Customer Reviews

The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(21)

 

 

Writing about science is difficult, but writing about science well is a gift; one that this author possesses. As a degreed scientist, even I have problems with certain areas of science that are outside my realm (which is environmental biology) and am always looking for more information that will help me understand. This book did a wonderful job of explaining the various areas where I have difficulties (which includes most of the areas outside biology).

If you, like me, remember the talking head in science class that was speaking in tongues, you will appreciate this book. It will open up areas such as chemistry, geology, biology and others to a clearer understanding. And, understanding science is becoming more and more important in today's society as we become more technologically advanced and science oriented.

I recommend this book for everyone, including, or maybe more importantly, to the scientifically challenged. It will change the way you understand the latest in scientific news, as well as give you an all important base knowledge. And, the writing is well done, easy without being condescending, and fun.

As a working scientist and a citizen of the world, I cannot recommend Natalie Angier's, "The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science" highly enough for not only non-scientists and the scientifically illiterate, but also for those working in science who have forgotten the wonder and joy in their profession.

From the biggest questions about the nature of the universe to more personal questions concerning humankind's origins and internal workings, Angier brings not only her journalistic experience and exuberant curiosity to her subjects, she also interviews experts in the field who bring their own authority and creativity in explaining both concepts that are fundamental to our understanding of the physical world and the latest advancements that challenge and further our current knowledge.

An intelligent reader may now gain the scientific literacy necessary for life in the twenty-first century between the covers of one book, written in a playful, vivid, conversational style that nonetheless manages to impart important concepts without oversimplifying them. Natalie Angier has done the world a great service by bringing science in an accessible, entertaining form to a general audience. She has done her job, and now it is the public's turn to do theirs and fulfill its responsibility to educate and enlighten itself.

There's a lot to like about this book. A guide for the literate adult who's nonetheless scientifically challenged, it lays out the basics of science -- the scientific method, probability and measurement -- and then uses them to explain astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology and physics with an almost poetic style. It's packed with alarming facts (did you know a third of U.S. advanced science degrees go to foreign students?) and full of emotion, which, sadly, you don't often find anymore in scientific writing.

Trouble is, author Natalie Angier is just too passionate for her own good. She obviously knows her stuff, but her prose is just too artful, too flowery, too straight from a creative writing class, never meeting a metaphor it doesn't saddle up and ride like the wind. Describing the beauty of a mountain range, she instructs her readers to "gaze out over the vast cashmere accordion of earthscape, the repeating pleats swelling and dipping silently in the far horizon without even deigning to disdain you."

I think that means it's pretty.

I don't claim to be a serious writer, but with science, a vital topic that America seems to have completely lost touch with, we need books that can easily engage their readers. This one is not quite there. Two better choices are the classics The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence and The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History.

In the United States nowadays, a person can graduate from college having taken only a couple of token soft science classes, and these may have been adjusted (dumbed down) for humanities majors. A surprising percentage (well over half?) of our US population doesn't believe in evolution. In the industrialized world, we rank dead last for this statistic, except for Turkey, which is caught up in the Muslim version of intelligent design. The vast majority of our state and federal legislators are not educated in the sciences, but in the humanities. No wonder they are so easily misled when it comes to making informed decisions about, for example, climate change.

A decision to side with mainstream science is almost always the right decision, but it would be nice to know what mainstream science is saying (read "Discover" or other science magazines), why it is so valid, and how the scientific method works. Of course, it's not perfect - it's administered by people, with all their tendencies to delusion, misuse of data, and greed; but it's relentlessly self-correcting and it has consistently provided the most usable strategy to find out how things work.

Natalie Angier has written a book that will help us with our scientific literacy. The first three chapters cover basics about the scientific method. The human default method of decision-making, gut instinct, worked well for hunter-gatherers, but today we can do better. Read these chapters if you don't read anything else (one chapter inspired me to order a book on probabilities). The next six chapters are about the specific fields of physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, geology, or astronomy.

How much physics can you learn in 34 pages? Well, you get a feel for how and why electrons can be harnessed to power our homes - or perhaps you'd like to know how the Houdini-like maneuver, "quantum leap" got its name. The chapter on chemistry gives an overview of chemical bonds - why DNA has hydrogen bonds, a weaker type (so they can easily unzip for reading by messenger RNA) and stronger types of bonds are on nitrogen (and why that makes them useful as explosives). In the evolution chapter, you learn why "nothing in biology makes any sense outside of evolution," with a strong outline on the basics. Despite what you may have heard, "Natural selection is about as nonrandom a force as you can imagine." - Richard Dawkins.

In the chapter on molecular biology, you learn how a cell bristles with proteins, looking (if you could lift the lid and look inside) like a beehive or ant-bed of activity, but at fast-forward speed. This beautifully written chapter reminded me of Lewis Thomas's classic, "Lives of a Cell" from 1974. Geologists immediately descend onto the site when a new tunnel is blasted through a hillside. We live on a planet that records its own history and each stone is a potential Rosetta stone. Astronomy is among the most popular of sciences, "chaster than other sciences, purer of heart and freer of impurities, mutagens, teratogens, and animal testing." It answers the eternal questions: Who are we? Where do we come from?

Each chapter covers enough basics to be able to provide a strong finish. For the scientifically challenged, for the reader who needs a science booster, or for the confirmed science nut like me, don't let this book get away. It is even available in audio so you can buff up your education the easy way.

Now for the disclaimer: The 5 stars is for the subject matter. Her deliver is "too cute" to the point of distraction. The last book I recall of this type was Bill Bryson's - "A Short History of Nearly Everything." His book doesn't suffer from maladies of this sort and is superior.

Natalie Angier covers a lot of ground in "The Canon," and presents her material in a logical and orderly fashion. After a couple of chapters on the conceptual underpinnings of the scientific mindset (the scientific method, designing controls in experiments, statistical analysis, and the like), Ms. Angier moves mostly from smallest to largest: a chapter devoted to Physics explores the atomic/sub-atomic realms; another is devoted to Chemistry and the molecular realm; a third and fourth are devoted to Evolutionary and Molecular Biology, taking us from the cellular level to multicelled organisms (including humans); a chapter devoted to Geology expands the circle of knowledge planet-wide; and a closing chapter devoted to Astronomy envelopes the rest of the known universe. For her presumed target audience, a relatively well-educated and well-read person with quite limited exposure to science, Ms. Angier's book could be a welcome primer, jogging repressed memories of high school science classes, vaguely recalled words of David Attenborough and Carl Sagan, and the odd assortment of Nova and Nature episodes.

Unfortunately, Ms. Angier's wealth of useful overviews into various disciplines is devalued considerably by her relentlessly cute, persistently pithy, and self-consciously "engaging" prose. Early on in the book, you might find yourself somewhat charmed by her witticisms. You may even excuse the groan-inducing puns that subtitle every chapter (i.e., "Molecular Biology: Cells and Whistles," "Geology: Imagining World Pieces"). I picture a sign posted on the wall above Ms. Angier's computer (just next to the "Keep It Simple, Stupid" admonition), saying "Keep It Fun, Stupid!" Added to her general flippancy is a decided and wearisome tendency to wax rhapsodic (as in her characterization of the diamond as "fossilized starlight . . . translucent, mesmeric, intransigent diamond, the hardest substance known, save for a human heart grown cold.") Awwwww! After a couple of chapters your patient forebearance may be stetching a bit thin, and by the halfway point you'll be ready to smack somebody upside the head. Maybe not the author, who is just too darn cute, but certainly some editor, somewhere along the line, is a deserving target for not reining her in a bit.

A last couple of minor criticisms:

1. a few well-chosen diagrams would have been a most welcome addition to this book. A visual representation of an atom, a molecule or two, a shifting tectonic plate diagram, etc., would have been worth more than a few thousand of Ms. Angier's words.

2. The author's blatantly dismissive and often subtly derisive attitude towards religious belief may be a bit off-putting for many readers. For an author trying so very hard to engage her general public, and publishing in a market wherein a substantial majority claim belief in a Higher Power, this snidely secularist perspective seems a bit ill-advised.

Admirable as Ms. Angier's book is in its attempts to lay out the basics of science, she is far too continually sarcastic in her delivery for anything truly lasting to come from this book. I fear that when you finish 'The Canon,' you will come away with some anecdotes and nothing much else.

Here's an example of an author much too concerned with being funny, and not at all trusting to her subject matter:

"A top of the line radar can pinpoint the whereabouts of a housefly two kilometers away, although clearly this is a radar with far too much time on its hands."

"Fine. They are all light. They are all electromagnetic radiation. They are all - what?"

"The universe, though, doesn't only like to cut things short, it also opts for the sagging saga approach, dictating thick volumes of time that are nearly as unfathomable as Finnegan's Wake."

"Where might Ebola weigh in? And how many of any could dance on a pin?"

"Contrary to myth, time doesn't fly particularly fast when you're dead."

"Hold your Miss Havensham's, huffed the progressive-spirited Darrell."

After several hundred pages, these trite quips (appearing as they do ten a page) grow tiresome and even somewhat alarming. Ms. Angier does not trust her reader to surrender to the facination of her subject or her research and, like an annoying friend in a museum, continues to make jokes upon viewing each painting ('I mean, I guess you can paint with one ear, am I right?')

New Yorker readers (I am one) who are not much interested in science might find a friend in Ms. Angier as she presents 'boring' material with a wink and a nudge-nudge. But to those with curious minds who purchase a book like this to actually learn a few things, move along.

"The Canon" is a book that tries to bring science into the grasp of the ordinary, science-ignorant reader. The author attempts to make science accessible through the use of witty prose, colorful analogies, and outrageous metaphors. Mostly she succeeds, although the scientifically literate may find this book too fluffy.

I would skip the introduction and get right to the meat of the book. In successive chapters the author looks at scientific methods of measurement, probabilities, and calibration, then proceeds onward with a chapter each on physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, geology, and astronomy. Along the way she comes out with a strong defense of Darwinism, a good history of the world, a less good history of the cosmos, and a pretty good account of DNA. In a book of this length and breadth much of importance is left out but, if you learn everything "the Canon" tells you, you will have reached a pretty high level of familiarity with several disciplines of science.

Smallchief

It's amazing that in a book which contains an entire chapter on Thinking Scientifically, Ms. Angiers commits one of the ultimate sins in science writing: the dissemination of information without bothering to check if it is actually correct. The discipline of referencing every "fact" presented in science writing (something this book fails to do) is important because, aside from allowing the reader to discover the evidence that a particular "fact" is based on, it forces the author to make sure that what they are presenting is actually CORRECT. The number of errors in the later chapters of this book (chapters 5-9) are far too many for a book aimed at non-scientists.

Some of the errors are minor and show only a slight misunderstanding on the author's part, but her explanation of why planets don't twinkle (they do twinkle, by the way) is wince inducing. And I'm sure it would be a surprise to many botanists that plants, in general, don't respire during the day time. This is the sort of laziness that I would expect from a tired middle school student writing a science report late at night the day before it's due, not what I would expect from a prize winning science writer in a book that had actually been EDITED.

I'll let others harp on the unhelpful language throughout the later chapters and the cheerleading mess of her chapter on evolution but would rather leave potential readers with this: Do not take anything you read in "The Canon" for granted until you confirm it in a trusted second source. This should go for anything you read but goes doubly so for this book.

I'm half way through this book, and it's become a chore. It feels as though someone wrote a perfectly good accessible science book, and then went back through their text and awkwardly shoe-horned in some stupid cutesy-ism or personal anecdote into almost every sentence. It's a shame, because the quips from actual scientists are often funny and light and relevant to the subject, something Angier is utterly incapable of doing when it's her turn to say something.

I remember a review describing this book as like taking a fun science class from your coolest teacher. In reality, this book is like taking a science class with that embarrassing trying-to-be-hip teacher who keeps telling unfunny jokes, and is too obtuse to realize that none of their students finds them the least bit amusing.

The author writes page after page of flowery prose without saying much at all. It almost seems that the author was paid by the word (probably not by page though - the book is printed in a tiny font which just exacerbates the 'word overload' problem.) If you're looking for an intro to science, then look elsewhere. You can start with Bill Bryson.