Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos [Paperback]

K. C. Cole (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 17, 2004

The universe comes down to earth in K. C. Cole's Mind Over Matter, a fresh and witty exploration of physics, cosmology, mathematics, astronomy, and more. Like no other science writer, Cole demystifies scientific concepts and humanizes the people who study them. Beginning with a discussion of how "the mind creates reality as well as muddles it," she then peeks into the stories behind science's great minds and into their playful side, and concludes by illuminating the relationship between science and society. Cole's remarkable work brings science to the reader's doorstep, revealing the universe to be elegant, intriguing, and relevant to politics, art, and every dimension of human life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cole (The Universe and the Teacup) gathers 92 short essays that first appeared primarily in her Los Angeles Times science column. The book's four sections are loosely ordered around the subjectivity of inquiry, the physical world, science in practice and the politics of science. Cole's technique is to set her stage with a scientific factoid or news blip and then ruminate on the unexpected insights, inversions or ironies she finds there. Her themes include uncertainty, the limitations of measure, fragility, illusion, humility before nature, complacency. A solar eclipse "exposes our fragility" and dispels illusion "like turning up the houselights during a movie." The millennium, indeed the notion of time itself, is an artificial concept, and "it's a fine line," the author writes, "between discovering something and making it up." Ever the navel gazer, Cole seeks the wondrous in the stuff we mistake for just ordinary. Her piece on clouds ("wind made visible") segues inevitably to dying stars ("a cosmic-scale cloudburst") and atoms (a nucleus "engulfed by a cloud of electrons"); her piece on wind leads her to the hurricanes on Jupiter and the complicated "weather" of galaxies. Her science is also a foil for left-of-center political commentary on Enron, daisy cutter bombs, the Kansas Board of Education's vote on Darwin and the American justice system, to name a handful of her targets. These light vignettes are doubtless welcome respite for readers of the L.A. Times, but this collection may be too much of a good thing. Readers are advised to take it in measured doses.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Having wound up her "Mind over Matter" science column for the Los Angeles Times, journalist Cole here corrals about 90 of her serial musings. More personal than her books, which, like The Hole in the Universe (2001), "translate" physics and mathematics for a mass readership, Cole's columns take inspiration from her conversations, sightings in nature, or reactions to items of science news or entertainment. An element of apology frequently surfaces here, for Cole is apparently responding to opinion from a segment of physicists who are either disdainful or jealous of successful popularizers such as the late Carl Sagan or her, for that matter. Her concrete defense, of course, is her skillful writing, built on sparking curiosity about her topics. These she broadly sorts into those about detection of impinging cosmic information; what the information communicates about what is out there; and the experience of doing science. Whether conceiving a column idea while at the theater, the lab, or the Canadian Rockies, Cole knows how to wrap it into a wonder-prompting package. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; "a" edition (April 17, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156029561
• ISBN-13: 978-0156029568
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #334,613 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable and Accurate, May 30, 2003

By 

Ursiform (Torrance, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos (Hardcover)

Back during the brief period when the Los Angeles Times pretended to care about science it ran a weekly column by K. C. Cole. The Times, unfortunately, has reverted to viewing science as something to egregiously misrepresent in its daily reporting. But Cole's columns live on, and are now available to a larger audience. A physicist by training, I am often disappointed by science books because they achieve understandability by subtly misrepresenting the essence of difficult concepts. Cole, on the other hand, has a knack for explaining difficult concepts in simple terms without sacrificing veracity. This book is both a pleasurable and accurate read on topics of current interest in science. I highly recommend it to people wanting to better understand modern science.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Science made readable, relevant and enjoyable, October 29, 2003

By 

Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos (Hardcover)

In this collection of mostly columns that she wrote for the Los Angeles Times, science writer K.C. Cole relies on her wide reading in science, and on her interviews and friendships with scientists as a basis for appreciations, observations, interpretations, reports, and just plain musings on science and how science is transforming the planet. Employing a style that ranges from gossip column cute to poetic, Cole (who teaches at my alma mater UCLA) works hard to make science as relevant to the general public as the personalities in, say, People magazine, and just as accessible.

The task in writing about science is making it intelligible without dumbing it down or making simplistic statements that are not accurate. Cole recognizes this problem; indeed in reading these small essays (almost all are under a thousand words) I can feel her struggling mightily to get it just right: to make her expression as accurate as possible and as readable. She muses on these problems in the final essay, entitled, "Oops!" in which she confesses to some slips including confabulating Caltech physicist Robert Millikan with junk bond king Michael Milken. Ah, yes, I know well that sort of error, having stumbled thereabouts myself a time or two!

But it is not her ability to popularize science (by the way, she is now doing pieces for National Public Radio) that impresses me about Cole. It's her ability to understand science and its place in society that sets her apart from other writers. She is especially good are relating science to the social, political and personal worlds in which we live. Indeed, Part IV of this book is entitled "Political" Science with just the "Political" in quotes emphasizing that Cole is talking about both the internal political affairs of science and how the political world in general affects science and how science affects the political world. Some of the best essays in the book are from this section.

In "Dreamers," beginning on page 269, for example, Cole laments the loss of funding for some science projects (e.g., particle physics, the mission to Europa) as money is being redirected toward the wars on terror, drugs, and cancer--"missiles and medicine." She understands the pragmatic view of politicians who want tangible results from grants and under writings, but makes the powerful point that it is the "dreamers in the hinterlands who often come up with the most practical inventions." She directs our attention to PET scans, magnetic imaging, and laser surgery, all products of dreamers. But most saliently she recalls the physicists behind the development of the atom bomb, "dreamers" like Einstein and Oppenheimer. She notes that Germany might have won that war had Hitler been able to keep most of the German and Austrian scientists from fleeing to the United States. It is one of the great and most delicious ironies of history that so-called "Jewish" science helped to defeat the Nazis.

In "Unnatural" (p. 291) she addresses the controversy about genetically modified foods, noting first that seemingly unnatural plastic is mostly made from petroleum products, natural "plant matter that brewed for millions of years in the bowels of the earth"; and second that we have been modifying foods since the pre-history. ("You could even say that falling in love is nature's way of genetically modifying the species.") In conclusion she makes one of my favorite arguments: "We evolve...There's nothing special about this particular point in the history of any species--corn, humans or dogs. We're all on our way from someplace, going somewhere."

I've read this argument elsewhere and indeed have presented it myself, but nowhere have I read it put so succinctly well. We are NOT an unchanging construction (as from a creator God); instead we are a perpetually evolving entity, immersed in, and part of, an ever changing cosmos.

Some things learned: why Brazil nuts rise to the top in cans of mixed nuts (p. 117); there is a human wave of wake-up calls constantly going around the earth as we travel in our mind's eye with the sunlight though the time zones (p. 204); a comet or meteorite impact on the scale of the one that hit Siberia in 1908 happens about once every hundred years (p. 295); you can't get a suntan indoors because glass is opaque to ultraviolet light.

And much more.

I have read three of Cole's previous books and reviewed two of them (First You Build a Cloud: And Other Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life 1999 and The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything 2001) and I read every essay in this book and can say this is her best work. I found almost all of her arguments agreeable and informed, very well and gently expressed. I was fascinated at how her distinctive style--sometimes cute (sometimes too cute!) but often understated--partially obscures her nimble and trenchant intellect. Cole knows science and she knows why science matters, why it matters more than we can know, and she works hard at getting that message across to a sometimes reluctant public.

Science writers are as necessary to the modern world as electricity is to our homes. In some places in the world there is neither. We are lucky to be able to turn on the lights and to read someone as lucid and pertinent as K.C. Cole.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The world of physics made clear at last, June 24, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos (Hardcover)

K.C. Cole has the rare ability to make the physical world both comprehensible and entertaining. I never thought I'd curl up with a good physics book but I found her brief commentaries obliterate the usual arbitrary separation between science and the humanities. In fact, it is by making physics so humanistic that she makes it clear to those of us who have difficulties understanding numerical concepts or apparently obscure ideas like space-time, quarks, and black holes. "Physics is simple," she writes, ". . . .consider the harmonics of a bottle of beer. Blow over the top, and you can make a series of different sounds, depending on how hard you blow and how much beer is left in the bottle. And lo and behold, it is by analyzing a very similar set of harmonics set up by the sloshing of gas and light in the early universe that astronomers have been able to put their ears to the cosmos, listening in on its babblings from the first moment of time. And here's what Cole, the mistress of metaphor, has to say about how Einstein's theory of relativity explains gravity as a curvature of space-time: "It's like an elephant sitting on a waterbed. Heavy objects bend space-time into "gravity wells" that pull other object in." If Einstein had put it that way in the first place, I wouldn't have had to wait this long to get it. Thanks, K. C. Cole.