Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos

by K.C. Cole

Book Overview

The universe comes down to earth in K. C. Cole's Mind Over Matter, a fresh and witty exploration of physics, cosmology, mathematics, astronomy, and more. Like no other science writer, Cole demystifies scientific concepts and humanizes the people who study them. Beginning with a discussion of how "the mind creates reality as well as muddles it," she then peeks into the stories behind science's great minds and into their playful side, and concludes...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156029561
• ISBN13: 9780156029568
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 319 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Science made readable, relevant and enjoyable

In this collection of mostly columns that she wrote for the Los Angeles Times, science writer K.C. Cole relies on her wide reading in science, and on her interviews and friendships with scientists as a basis for appreciations, observations, interpretations, reports, and just plain musings on science and how science is transforming the planet. Employing a style that ranges from gossip column cute to poetic, Cole (who teaches at my alma mater UCLA) works hard to make science as relevant to the general public as the personalities in, say, People magazine, and just as accessible.The task in writing about science is making it intelligible without dumbing it down or making simplistic statements that are not accurate. Cole recognizes this problem; indeed in reading these small essays (almost all are under a thousand words) I can feel her struggling mightily to get it just right: to make her expression as accurate as possible and as readable. She muses on these problems in the final essay, entitled, "Oops!" in which she confesses to some slips including confabulating Caltech physicist Robert Millikan with junk bond king Michael Milken. Ah, yes, I know well that sort of error, having stumbled thereabouts myself a time or two!But it is not her ability to popularize science (by the way, she is now doing pieces for National Public Radio) that impresses me about Cole. It's her ability to understand science and its place in society that sets her apart from other writers. She is especially good are relating science to the social, political and personal worlds in which we live. Indeed, Part IV of this book is entitled "Political" Science with just the "Political" in quotes emphasizing that Cole is talking about both the internal political affairs of science and how the political world in general affects science and how science affects the political world. Some of the best essays in the book are from this section.In "Dreamers," beginning on page 269, for example, Cole laments the loss of funding for some science projects (e.g., particle physics, the mission to Europa) as money is being redirected toward the wars on terror, drugs, and cancer--"missiles and medicine." She understands the pragmatic view of politicians who want tangible results from grants and under writings, but makes the powerful point that it is the "dreamers in the hinterlands who often come up with the most practical inventions." She directs our attention to PET scans, magnetic imaging, and laser surgery, all products of dreamers. But most saliently she recalls the physicists behind the development of the atom bomb, "dreamers" like Einstein and Oppenheimer. She notes that Germany might have won that war had Hitler been able to keep most of the German and Austrian scientists from fleeing to the United States. It is one of the great and most delicious ironies of history that so-called "Jewish" science helped to defeat the Nazis.In "Unnatural" (p. 291) she addresses the controversy ab

The world of physics made clear at last

K.C. Cole has the rare ability to make the physical world both comprehensible and entertaining. I never thought I'd curl up with a good physics book but I found her brief commentaries obliterate the usual arbitrary separation between science and the humanities. In fact, it is by making physics so humanistic that she makes it clear to those of us who have difficulties understanding numerical concepts or apparently obscure ideas like space-time, quarks, and black holes. "Physics is simple," she writes, ". . . .consider the harmonics of a bottle of beer. Blow over the top, and you can make a series of different sounds, depending on how hard you blow and how much beer is left in the bottle. And lo and behold, it is by analyzing a very similar set of harmonics set up by the sloshing of gas and light in the early universe that astronomers have been able to put their ears to the cosmos, listening in on its babblings from the first moment of time. And here's what Cole, the mistress of metaphor, has to say about how Einstein's theory of relativity explains gravity as a curvature of space-time: "It's like an elephant sitting on a waterbed. Heavy objects bend space-time into "gravity wells" that pull other object in." If Einstein had put it that way in the first place, I wouldn't have had to wait this long to get it. Thanks, K. C. Cole.

Enjoyable and Accurate

Back during the brief period when the Los Angeles Times pretended to care about science it ran a weekly column by K. C. Cole. The Times, unfortunately, has reverted to viewing science as something to egregiously misrepresent in its daily reporting. But Cole's columns live on, and are now available to a larger audience. A physicist by training, I am often disappointed by science books because they achieve understandability by subtly misrepresenting the essence of difficult concepts. Cole, on the other hand, has a knack for explaining difficult concepts in simple terms without sacrificing veracity. This book is both a pleasurable and accurate read on topics of current interest in science. I highly recommend it to people wanting to better understand modern science.