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How calculus can beat the zombies
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Villains and heroes
the advertising archives
A whistle-stop tour around the lesser-known regions of science and invention
Boffinology: The real stories behind our greatest scientific discoveries by Justin Pollard, John Murray, £12.99 Reviewed by Jo Marchant
IN APRIL 1940, the celebrated physicist Niels Bohr was in a quandary: what to do with two gold Nobel medals, given to him for safe keeping at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. With Nazi forces invading Denmark, it was only a matter of time before the institute was searched. After rejecting the idea of burying the medals, Bohr and his colleague George de Hevesy dissolved them in a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acid. They poured the resulting orange liquid into two bottles and placed them, in plain view, on a laboratory shelf. Years later, the gold was recovered, and recoined for the grateful owners.
Boffinology is full of tales like this. Justin Pollard slips behind the scenes of science, telling us the quirky, smelly, deceitful, charming and sometimes spinechilling details behind moments of genius throughout history. Some of those moments would be of lasting significance, such as Louis de Broglie’s suggestion that matter must behave like a wave, or the night that Dmitri Mendeleev dreamed up the periodic table. Others have faded from memory, such as the time 3000 tonnes of conkers were collected by the British government in 1917 to make acetone, needed in the production of explosives, and Henry Ford’s soya-bean-plastic car. Many of the stories concern not science but invention, the leaps of faith behind everyday items such as Velcro, the Slinky spring, and the Frisbee. Pollard also tackles the darker side of scientific progress, from the Radium Girls – women whose bones were eaten away as they worked, painting luminous watches with
radioactive radium paint – to Luigi Galvani, who used sparks of electricity to twitch the muscles in dead frogs’ legs, then followed up with a stage show which substituted freshly hanged criminals for the frogs. A recurring theme is the role of women in many of the accomplishments traditionally ascribed to men, for example Emily Roebling, who became the real force behind the Brooklyn bridge after her engineer husband was incapacitated by the bends. Pollard’s stories will not be new to those with an interest in the history of science. The technical explanations can also be hard to follow, when there at all. Overall, however, the package is an enjoyable read, and reminds us, if we needed it, that science is inextricably entwined with people, and so with history. Pollard is a historical writer and consultant for film and television. He says that “real science is not done by the perfect white-coated men and women I imagined as a child” and that, as well as lauding its heroes, he wants to show that science has “its villains, its disasters, its brilliant ideas that turn suddenly to dust and those handfuls of dust that, quite unexpectedly, lead to moments of genius”. In this, he succeeds.
Outlook cloudy A Brief Guide To Cloud Computing by Christopher Barnatt, Constable, £8.99 Reviewed by Justin Mullins
IF YOU’VE ever posted a picture on Facebook, sent an email using Gmail or bought a book on Amazon, you’re already a cloud user. But that’s just the start, says Christopher Barnatt, who brings admirable clarity to this thoroughly nebulous topic. Barnatt gives a detailed guide to the cloud, including a useful list of sites where you can try it for
yourself. He argues persuasively that businesses that ignore it do so at their peril: the financial and environmental costs of running their own computer centres will be just too great. And he paints a fascinating, if relentlessly optimistic, vision of the cloudenabled future. Expect reality to be augmented by cloud-connected contact lenses, while anything ever captured on camera – and that includes you and just about everyone else – will be instantly tracked using powerful image-based search engines. Jump aboard, the future’s coming and it’s cloud-shaped.
Surviving zombies The Calculus Diaries by Jennifer Ouellette, Penguin, $15 Reviewed by Celeste Biever
INTEGRATION and differentiation may just have leapt out of the mathematics class. In The Calculus Diaries, Jennifer Ouellette ably demonstrates how challenges such as buying a house, setting up your own business, even surviving a takeover by brainguzzling zombies, can all be tackled if you break them down into quantities that vary over time – and take a derivative or perform an integral. Ouellette visits green gyms in Oregon, surfing mathematicians in Hawaii and the craps tables of Las Vegas, explaining what calculus can tell you about them and why. There is self-discovery too, as Ouellette loses her fear of calculus and embraces it as an art. Can she convert others? I doubt the daunted would pick it up, let alone persist through its more technical parts. But if, like me, you love the neatness of calculus but never appreciated its applications or the colourful characters who have used it through history, then these diaries are well worth a read. 4 September 2010 | NewScientist | 43
Villains and heroes
the advertising archives
A whistle-stop tour around the lesser-known regions of science and invention
Boffinology: The real stories behind our greatest scientific discoveries by Justin Pollard, John Murray, £12.99 Reviewed by Jo Marchant
IN APRIL 1940, the celebrated physicist Niels Bohr was in a quandary: what to do with two gold Nobel medals, given to him for safe keeping at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. With Nazi forces invading Denmark, it was only a matter of time before the institute was searched. After rejecting the idea of burying the medals, Bohr and his colleague George de Hevesy dissolved them in a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acid. They poured the resulting orange liquid into two bottles and placed them, in plain view, on a laboratory shelf. Years later, the gold was recovered, and recoined for the grateful owners.
Boffinology is full of tales like this. Justin Pollard slips behind the scenes of science, telling us the quirky, smelly, deceitful, charming and sometimes spinechilling details behind moments of genius throughout history. Some of those moments would be of lasting significance, such as Louis de Broglie’s suggestion that matter must behave like a wave, or the night that Dmitri Mendeleev dreamed up the periodic table. Others have faded from memory, such as the time 3000 tonnes of conkers were collected by the British government in 1917 to make acetone, needed in the production of explosives, and Henry Ford’s soya-bean-plastic car. Many of the stories concern not science but invention, the leaps of faith behind everyday items such as Velcro, the Slinky spring, and the Frisbee. Pollard also tackles the darker side of scientific progress, from the Radium Girls – women whose bones were eaten away as they worked, painting luminous watches with
radioactive radium paint – to Luigi Galvani, who used sparks of electricity to twitch the muscles in dead frogs’ legs, then followed up with a stage show which substituted freshly hanged criminals for the frogs. A recurring theme is the role of women in many of the accomplishments traditionally ascribed to men, for example Emily Roebling, who became the real force behind the Brooklyn bridge after her engineer husband was incapacitated by the bends. Pollard’s stories will not be new to those with an interest in the history of science. The technical explanations can also be hard to follow, when there at all. Overall, however, the package is an enjoyable read, and reminds us, if we needed it, that science is inextricably entwined with people, and so with history. Pollard is a historical writer and consultant for film and television. He says that “real science is not done by the perfect white-coated men and women I imagined as a child” and that, as well as lauding its heroes, he wants to show that science has “its villains, its disasters, its brilliant ideas that turn suddenly to dust and those handfuls of dust that, quite unexpectedly, lead to moments of genius”. In this, he succeeds.
Outlook cloudy A Brief Guide To Cloud Computing by Christopher Barnatt, Constable, £8.99 Reviewed by Justin Mullins
IF YOU’VE ever posted a picture on Facebook, sent an email using Gmail or bought a book on Amazon, you’re already a cloud user. But that’s just the start, says Christopher Barnatt, who brings admirable clarity to this thoroughly nebulous topic. Barnatt gives a detailed guide to the cloud, including a useful list of sites where you can try it for
yourself. He argues persuasively that businesses that ignore it do so at their peril: the financial and environmental costs of running their own computer centres will be just too great. And he paints a fascinating, if relentlessly optimistic, vision of the cloudenabled future. Expect reality to be augmented by cloud-connected contact lenses, while anything ever captured on camera – and that includes you and just about everyone else – will be instantly tracked using powerful image-based search engines. Jump aboard, the future’s coming and it’s cloud-shaped.
Surviving zombies The Calculus Diaries by Jennifer Ouellette, Penguin, $15 Reviewed by Celeste Biever
INTEGRATION and differentiation may just have leapt out of the mathematics class. In The Calculus Diaries, Jennifer Ouellette ably demonstrates how challenges such as buying a house, setting up your own business, even surviving a takeover by brainguzzling zombies, can all be tackled if you break them down into quantities that vary over time – and take a derivative or perform an integral. Ouellette visits green gyms in Oregon, surfing mathematicians in Hawaii and the craps tables of Las Vegas, explaining what calculus can tell you about them and why. There is self-discovery too, as Ouellette loses her fear of calculus and embraces it as an art. Can she convert others? I doubt the daunted would pick it up, let alone persist through its more technical parts. But if, like me, you love the neatness of calculus but never appreciated its applications or the colourful characters who have used it through history, then these diaries are well worth a read. 4 September 2010 | NewScientist | 43