The Faber Book of Science. Edited by John Carey

by John Carey

Book Overview

Covering hunting spiders and black holes, gorillas and stardust, protons, photons and neutrinos, this anthology plots the development of modern science from Leonardo da Vinci to chaos theory. It... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0571179010
• ISBN13: 9780571179015
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

INTRODUCTIONS

This book is edited (with introduction) by John Carey, and that ought to trigger a few responses in people who have been around. Professor Carey is an all-purpose media intellectual, much in demand for elevated discussions of more or less anything. He was formerly Professor of English at Oxford, and here he is guiding us around `science'. I recall the answer of John W Campbell Jr when asked what was the place of science fiction in English literature. Campbell responded that science fiction is a genre taking in everything from the primal egg to the heat-death of the universe, so to try to place it within English literature is a bit of an odd question. Carey clearly views this anthology as `literature' rather than as some kind of reference book. On the one hand he gave thought to the sequencing of the selections, and I may say I read the volume from cover to cover as sequenced. On the other hand one of his main criteria for inclusion is that the pieces that qualify should be well enough written for him to want to read them twice. This is where I start to have problems with his approach. Given the significance of most of the subject-matter, my own reason for wanting to read any given piece twice would be that I had not understood it the first time. I am only too grateful for the quality of readability, but when confronted with relativity or quantum theory or black holes or seismology or nuclear fusion or fractals or genetics I can only find a preoccupation with literary aspects to be the most despicable footling. That said, the literary quality is pretty good, as of course one would expect. This is obviously a book for amateurs not for professionals, and speaking as an amateur I felt helped to retain my fumbling but determined grasp on, say, particle physics as well as getting a genuinely better perception of, say, chaos theory and natural selection. Readers inclined to a religious outlook will probably not find much to bolster it here, and whether that represents some bias on the part of the editor or whether it is simply in the nature of the case I am unable to judge. It's a clever production by a very clever editor, but I'm still suspicious of him because of his background. I have never really been convinced that reading books in one's own mother tongue amounts to a respectable academic subject. So far as I could tell, the way they got around this perception at Oxford was to make the subject artificially difficult, demanding a ludicrous amount of reading and assessing the products of their grisly ergastulum on their capacity to make clever-clever observations provided these stayed within the party line adopted by a fearsome and condescending thought-police. That anyone who had gone through this particular mill retained any literary sensibility whatsoever seems to me as good an argument for a benevolent deity as I have encountered. Professor Carey is clearly alive to this problem, but after my own struggles with establishing Greek and Latin tex

This is the Science Anthology for you

If you're interested in Science, but want to study some new topics, meet some new people, reading about their achievements in their own words or of their contemporaries, then this book cannot be surpassed.

Of interest to anyone with an enquiring mind.

I must confess it is over a year since I read this book but it has to be one of the best I've read in several years. Its ability to give an insight or recount an incident helps us look not only at the world in a new light, but also the people who brought about the advances. The range of history and the range of topics is very wide and it should appeal to anyone with an enquiring mind, whether or not they have a science background. I would strongly recommend it and have already lent my copy to several people

A SUPERB GUIDED TOUR THROUGH THE MAGIC OF SCIENCE.

"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe," wrote Einstein, "is that it's comprehensible". Comprehensible to scientists, anyway -- most of the rest of us abandoned the scientific method back in high school, along with the periodic table and pickled frogs. Today the general reader needs the mediation of a thoughtful, lucid guide to make sense of it all. Luckily there are plenty of good science writers around , and even some scientists, who have a gift for communicating their stories with childlike wonder intact. These authors can not only make the universe comprehensible to us, but enchanting. Good scientific prose is more than a minor literary genre; it's genuine magic realism. The Faber Book of Science has a cast of characters no less colourful than those from the pens of the Latin American fantasy-weavers: black holes and battling ants, quarks and quasars, and a man who mistook his wife for a hat. "Like any anthology," editor and Oxford professor John Carey writes in the introduction, "it is meant to entertaining, intriguing, lendable-to-friends and good-to-read as well..." Readers need not worry about mental meltdowns. Carey spent five years reading "many books and articles, ostensibly for a popular readership, which start out intelligibly and fairly soon hit a quagmire of fuse-blowing technicalities, from which no non-scientist could emerge intact." These, along with the articles he felt he'd never read twice, were "instantly rejected." The result is a guided tour through the best articles, essays, and memoirs of scientists and science writers, from the Renaissance on. The chapters are brief: Carey is following the toxin principle of anthologies -- a trace amount of a technical topic is a stimulant, anything more is deadly. The book begins with a few pages from Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical notebooks, and then we alight on Galileo's reflections, and just as quickly are into Anton Von Leeuwenhoek descriptions of the tiny "animalcules" discovered by microscope in a drop of water. Carey inserts biographical information and other asides throughout each chapter, breaking up the material and giving continuity to the journey. He's along as a guide, nudging the reader's interest and sharing in the discovery of the unexpected. Some of the selections seem a little odd (Freud seems out of place here, as does Orville Wright). And why the inert gas of Isaac Asimov, at the expense of better storytellers of science -- Timothy Ferris, Dianne Ackermann, or Heinz Pagels? Still, The Faber Book of Science will have you digging in for weeks for the many little treasures within, particularly the selections from the past quarter-century. In Italo Calvino's The Gecko's Belly, the author constructs a meditation on a tiny creature that slowly moves from literary-scientific inquisitiveness into a Zenlike awe. And in an excerpt from Primo Levi's writings, we follow the progress of a carbon atom: "It was caught high by the wind, f