Jun

9

Book ‘Em: Blinded By Science.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

June 9, 2008 |

blackholes.jpg I’m fairly knowledgeable when it comes to science–or so I like to think. At the same time, there are huge gaps in my knowledge, and things I hear about in passing that I’d like to know more about but don’t have the training to fully understand, and things I think I understand but I’m not sure because my simple understanding of them is really correct. That’s what makes Why Aren’t Black Holes Black? by Robert H. Mazen and Maxine Singer such a fun read. For one thing they provide a preface that tries to break down, simply, questions that, while on the edge of science, are still science, because ways of testing these questions can be devised, as opposed to questions that, for now at least, remain outside of science’s grasp. The nature of time, for instance, is still more of an issue of philosophy than it is for science. The book also opens with an introduction by Stephen Jay Gould. Gould’s introduction is a response to people who think all the “big questions” of science have already been answered, and so is the rest of the book. As Gould, Mazen, and Singer explain, science is an ongoing process, and the more we learn the more we discover how much more there is to know. Chemistry, for instance, doesn’t grab headlines like big discoveries in astrophysics or even biology, and yet we’re surrounded by chemistry. Chemists are constantly in the process of developing and studying new materials, and yet don’t understand why exactly atoms combine the way they do.

Accessibility is the big key to understanding, and this is where Why Aren’t Black Holes Black? really excels. Taking difficult subjects ranging from dark matter and the fate of the universe to the origin of life to the controversial issue of global warming, the book doesn’t just open up the frontiers of science to general readers, it makes a case for science itself.


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. Dan Jensen on June 10, 2008 12:56 pm

    Sounds good! We need more books about questions. Unfortunately, fundamentalist reactionaries too often put scientists on the defensive, putting scientists and science entusiasts in danger of looking like minions for some kind of fanciful Marxist-Darwinist orthodoxy.

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