When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish: And Other Speculations about This and That

by Martin Gardner

Book Overview

Best known as the longtime writer of the Mathematical Games column for "Scientific American"--which introduced generations of readers to the joys of recreational mathematics--Martin Gardner has for decades pursued a parallel career as a devastatingly effective debunker of what he once famously dubbed "fads and fallacies in the name of science." It is mainly in this latter role that he is onstage in this collection of choice essays. "When You Were...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809087375
• ISBN13: 9780809087372
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Hill & Wang
• Length: 246 Pages
• Weight: 0.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Gardner the Great

I was lucky to get to know Martin Gardner's writings when I was a kid. For me, Gardner will always be the guy who wrote the celebrated and long-running (25 years) monthly column "Mathematical Games", found in the back pages of _Scientific American_. It is true that Gardner didn't always confine himself strictly to mere mathematics; his column was the first introduction I got to the pictures of M. C. Escher, for instance. And the columns were not necessarily games, although games like Reversi were often featured. The wide-ranging subjects were not just an introduction to mathematics, broadly defined, but to the oddities and the beauties that mathematics might reveal. They also showed the enormous instructive power of puzzles. The columns are now collected in lots of books, and they will never go out of date. Gardner also annotated the Alice books by Lewis Carroll, and went on to annotate "Casey at the Bat" and "The Night Before Christmas". He wrote in different forums about science, hoaxes, literature, skepticism, magic, and religion. He has published over seventy books, and I learn in his latest, _When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish: And Other Speculations about This and That_ (Hill and Wang), that he is 94 years old, and resides in an assisted living home. And still writing! Thank goodness, he is still writing! His current book is a miscellany, reprints of pieces published in many arenas. "The only thing these scribblings have in common," he writes, "is that I wrote them all." That's good enough for me! The essays herein cover a lot of territory. There is politics, like a chapter on Ann Coulter. "I never took Ann seriously until I read her fifth book, _Godless: The Church of Liberalism_." Coulter promotes Intelligent Design, which is religious creationism in as best a new scientific guise as it can muster. Coulter says that Christianity fuels everything she writes, so Gardner wants to know what sort of Christian she is, so she could inform us of the background for her insults against scientists. There is a review here of Frank Tipler's book _The Physics of Christianity_, and it is scathing about Tipler's belief that miracles are not supernatural events violating laws of science, but highly improbable natural events performed deliberately by God without such violations. Gardner reports sadly that this absurd book is not a hoax. Gardner is not an atheist; one of his chapters has a title borrowed from a similar one from Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not an Atheist". He believes in God, but is content to confess "... that I have no basis whatever for my belief in God other than a passionate longing that God exists and that I and others will not cease to exist." He also confesses that this is a leap of faith that he understands "as little as I understand the essence of a photon." There are a couple of "Mathematical Games" style chapters, one about the Fibonacci sequence (always fertile ground for recreational math) and one