Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science [Hardcover]

Peter Atkins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 5, 2003

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 392 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (June 5, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0198606648
• ISBN-13: 978-0198606642
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,248,834 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Galileo's Finger: The 10 Great Ideas of Science, February 2, 2004

By 

Joe Zika "Khemprof" (Cincinnati, Ohio) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science (Hardcover)

Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science written by Peter Atkins is an excellently written book that gets to the heart of science ideas. "Galileo's Finger" takes us on a journey through the sciences on a broader context and embraces the ten central ideas of current science.

There are ten chapters taking us on a challenging but ultimately deeply satisfying journey. Science is the apotheosis of the spirit of the renaissance, an extraordinary monument to the human spirit and the power of comprehension of the puny human brain. This book is highly readable and the author makes the subject matter intelligable to the modest reader, making for an understanding of complex subject matter.

The chapters are as follows:

Evolution: The Emergence of Complexity
DNA: The Rationalization of Biology
Energy: The Universalization of Accountancy
Entropy: The Spring of Change
Atoms: The Reduction of Matter
Symmetry: The Quantification of Beauty
Quanta: The Simplification of Understanding
Cosmology: The Globalization of Reality
Spacetime: The Arena of Action
Arithmetic: The Limits of Reason

There is an epilogue for the future of understanding. The author has written the chapters in a way that you can either read them in order or read them out of order as they are free standing subjects. But, I found that that I could skim read the book and later reread in depth the subjects that piqued my interest.

This is an excellent book to be used as a introduction to scientific concepts and puts the reader into a logical approach to the scientific concepts, as you read on you'll find that you'll arrive at an emergence of understanding. This book is written well and the author uses the English language to describe concepts in a way that opens our minds through our eyes of the ways of deep science.

Galileo's Finger is a solid 5 star introduction to scientific concepts written in a manor to educate the reader. This book deserves a good read and a place on your bookshelf.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Overview of Science, February 22, 2005

By 

e uva (Montreal) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science (Hardcover)

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."

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Popularized science but not a For Dummies book, December 6, 2004

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science (Paperback)

Galileo, as he was sentenced to recant what he had seen with his own eyes is reputed to have said under his breath something like, "but I saw what I saw." Trying to see evolution or quanta or the spacetime continuum is more difficult.

Galileo was then sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. No more questioning the unbridled power of the church. But the church was not all powerful, in places other than Italy observations continued. And the instruments used for observation became better and better, scientists could see further, and smaller, and with a better understanding of what they were seeing.

Dr. Atkins has selected ten key central ideas of today's science and described them for the general public. But having said that, I must also say that this isn't a For Dummies book. His explanation, for instance, of some of the modern thinking in the physics of symmetry, quanta, cosmology and spacetime reaches the point where you either have to accept it on faith or spend a considersible amount of time with very high level mathematics.

This is a book that presents the modern thinking at a level that most of it is understandable to most of us. Combine that with an elegent writing style, and reading it makes for a great deal of enjoyment.