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Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science, by Peter Atkins
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Why Galileo's finger? Galileo, one of whose fingers is preserved in a vessel displayed in Florence, provided much of the impetus for modern science, pointing the way out of medieval ignorance. In this brilliant account of the central ideas of contemporary science, Peter Atkins celebrates the effectiveness of Galileo's symbolic finger for revealing the nature of our universe, our world, and ourselves.
Galileo's Finger takes the reader on an extraordinary journey that embraces the ten central ideas of current science. "By a great idea," writes Peter Atkins, "I mean a simple concept of great reach, an acorn of an idea that ramifies into a great oak tree of application, a spider of an idea that can spin a great web and draw in a feast of explanation and elucidation." With wit, charm, and patience, Atkins leads the reader to an understanding of the essence of the whole of science, from evolution and the emergence of complexity, to entropy, the spring of all change in the universe; from energy, the universalization of accountancy, to symmetry, the quantification of beauty; and from cosmology, the globalization of reality, to spacetime, the arena of all action.
"My intention is for us to travel to the high ridges of science," Atkins tells us. "As the journey progresses and I lead you carefully to the summit of understanding, you will experience the deep joy of illumination that science alone provides."
Galileo's Finger breaks new ground in communicating science to the general reader. Here are the essential ideas of today's science, explained in magical prose.
- Sales Rank: #762760 in Books
- Published on: 2004-09-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 5.00" h x 1.10" w x 7.70" l, .61 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 400 pages
From Publishers Weekly
This beautifully written but at times overly ambitious book illustrates both the possibilities and the limitations of science popularizations. Chemistry professor Atkins examines the epochal ideas of science, including evolution, the role of DNA in heredity, entropy, the atomic structure of matter, symmetry, wave-particle duality, the expansion of the universe and the curvature of spacetime. Exploring the history of these concepts from the ancient Greeks onward, the chapters amount to case studies in the power of the Galilean paradigm of the "isolation of the essentials of a problem," and mathematical theorizing disciplined by real-world experiment, as humanity's understanding moves from armchair speculation and observational lore to testable theories of great explanatory power. Atkins presents this progress as a search for evermore fundamental abstractions: DNA emerges as the fleeting physical instantiation of immortal information; thermodynamics is a universal tendency to disorder; and much of physics itself a logical corollary of pure geometry. Writing in lucid, engaging prose illustrated with many ingenious diagrams, Atkins often succeeds brilliantly in conveying the deep conceptual foundations of scientific disciplines to readers lacking a mathematical background. He falters a little, like most science popularizers, at the frontiers of modern physics, where things get very abstract indeed. Atkins's examples are excellent and his prose a marvel of economy, but for most lay readers, no amount of graphical heuristics or arguments by analogy will fully explain string theory or four-dimensional space-time curvature. Still, the elegant style, wide-ranging scope, and unusually high ratio of enlightening explanation to baffling abstruseness make this book one of the best of its kind.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Condensing scientific knowledge into 10 concepts, such as theconservation of energy, Atkins offers a primer on the essential ideasof Western science. This is a work descriptive of abstract principles,and it is easily grasped, for Atkins, in the humoring manner of apopular lecturer at the blackboard, illustrates underlying connectionsthat unite dissimilar phenomena, such as waves and particles inquantum mechanics. Although the material does not include equations,readers still must acclimate to significant brain-bending, especiallyon the subject of symmetry and on dimensions beyond our familiarthree, crucial to getting a grip on the string and M-theory so chicwith physicists. Where does Galileo's finger figure in this? Recliningin a cup displayed in Florence, it represents to its curators and toAtkins the scientific method, the way of "unpacking" (in the author'srecurring phrase) the appearances of nature to reveal its essence. Forthe uninitiated, this is remedial education that is pleasurable ratherthan punishing. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"An accessible and informative introduction to Western scientific thought."--Science News
"For the uninitiated, this is remedial education that is pleasurable rather than punishing."--Booklist
"The Nobel Prize for Literature has never been won by a scientist. It is high time it happened, and Peter Atkins would be my candidate. He is not a popularizer of science in the ordinary sense.... He is not afraid to lead us toward the far horizons of scientific understanding but, rather than oversimplify and trivialise, he uses his powerful mastery of the English language to open our eyes to the poetry of deep science.... Atkins's literate prose leaves us inspired, fulfilled, enriched, and properly alive."--Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and Unweaving the Rainbow
Most helpful customer reviews
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Not Popular Science
By Daniel
As a science graduate and experienced teacher of A level Chemistry and GCSE Science I thought this book would be a nice overview of what is going on (and has gone on) in science. How wrong I was.
This book flips from some nice historical detail and context to some very complex ideas in a wide range of disciplines. The transition is not smooth and I felt in the turn of a page I went from being firmly in my comfort zone to being completely out of my depth.
Atkins can describe things with skill but he has bitten off more than he can chew in trying to cram so much into one book and the bits that he misses out were the links between school level and graduate level science, which unfortunately are likely to be the bits that his readership will be most interested in.
With better editing (or choosing of content level). This could have been a good and informative book. Unfortunately, it was interesting in parts but unreachable in others.
18 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Good Overview of Science
By e uva
P.W.(Peter) Atkins is the author of the excellent textbook "Physical Chemistry", "Molecules", a general overview of nature's chemicals from the Scientific American Library, and the imaginative "Periodic Kingdom". In his latest popularization, "Galileo's Finger", Atkins outlines what he considers are the ten central ideas of science. Without bias, he only chooses two from his own area of expertise. The rest are from the realms of biology, physics and astronomy. Given that only two to three of the chapters are part of a high school curriculum, the book is essential reading for anyone who has not studied science past that point. His writing neither oversimplifies nor bores the reader, reminiscent of the way the late Stephen Jay Gould practised his craft. I love Atkins' definition of chemistry, " It is the bridge between the perceived world of substances and the imagined world of atoms."
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Good, but uneven
By Mec
Atkins follows in the tradition of Gamow and Asimov but with more depth.
Unfortunately, the narrative thread skips frequently. Atkins introduces an idea (for example, Turing machines), then quickly jumps to Universal Turing Machines and a diagonalization proof that the Halting Problem has no solution. The essays would have benefitted from a smoother, more continuous exposition, even at the expense of advanced material.
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