Customer Reviews

Nanoconvergence: The Unity of Nanoscience, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science

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I was quite excited by the prospect of this book because my area of research is essentially a convergence of 3 of the four fields he mentions. However, the book is written as if by an average 11th grader who really knows how to use the internet. Within the first two pages this is obvious as he already talks about the number of times the word "nano" is used in recent publications. So then I read the biography on the author and find out he has a PhD in Sociology. Which is basically all you need to know about how the book reads. He is all over the place, random ideas pop up at the end of paragraphs about completely different topics and then he goes to something entirely different. He spends half the book talking about himself and why basically everything important in science in this century has been a byproduct of his work or that of his friends.

I don't even want to qualify this as popular science as true popular science is interesting and actually provides real facts. Furthermore, books such as the two written by Brian Greene provide objective scientific fact and realistic statements at a level that is understandable by a non-expert. This book was written by a sociologist about science and engineering, i.e. a book by someone who has no idea what he is talking about trying to "dumb" it down for the masses.

This book randomly makes detours into why the author is anti-religion and then he repeatedly quotes the bible. Not that quoting the bible makes one religious, but he does so in a way that is highly contradictory. He talks about how freedom in science is important to creativity and that innovators in fields should be rewarded for the work they do and then about how all work must benefit "mankind" to create equality and that the government must decide what science should do. A final complaint is that the author does not know how to use the word "the". I have my theory of why he does not use it properly, but this is mostly based on the fact that he went to one of my rivals in the Ivy League.

If you are interested in reading a poorly written, poorly organized, uninformative and pretentious piece of "popular" science, then this is the book for you.

I give it two stars and not one simply because this is a topic that needs to be addressed and given more attention. Hopefully the book will bother a real scientist enough to write a real book about the subject and thus the book might have some purpose yet.