sometimes it sounds like Paul sees absolutely every detail; and other times he misses major aspects of the course of the future. So is he truly prescient, or is he not? And if he’s truly prescient, and if he knows exactly what’s going to happen, what can he do about it? Can he avoid the pain that he envisions, or must he sublimate his feelings of revulsion and simply go with the flow? It’s a constant tension throughout the story, and in my opinion it was never adequately resolved.

I don’t believe in prescience. I don’t see how it will ever be possible for anyone– regardless of how many drugs they may consume– to see the future. In mathematics there is a concept known as “chaos.” It’s defined as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” That phrase has been rendered in everyday speech as “the Butterfly Effect.” The idea is that if a butterfly flaps its wings in Rio de Janeiro, six months later the weather in London will be different from what it would otherwise have been. Tiny changes in a complex system today can have a ripple effect that can drastically alter the course of future events. Nonetheless, the question of whether prescience is a good thing or a bad thing seems like it might be worth discussing. It’s a recurring theme throughout the book.

To me the most frustrating aspect of the book is that I still don’t think I know who the real players were in the narrative. I can’t add any detail around that statement without spoiling the entire story. But as I read it there were things that some of the leading characters did that they could not have done without a highly detailed prescience of their own. And it was never made clear as to just how they obtained that level of prescience.

The first book– Dune— was very engaging. There was much more action– and violence. And it arrived at a satisfying conclusion when Paul defeated the emperor of the known universe and assumed control if the empire’s most important resource– spice. This book is much more cerebral. There’s far less action, far less violence. But there’s also more introspection and deliberation. And more to think about.

Book review: Proust and the Squid

This book, “Proust and the Squid,” was published in 2007 by Maryanne Wolf. She is a professor of child development at Tufts University where she is also director of the Center for Reading and Language Research.

The title is rather misleading in the respect that although the author provided an interesting analysis of Proust’s writing, she said very little about squids. But it does provide a wonderful history of the invention of writing and of the teaching of both reading and writing. It explains that the human brain has no natural structures that are explicitly designed for reading and that therefore the brain must employ more generic structures to accomplish the amazing feats of both writing and reading.

The history of writing is one of the most fascinating developments in history. The two locales where writing was first invented are ancient Sumer and ancient Egypt. Sumerian writing began as a pictographic system in which written signs represented physical objects such as a house, the sun, or a sheep. But it quickly morphed into what is known as a logographic system in which characters can also represent abstract concepts such as love, anger, or hope.

The Sumerian writing system at first did not represent sounds– but later it evolved to include the sounds of some syllables. In this form it was what is known as a logosyllabary– a writing system that incorporates both logographic images and syllabic sounds. It must have been a very difficult system to master.

The Sumerians also developed a process for teaching the young how to learn this very important tool. We have clear evidence that shows that the Sumerians taught reading with lists of words that were memorized. This was a significant advance in the respect that the Sumerians realized that only the young can carry the knowledge of how to read and write into the future.

This book was written in 2007, and at that time a debate was raging as to whether the Sumerians or the Egyptians were the first to develop a complete writing system. Ms. Wolf presents evidence for the priority of Egypt as follows:

New linguistic evidence, however, suggests that an entirely independent invention of writing in Egypt took place either around 3100 BCE; or, on the basis of still controversial evidence from German Egyptologists in Abydos, as early as 3400 BCE– earlier than the Sumerian script. If this finding proves correct, hieroglyphs would be the first major adaptation in the evolution of the reading brain.
Proust and the Squid, pg. 43

Ms. Wolf devotes an entire chapter to the objections Socrates raised about the propagation of writing. His chief concern was that a written body of text, however erudite, cannot engage in a conversation with its reader. His entire style of teaching– the eponymous technique known as the Socratic method– involved engaging the student in a dialogue, an exchange of ideas, a debate. Written words, Socrates objected, cannot engage the reader in debate and that reading allows citizens to arrive at the wrong conclusions from what they read:

Underneath his ever-present humor and seasoned irony lies a profound fear that literacy without the guidance of a teacher or of a society permits dangerous access to knowledge. Reading presented Socrates with a new version of Pandora’s box: once written language was released there could be no accounting for what would be written, who would read it, or how readers might interpret it.
Proust and the Squid, pg. 77

That observation rings especially true today. The entire QAnon movement was launched by people who found evidence of dark conspiracies lurking behind otherwise ordinary events: a cabal of pedophiles who secretly control the entire world economy from the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington D.C.; space satellites operated by Jews who use them to start forest fires in California; a vast conspiracy of Chinese spies who have infiltrated the deep state and are working tirelessly to turn the entire United States into a Communist gulag. So yes, we have seen and experienced the ill effects of the mass availability of raw data unencumbered by interpretive guidance.

The core of the book is about the actual process of reading. How does the brain actually read anything? Again, the brain doesn’t have any structures that are specifically dedicated to reading. There is no evolutionary reason why humans in hunter-gathering societies would have benefited from reading– and so our genes don’t encode for either reading or writing. Rather, the brain has more abstract pattern matching capabilities– and these have been adapted to the purposes of writing and reading. Ms. Wolf does a wonderful job of relating the latest scientific research (as of 2007) on the subject of the neurobiology of reading. And the astounding fact is that a typical expert reader is able to identify and properly interpret a word in half a second or less. The entire process is one that requires several separate components of the brain– components that work in coordination, some working in parallel– to arrive at an understanding of the thought or story being conveyed by the symbols on the page.

Ms. Wolf also explores cases in which the skill of reading is never fully mastered. What is it that goes wrong? Her answer is that because the process of reading is so complex, and because it involves so many separate brain structures, there are in fact many ways it can go wrong. She provides many interesting examples, along with the wise and compassionate observation that persons with reading disabilities generally have differences in the structures of their brains. They’re not lazy or bored– they’re just different.

I’ll relate an experience of my own. Many years ago I taught high school mathematics classes from pre-algebra through second year calculus. For my geometry classes, I required my students to write a paper– the kind of paper one would write for an English class– but on a topic of mathematics. One year I had a student who was a 9th grader in my Geometry class, putting her roughly one year ahead of where she “should” have been. She was a very good student and was earning an “A” in my class. But when I saw her written paper I was shocked. I couldn’t believe the number and the kinds of spelling errors in her paper! She was the first example of a student with true dyslexia that I had ever encountered. She was decidedly NOT lazy– she just couldn’t spell. I found out that she was working with a special dyslexia tutor. I talked to the tutor and learned that she used a spelling test to determine which students were most likely to benefit from her tutelage.

Ms. Wolf presents a completely different method for diagnosing dyslexia– a speed test. Dyslexic readers are much slower at identifying characters and/or words. I’ll let Ms. Wolf describe her encounter with one such child:

Typically, children who qualify for our study are struggling readers who have been recommended by their teachers, and who have then passed a battery of strenuous tests. Not Luke. He basically recommended himself for our reading intervention. When asked why, he solemnly responded, “I have to read my arias. I can’t memorize them anymore!” Luke, it turned out, sang in the Boston Children’s Opera. He was a gifted singer, but he could no longer keep up with children who could read their lyrics.
Proust and the Squid, pg. 134-135

The book presents a provocative and wonderfully documented analysis of how reading can go wrong– and what can be done about it. And the heartwarming message of this analysis is that the majority of readers with dyslexia can be helped– if they are given the right training.

This is a terrific book. If you don’t believe in dyslexia, if you have dyslexic friends or family members, if you want to understand how the marvelously complex process of reading actually works, or if you want to know something about the history of writing and reading– this book is for you. It is beautifully written and it is chock full of scientific findings– and with hope for the future of treating reading failures.

Book Review: Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford was published in 2004. It’s the story of the rise and demise of the largest empire in world history– the Mongol Empire. Here’s how the author describes the astonishing accomplishments of the Mongols:

In twenty-five years, the Mongol army subjugated more land and people than the Romans had conquered in four hundred years. Genghis Khan, together with his sons and grandsons, conquered the most densely populated civilizations of the thirteenth century. Whether measured by the total number of people defeated, the sum of the countries annexed, or by the total area occupied, Genghis Khan conquered more than twice as much as any other man in history.
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Weatherford, pg. xviii

I had known something about the Mongol Empire before I read the book, but it really helped me understand what the Empire really was and how it worked. During the Cold War the Soviets suppressed all research into Genghis Khan. The region of his homeland in Mongolia was strictly off limits and much of the surrounding area was used for artillery practice. Scholars who probed the history of the Mongols were censored, and publication of works about Genghis Khan were forbidden.

The collapse of the Soviet Union meant that scholars could begin to research the history of the Empire, but there was another problem– the Mongols were very secretive about the inner workings of their society. A set of documents known as The Secret History of the Mongols supposedly narrated the history of the Empire from the perspective of an insider– an actual eyewitness to the events that subjected more than 3 billion people to Mongol rule. But the Secret History had long since been lost.

In the early 20th century a copy of the Secret History was found in Beijing, written in Chinese characters. But the document made to sense to readers of the time because it preserved Mongolian sounds in a code written in Chinese characters. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Mongolian and English translations first appeared in print– the product of decades of slow but steady scholarship. But even then the Secret History was mostly incomprehensible to modern readers because it assumed a deep understanding of common cultural practices and beliefs of Mongolian society, and of the geography of Mongolia.

By the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union scholars from around the world had pieced together a fair picture of how the Secret History should be read. Weatherford had absorbed much of this research and in 1998 he traveled to Mongolia to get some background information on the region and the people. He expected that it would take him a short time to put together the finishing touches on the book he had been writing– but he ultimately spent another five years there. He learned how to ride horses as the Mongolians rode them. He learned how to shoot a bow and arrow the way that Mongolian soldiers did. And he learned about the many Mongolian traditions on which their society was based. His book represents the culmination of a century of scholarly research and his own five years of in depth immersion in Mongolian society.

The Mongols were tremendous warriors. They developed a large repertoire of innovative tactics, many of which changed warfare forever. For example, in ancient times it was traditional to conduct war in the spring, summer, and fall. Winter was a time to consolidate one’s forces, to rebuild supply lines, and to tend to the wounded. But the Mongols often launched their attacks in winter, rather than the spring– thereby turning the traditions of warfare inside-out. As people of the steppe, the Mongols were perfectly adapted to conducting war in ice and snow. Their conquest of northern China gave them access to gunpowder– used by the Chinese for fireworks. The Mongols changed the formula for making gunpowder to make it burn instantly rather than to glow slowly as it had been used by the Chinese– and they quickly adapted it for use in weapons. As a result the Mongols forever changing the mechanics of the siege. And they were absolute masters of using deception to mask their real objectives and intent in battle. It was a type of tactic that had long been employed by their ancestors on the steppe, and one that they adapted for use on the grand stage of Asia to devastating effect.

The Mongols built only one major city– Karakorum, the Mongol capitol in the heart of Mongolia. They created no monuments, no sculptures, no art. From ancient times the residents of the steppe had lived as nomads– and Mongolian soldiers were as much at home in a saddle as in a tent. They simply didn’t see a need to stay rooted at a single location. The Empire was driven by Mongolian societal traditions that expected a tribal leader to distribute wealth to the other members of his tribe. And that tradition demanded that the Mongols had always to obtain new riches, necessarily acquired through new conquests. Their relentless drive took them from the far reaches of east Asia to the Mediterranean Sea. It wasn’t until the Mongol army was defeated by the Mamluks at the small town of Ayn al-Jalut that the Empire’s expansion was brought to an end.

When the Mongols arrived at a city that they intended to conquer they announced to the city leaders that they could either surrender– or die. It was no idle threat. The Mongols had perfected the art of the siege, and inevitably a city under siege would fall. Once the Mongols had control they assassinated the wealthy oligarchs, appropriated their riches, and demanded absolute loyalty from those who were appointed to rule. The city would then be plundered and riches taken from it would be returned to Mongolia to be redistributed to Mongol society generally.

But the Mongols weren’t just rapacious plunderers. They instituted many innovations across the broad expanse of their Empire, including a postal system and tax incentives that were friendly to business enterprises. They allowed all religions to flourish, so long as religious leaders did not challenge the Mongol right to rule. As the book’s title suggests, the Mongols were to a large extent responsible for ripping the medieval world out of its parochial slumber into a new age of cosmopolitan awareness, international trade, and religious toleration.

This book is very well written, thoroughly researched, and a delight to read. It fills in many gaps I had in my understanding of the Mongols’ place in history. I therefore heartily recommend it to anyone who wishes to know more about one of the most transformational periods of history.