Faber Book of Science [Paperback]

John (ed) Carey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 5, 1999

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 consists of accounts by scientists themselves - astronomers, physicists, biologists, chemists, psychologists - who talk about their moments of breakthrough. Ronald Ross describes his discovery of the secret of malaria; the workers in Edison's laboratory put together the first electric-light bulb; and readers share in the construction of the world's first atomic pile.The book shows how science has changed art: how Newton's "Optics" flooded 18th-century poetry with colour; how the vastness of geological time terrified Tennyson and the Victorians; and how modernist writers struggled to adapt to Einstein's relativity. The classic science-writers are included - Darwin, T.H. Huxley, and Jean Henri Fabre tracking insects through the Provencal countryside. So too are today's experts - Steve Jones on the Human Genome Project, Richard Dawkins on DNA, and many other representatives of the late-20th-century genre of popular-science writing which, John Carey argues, challenges contemporary poetry and f

Product Details

• Paperback: 752 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber (April 5, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571179010
• ISBN-13: 978-0571179015
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #184,333 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A SUPERB GUIDED TOUR THROUGH THE MAGIC OF SCIENCE., September 2, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: The Faber Book of Science (Hardcover)

"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, flung down on the earth, lifted ten kilometers high. It was breathed in by a falcon, descending into its precipitous lungs, but did not penetrate it s thick bood and was expelled. It dissolved three times in the water of the sea, once in the waster of a cascading torrent, and again was expelled. It travelled with the wind for eight years: now high, now low, on the sea and among the clouds, over forests, deserts, and limitless expanses of ice; then it stumbled into capture and the organic adventure..."

Magic realism indeed!

John Updike has his famous "Cosmic Gall" here, a poem about subatomic particles called neutrinos. Every second, hundreds of billions of these neutrinos pass through each square inch of our bodies, coming from above during the day and from below at night, when the sun is shining on the other side of the earth.

Neutrinos, they are very small./
They have no charge and have no mass/
And do not interact at all./
The earth is just a silly ball/
To them, through which they simply pass,/
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall/
Or photons through a sheet of glass.... /

"Not many poets have written about atomic particles", Carey approvingly adds.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Of interest to anyone with an enquiring mind., September 11, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Faber Book of Science (Hardcover)

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

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This is the Science Anthology for you, October 30, 2003

By 

Keith Appleyard "kapple999" (Brighton, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Faber Book of Science (Hardcover)

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.