I always wanted to be a scientist. Well I think that as I grew up I wanted to be a scientist but to tell the truth, what I wanted to be when I grew up is obscured by the fog of memory. I don’t know if it is because of the time elapsed from when I was a kid or the lack of passion for a certain career. Either way I always loved science (if you haven’t noticed from prior entries). These two books are great examples of why I love science. And Peter Atkins does a great job of imparting his love for science to the reader.
The Four Laws that Drive the Universe.Pretty self explanatory title. Peter Atkins takes a short amount of space to explain how the universe works. How elegant these laws are to the point that their simplicity encompasses incredible complexity.
The laws of thermodynamics are pretty easy to understand. Temperature, conservation of energy, entropy, and never reaching 0K (that’s 0 Kelvin, absolute zero, the lowest energy state of matter). But on the contrary, they really aren’t. Huh? Let me explain. The distillation of the four laws of thermodynamics have, much to the detriment of how science is understood, confused the average person as to what they really are. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is brought out like some trump card by creationists to show that evolution can’t happen. They are going on their understanding of the second law based on the distillation of that law that goes something like:
“In a closed system, complexity cannot increase; chaos can only increase.”
or some nonsense like that. But what they fail to understand about the second law is a few things. Complexity can increase. Dust collapses into stars and planetary discs, evolution occurs, etc. They fail to understand that the system is the entire Universe. Full stop. The system that the second law is referring to is the entire friggin universe. Not the Earth, not your fridge either. This misunderstanding of the definition of system leads to an entire misunderstanding of the second law.
Peter Atkins does an excellent job of explaining the four laws that do, in fact, drive the universe. Atkins shows that scientists started out with three, but they neglected one basic one, so they tacked on the Zeroth Law. Atkins is concise in his writing. He doesn’t waste words and is able to convey very intricate ideas into the best possible explanation without talking down to the reader, nor simplifying it to the point that it looses all meaning or could be construed as something it is not.
Though Atkins does tend to lean to the heavily detailed and technical side of explanation, he doesn’t lose the reader that is paying attention. This book isn’t one ot be read while distracted or with your mind figring out what you are going to have for dinner later. It demands your attention.
Galileo’s Finger reviews ten of the most important discoveries in science. Unlike The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, Atkins doesn’t focus on the experimentation side of science. He lays his focus on explaining some broad, and often complex, scientific theory. Ranging from Evolution to Math, Atkins excels at explaining each scientific breakthrough with detail without sacrificing information.
The most fascinating chapter, the discovery of math, ties together each preceding chapter, which I believe Atkins purposefully structured. Atkins has this underlying theme in the book that humanity doesnt’ invent any of these scientific breakthroughs. Invention lends itself to the engineering side of the applied sciences, Atkins puts himself firmly in the camp that the answers are out ther and that scientists happen upon them. He illustrates this point succinctly in the math chapter. We tend to take math for granted and tend to think that humanity invented math to count, have commerce etc. Atkins shows that math was a discovery and that, only through mathematicians we discovered how numbers actually work and how they interact and even describe out reality. An utterly fascinating chapter that shows our discovery of numbers, zero, real and imaginary numbers, primes, infinity, integers, and so much more. This chapter makes the book well worth the purchase.
edit: Yes I mangled Galileo’s name in the post title. Blame it on late nights.
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