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Review: The Age of Stupid film
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Think small Focusing on the fundamentals can yield surprising insights, as two new books show
Living at Micro Scale by David B. Dusenbery, Harvard University Press, $49.95/£36.95 Nanoscale by Kenneth S. Deffeyes and Stephen E. Deffeyes, MIT Press, $21.95/£14.95 Reviewed by Colin Barras
THERE’S an old joke about the theoretical physicist who claims to have worked out the reason for a sudden drop in milk production at the local dairy farm. The biologist, ecologist and nutritionist all failed to solve the problem, and are curious to hear how it was done. “Well,” says the physicist, “consider a spherical cow…”. The joke is that physicists reduce problems to a simple form to ease their calculations, even if that makes their model irrelevant to the real world. David Dusenbery has the last laugh. In Living at Micro Scale,
he begins with the assumption that micro-organisms can be considered as spherical bodies, and then goes on to show how simplifications of that kind can demonstrate how deeply the physics of fluids has influenced the behaviour and evolution of microbes. For example, from the buffeting the tiniest of cells receive from the molecules around them, Dusenbery predicts they should not be capable of powered swimming – and they aren’t. At a slightly larger scale, water behaves as a highly viscous fluid, and from this physics suggests that microbes should swim through it using rodshaped, not paddle-shaped appendages – and they do. The book draws on 20 years of Dusenbery’s own research, and he doesn’t compromise on the science; informed readers will find all the equations they could need. But it is rarely dry or uninteresting, and benefits from
a liberal scattering of anecdotes going back 2500 years. My favourite is the idea that Galileo fell foul of the church because of his atomist view of matter. Anecdotes also abound in Kenneth and Stephen Deffeyes’s Nanoscale. While Dusenbery builds on one central idea, the Deffeyes’s book is a celebration of the entire microscopic world, with an emphasis on crystallography, giving us insights into science we cannot “see”. It is divided into 50 themed essays, with beautiful illustrations such as the end-on view of a fibrous virus (left). The essays, which tend to focus on the history of discovery, have a personal and lively feel. So we see how the 18th-century mineralogist René Just Haüy smashed his impressive collection of calcite crystals to show that minerals were constructed from universal building blocks that would always break into similar shapes. Other essays address modern nanotechnology. Carbon nanotubes inevitably get a mention, and the book explores supercapacitors, superconductors and even memristors, the resistorswith-a-memory built for the first time only last year. Some of this is so new that the behaviour of these materials is, at times, still not fully understood.
Bleeding-edge science The Crowded Universe: The search for living planets by Alan Boss, Basic Books, £15.99/$26 Reviewed by Lewis Dartnell
LIVING worlds are commonplace in the cosmos. So says Alan Boss, a key scientist working with the Kepler space telescope. It is hoped that the telescope will reveal the frequency of Earth-like planets in the universe when it launches this year. Boss recounts the exhilarating
tale of the race to discover the first truly Earth-like exoplanet. As The Crowded Universe unfolds, it brings alive the thrills and disappointments of bleedingedge science, the fierce competition between American and European planet-hunting teams and the politics of billiondollar research. Along the way we learn the latest theories on how planets form and just how astronomers detect distant worlds too faint to see. Frustratingly, the book is written as a series of chronologically dated sections which often lack cohesion. As a result, it feels as if Boss has simply lent us notes from his diary.
Time to act The Age of Stupid directed by Franny Armstrong. UK cinema release 20 March/US release September Reviewed by Catherine Brahic
NO ONE likes being preached to, which doesn’t bode well for any film on climate change. The latest offering is the part sci-fi movie, partdocumentary The Age of Stupid. Set in 2055 on a flooded, damaged, inhospitable Earth, a lone man, played by Pete Postlethwaite, guards a historical archive and bemoans that earlier generations did not prevent climate change. It is worthy, though not riveting, cinema, but it has a very clever feature: much of the film is a patchwork of real news clips of remarkable single weather events from the early 2000s. Isolated events cannot be wholly blamed on global warming but, together, the staggering accumulation of severe hurricanes, droughts, heat waves and more is probably the result of climate change. By displaying these events side by side, the film compellingly shows that climate change is real, providing 20/20 hindsight while there is still time to act. 14 March 2009 | NewScientist | 47
Think small Focusing on the fundamentals can yield surprising insights, as two new books show
Living at Micro Scale by David B. Dusenbery, Harvard University Press, $49.95/£36.95 Nanoscale by Kenneth S. Deffeyes and Stephen E. Deffeyes, MIT Press, $21.95/£14.95 Reviewed by Colin Barras
THERE’S an old joke about the theoretical physicist who claims to have worked out the reason for a sudden drop in milk production at the local dairy farm. The biologist, ecologist and nutritionist all failed to solve the problem, and are curious to hear how it was done. “Well,” says the physicist, “consider a spherical cow…”. The joke is that physicists reduce problems to a simple form to ease their calculations, even if that makes their model irrelevant to the real world. David Dusenbery has the last laugh. In Living at Micro Scale,
he begins with the assumption that micro-organisms can be considered as spherical bodies, and then goes on to show how simplifications of that kind can demonstrate how deeply the physics of fluids has influenced the behaviour and evolution of microbes. For example, from the buffeting the tiniest of cells receive from the molecules around them, Dusenbery predicts they should not be capable of powered swimming – and they aren’t. At a slightly larger scale, water behaves as a highly viscous fluid, and from this physics suggests that microbes should swim through it using rodshaped, not paddle-shaped appendages – and they do. The book draws on 20 years of Dusenbery’s own research, and he doesn’t compromise on the science; informed readers will find all the equations they could need. But it is rarely dry or uninteresting, and benefits from
a liberal scattering of anecdotes going back 2500 years. My favourite is the idea that Galileo fell foul of the church because of his atomist view of matter. Anecdotes also abound in Kenneth and Stephen Deffeyes’s Nanoscale. While Dusenbery builds on one central idea, the Deffeyes’s book is a celebration of the entire microscopic world, with an emphasis on crystallography, giving us insights into science we cannot “see”. It is divided into 50 themed essays, with beautiful illustrations such as the end-on view of a fibrous virus (left). The essays, which tend to focus on the history of discovery, have a personal and lively feel. So we see how the 18th-century mineralogist René Just Haüy smashed his impressive collection of calcite crystals to show that minerals were constructed from universal building blocks that would always break into similar shapes. Other essays address modern nanotechnology. Carbon nanotubes inevitably get a mention, and the book explores supercapacitors, superconductors and even memristors, the resistorswith-a-memory built for the first time only last year. Some of this is so new that the behaviour of these materials is, at times, still not fully understood.
Bleeding-edge science The Crowded Universe: The search for living planets by Alan Boss, Basic Books, £15.99/$26 Reviewed by Lewis Dartnell
LIVING worlds are commonplace in the cosmos. So says Alan Boss, a key scientist working with the Kepler space telescope. It is hoped that the telescope will reveal the frequency of Earth-like planets in the universe when it launches this year. Boss recounts the exhilarating
tale of the race to discover the first truly Earth-like exoplanet. As The Crowded Universe unfolds, it brings alive the thrills and disappointments of bleedingedge science, the fierce competition between American and European planet-hunting teams and the politics of billiondollar research. Along the way we learn the latest theories on how planets form and just how astronomers detect distant worlds too faint to see. Frustratingly, the book is written as a series of chronologically dated sections which often lack cohesion. As a result, it feels as if Boss has simply lent us notes from his diary.
Time to act The Age of Stupid directed by Franny Armstrong. UK cinema release 20 March/US release September Reviewed by Catherine Brahic
NO ONE likes being preached to, which doesn’t bode well for any film on climate change. The latest offering is the part sci-fi movie, partdocumentary The Age of Stupid. Set in 2055 on a flooded, damaged, inhospitable Earth, a lone man, played by Pete Postlethwaite, guards a historical archive and bemoans that earlier generations did not prevent climate change. It is worthy, though not riveting, cinema, but it has a very clever feature: much of the film is a patchwork of real news clips of remarkable single weather events from the early 2000s. Isolated events cannot be wholly blamed on global warming but, together, the staggering accumulation of severe hurricanes, droughts, heat waves and more is probably the result of climate change. By displaying these events side by side, the film compellingly shows that climate change is real, providing 20/20 hindsight while there is still time to act. 14 March 2009 | NewScientist | 47