Customer Reviews

Pinball Effect: Journeys Through Knowledge

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Since Chaos burst upon the intellectual consciousness of the twentieth century, examples of the butterfly effect have inundated our lives. Chaotic systems exhibit a type of behavior where vanishingly-small perturbations in initial conditions result in wild and unpredictable alterations in a system's final state. The butterfly in China, flapping its wings, results in a hurricane off the coast of Florida 100 years later.

James Burke takes us on an intersected voyage through the web of history, and in the process shows the intricately connected nature of our lives in a chaotic mishmash of intersecting events. The mental imagery I concocted while reading his book was one of a small worm making its way through a biscuit of shredded wheat. With thousands of intersecting strands, and billions of route possibilities open at each juncture, my biscuit gives a feel for the intricate connection that every event in history shares with everything else. In fact, Burke has written his book from the worm's perspective, with branch points identified in the margins so you can follow a thread (instead of the book) as it weaves its way through history. You do not need to read this book sequentially, and quite possibly might choose to read it worm style rather than cover to cover.

When I first began Burke's book I looked for the obvious connections, but soon learned that was not his objective. Though he illustrates obvious connections, much of the interelatedness in Burke's book deals with subtle effects that changed people's lives and resulted in dramatic changes in history. Sometimes the stories become so intricate I found myself taking notes so I could mentally trace back through the web of events.

Most of the historical events he covers relate in some way to scientific or technical achievements and discoveries. In some of these, I found myself confused about the terminology used. Burke is not always clear when he comments about a particular discovery, whether he is making a statement about the way things are viewed today, or how they were viewed by the original discoverers. Because of this, I found myself sometimes irritated by technically incorrect descriptions. For example, on page 198 Burke says:

"There was only one thing that would reflect radio waves besides metal reflectors like the ones Hertz had used: ionized atoms, which had lost one or more of their electrons. These atoms became positively charged and would reflect electronic signals (which were negative)."

While it is true that ions are positively charged, radio waves are not negative. In another place, he describes voltage as charge (see page 186). He also mentions, off handedly, that collimated laser beams spread by only "a few feet" over the distance between the earth and moon (see page 75). [A collimated beam, with a wavelength of 600 nm, will have a half-beam divergence of about 48 feet over the distance between the earth and moon when collimated with a telescope having a 10-meter-diameter primary mirror. See, for example, Saleh, Teich, "Fundamentals of Photonics," Wiley Series in Pure and applied optics, equation 3.1-20.]

These examples left me with a sometimes uneasy feeling about the book's technical accuracy, yet I cannot discount the possibility that Burke was simply explaining these phenomena in the context of the way they were understood when first discovered.

The book has an excellent index. The figures, however, are of generally poor quality and hard to see. Another irritant was the frequent and often-detailed descriptions Burke gives of ingenious and complex machinery and gadgets. These descriptions are often very hard to follow, and would benefit greatly from drawings that support the textual descriptions.

Aside from these few criticisms, however, I found Burke's book most enjoyable. It will broaden your horizons and make you appreciate history from a new perspective. An ideal book for just before bedtime, I highly recommend it.

Duwayne Anderson

Although, I'm not even finished yet, I know I'll be re-reading this at some time to take advantage of the inspired gateways scattered throughout the text. I remember watching the original 'Connections' series on PBS years ago, and his work fascinated me even then. This work is easily readable, and makes itself readily available to young and old, the scientifically minded and those just looking for a good read. 'Pinball' is a fun excursion through science, technology, and history! If you don't realize just how connected life is, this book will certainly open your eyes to the web of a world in which we live.

It's been some time since I read this book, but I was recently reminded of it. I like Burke's pinwheeling (or pinballing, rather) style, jumping from topic to topic and making what are, indeed, often very interesting connections.

The reason I rate this book so low, however, is that often Burke sums up a series of connections by implying -- or sometimes directly stating -- that the first event in the chain caused, by means of the intermediate steps, the last. This is often not at all the case; the connections between steps may have had no causal relationship, but simply meant that a person was working in the same city, or some other such interesting but not causally relevant connection.

So in short, the chains of connections themselves make for fun reading, but don't trust the summaries. "Correlation does not equal causation," to quote an old statistics maxim; in the case of The Pinball Effect, connection doesn't always equal causation, either.

This latest edition of Mr. Burke's unique perspective of history is aptly named. Unlike his previous, best known works, "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed", James Burke does not examine the events bearing on a specific topic indepth. This volume, of 20 chapters, contains a plethora of persons and events in each. It has an exhaustive index of 18 pages and 447 points of reference in the margins. Taking a different literary approach from his previous works, Burke makes his point of the connections between seemingly disjointed and unforeseen events in history remarkably well.

Aptly titled "The Pinball Effect" James Burke coherently outlines events leading from one point of reference to a completely unforseen outcome. He does not examine the advent of a specific discovery or human insight exhaustively. In prose style, it is a true outline, giving very brief summaries of the interactions of events and persons. This gives a whirl wind, fast paced tone to the work. Additionally, adding to the the pinball pace of the book, Burke has added to the margins of each page "gateways", cites to other pages in the book, where the event is mentioned. Based on the premise that history can be recorded as timelines, and these timelines invariably cross innumerably, these "gateways," as Burke terms them, show how preceived unrelated events are indeed related. The major premise of this work is that these relationships are impossible to determine contemporaneously and it is only with the benefit of hindsight can the implications be devined.

Since knowlege expands exponentially, each new insight building upon the former, and chaotically, with each individual mind developing it's own thought patterns, the possbilities are exhausting. These inexhaustive combinations and the tangentery implications that may be drawn therefrom is the "Pinball Effect." Thus, this departure from Burke's previous approach is well suited to his premise.
This work is not a companion book to the television series "Connections 2", although many chapters cover topics of these episodes. In an interview to the Boston Phoenix newspaper, on debute of the "Connections 2" series in 1994, Burke stated that the indepth examination given in the hour long episodes of "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed" were not accessible to today's television audience, accustom to soundbite TV. Therefore, "Connections 2" consisted of facer pased, half hour shows. Whether or not this premise is true, "The Pinball Effect" is not a dumbing down of knowleged for the masses by it's outline technique. It is fascinating, fast paced reading as such, but is is also an excellant reference book. Every bookshelf should contain a copy for this reason alone. Almost the whole of Western scientific history and it's impact on society is in this book. The excellant index and bibliography enables one to look up characters and events divergent as: Josiah Wedgwood, Luigi Galvani, Immanual Kant; immigration quota laws, phosphates, and block and tackle systems and thereby guage their time, place and implications.

This is not a book to gain indepth knowledge of any particular subject by. It is an excellant overview of the complexity of modern Western history, from the view of a scientific historian, for both the neophyte and the proficient. True to it's name, "The Pinball Effect" takes the reader on a fast and furious ride through the major events of our history, events which are all too often taken for granted. It is highly recommended.

Reviewer's note: I've tried to include indentation and line spacing between paragraphs, but they do not seem to show on the screen. If these do not appear, please excuse the inconvenience.

James Burke's The Pinball Effect is a literary fractal through inventive history. The book seems not to follow any particular pattern, but after finishing the book the reader can look back and see a distinct orderliness. Creativity and openness begets creativity. I read this book as one would read a novel, but Pinball can be analyzed from several perspectives. Invention and time can be easily traced through seemingly unrelated events in Burke's writing. More than once I thought I would single out an invention connection, but the next story amazed me even more. Easy to read, the book lends itself to deeper analysis in tracing humans' journeys, origins, and light bulb moments. Two things impressed me about the people who were inventive: 1. They availed themselves to other creative people. and 2. They were able to see new things because they looking for them.

History of technology or history as technology, this book is an entertaining guide through the human adventure of the past few centuries. You may quibble with precise cause and effect connections the author proposes but the overwhelming effect is to drive home one irrefutable message: "We all live on the great dynamic web of change". No other book that I have ever read justifies better the first sentence in its introduction (not even the Tale of Two Cities)
But who has made the next connection, ie that the pinball effect is another manifestation of the Howard Bloom's Global Brain (ISBN: 0471419192)? Once you dispose of the preconception that brains have to be conscious then you can better see that technological development is the learning experience of our collective brain. The balls flying from pin to pin are the interactions of agents in the complex adaptive system that is modern civilisation. Treat the book as fun and you will see connections that you were never aware existed. Treat the book as a guide and you will be lead on a non-linear path through the history of ideas, invention and technology. Treat the book as recipes for invention and you will find there are no rules. Treat the book as mind food and you will realise that the human condition is more interesting and meaningful than any fundamentalist has ever dreamed of... But read it, dip into it, return to it and follow up some of the exciting ideas that may find a new home in the next century.

A previous reviewer has pointed out that much of what is described in the book is coincidence. This is true but misses the point entirely. The author does not mean to imply cause and effect; the world is too complex for that. The point is that there are several sets of scattered events that can be joined together; the fascinating thing is that such events and connections exist in the first place. Burke gives examples of such, and does so in such a way that you know he is only sampling from a much larger collection of them.

For example, the following sequence of events comes from the first chapter of the book:

Rowland Hill is best known for introducing the idea of postage stamps. The first printer that the British government hired was an American named Jacob Perkins, who later turned his new printing techniques to the problem of mass producing printed cotton cloth. For this he used a special gum imported from West Africa called Senegal gum. This was made possible by the French who had colonized that part of the world. That in turn was made possible by the 17th century statesman called Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who modernized much of France and in particular its navy. He was responsible for the building of the Canal du Midi that cut a swathe in France from the Atlantic to the Med. One of the engineers who worked on this massive undertaking was Sebastien Vauban, a brilliant inventor who also came up with a new method of siege warfare that was used by French and American troops to defeat the British at Yorktown. The American victory led to a huge number of loyalists fleeing to Nova Scotia. One of them was Abraham Kunders, who saw an opportunity in transporting the other group of refugees sweeping into that part of the world, namely Scots who had been kicked off their lands. After some time this transatlantic traffic was beginning to wane. Meanwhile, Hill's Penny Post had just begun, and Kunders was quick to realize that this would mean a huge amount of mail requiring transportation across the Atlantic, and made sure his company was there to ship a good deal of it. This made him rich, and started a successful family business which by the twentieth century and a clerical error was the Cunard shipping company, that built such well known liners as the Lustiania and the Queen Elizabeth II.

And that's just part of the first chapter, remember.

July 16, 1999

I first became aware of James Burke work through the Discovery/TLC channels and when I stumbled across his audio novel Connections I had to try it out. Connections was great and so I was encouraged to try out his other audio novels, The PinBall Effect which were just as ingenious and entertaining.

The quality of James Burke's work set the stage for what has become a new age in bedtime stories. My new born son then 3 months was quickly introduced to the art of the audio novel as his new bedtime stories.

Its been well over a year now after several dozen audio novels the little guy has now turned 18 months old. The very creative story of The Pinball Effect still gets a replay every few months and he enjoys it every time.

The only sad part about the James Burke audio novels is that I haven't seen a new one in a very long time.

I highly recommend this creative story about history and the connections which brought us to where we are!

Arnold D Veness

I found the book to be very good and should be considered a basic reference - if not assignment book for late elementry or middleschool class rooms - for science or history. My eighth grader (who has a modest interest in science) and I discussed several examples in the book - with a " light going on" each time. This book is somewhat about who discovered a particular invention or process - and more about who found a better use for it. One of the values here is discussing current technological advances that dont seem to be directly linked to an end use, such as gene therapy, slowing down the speed of light, etc.. and contemplating possible applications. The reader - old or young - will come away with wanting to know what will be derived from todays discoveries.

Burke's companion volume to the Connections-2 TV series mimics
the failings of that series, while failing to live up to his
standard set in his two previous ones.

The great insight that Burke supposedly brings to this book
is that technological, scientific, and cultural development
are all intertwined, and that individual achievements are
only made possible by many previous advances brought together
unexpectedly.

But readers of "Connections" and "The Day the
Universe Changed" already know this. So Burke adds hypertext
to the book with indices in the margins. It's a cute idea,
and well-executed, but actually following these links would
destroy any cohesion in the stories Burke is trying to tell.

If there were cohesion, that is. "Connections" told stories
often stretching over centuries, and if you couldn't guess
how you were getting there (part of the fun, of course), you at
least knew where you were going. "Day" used essentially the
same insight, but each chapter had a unifying theme: a
particular revolutionary insight that changed our world view.

"Pinball" has neither. Perhaps because Burke only had 30
minutes rather than an hour as in the previous shows, he
rushed through the same amount of material twice as fast,
barely pausing for breath. He doesn't stop to review where
we've been, and in the first chapter, each leap takes us
backwards, rather than forwards. The chop-chop style might
work for MTV, but left me feeling that "Pinball" was not
"Connections", but even less of the same.