Customer Reviews

The Sand Dollar And The Slide Rule: Drawing Blueprints From Nature

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This book is worth every penny. In an era when we're lucky to glean one or two inspiring ideas from a book of nonfiction, Delta Willis has packed this one with dozens-- possibility space, tensegrity, morphodynamics... And the details: did you know that a fly has a three-speed gear shift for its wings? Or that the branches of an oak tree are frequently longer than the tree's height? Nature's designs are not always ideal, but they have uncanny ways of dealing with the conditions of this planet, using a great economy of means. The author introduces us in a very personal way to the researchers, inventors, and engineers who've tried to understand and/or use nature's schemes, and continue to do so. At the center of the book is the patriarch of "growth and form," D'Arcy Thompson, whose legacy is perhaps still not fully realized. His predecessors (Leonardo da Vinci, Fibonacci...) and successors (Fuller, Seilacher...) are juxtaposed more on the basis of pertinence than conventional plodding chronology. The author shows a natural playfulness, weaving her own experiences into the explanations, and allowing her personages to speak for themselves. Dolf Seilacher's words occasionally shows signs of nature experimenting on the spot.

In the spirit of her controlling metaphor, the sand dollar, Willis gives immediate delight like the flower design etched on a sand dollar's back, and deftly reveals the underlying intrigue such as the sand dollar's intricate food grooves, tube feet, and system of sand ballast under the thin etched dome.

Faced with this abundant evidence of genius in nature's designs, I found myself asking what exactly this genius could be. As Stephen Jay Gould has said, these are "paths that a sensible God would never tread." But while physical laws describe a trend to disorder (entropy), life plays with designs and moves toward greater order, as if consciousness were not an exclusive property of the brain.

This book is full of "possibility space" and it's a good read.

What's to enjoy: Wide-ranging and approachable essays on many different sciences and scientists. Willis has a light and fluent style that really pulls the reader down into the analogy between a sea urchin and a blimp, an athletic stadium and a soap bubble, and more. Along the way, the author constructs roadside memorial shrines to great thinkers who are not memorialized in the main stream of the history of ideas. A few facts in every story invite the prepared reader to search more deeply, but do so without snubbing the intelligent and interested layman.

What's not: A few maddening faults of phrase, and one profound blooper - at least, one that I caught. In one (p.22), the word "captives" appears where "captors" would have made sense. In another (p.56), the relationship between aeordynamic stalling, lift, and horizontal braking breaks. Speaking from my own skydiving and parachuting experience, "veering up" doesn't directly create the stall. Instead, the induced stall creates a tradeoff that buys upward acceleration (lower downward speed) at the cost of forward velocity - a tangible tradeoff of kinetic and potential energy. Yet another (p.114) confuses the theories and theorems of Pythagoras. The one that truly galled me, though was the assertion (p.213) that Goedel's theorem involves randomness. It does not. It pulls undecidability (or 'unreason' if you must)surgically and certainly out of the fundamental structure of reason itself, once "reason" meets certain criteria. Its inexorable, inevitable nature is what makes Goedel's theorem so profound and beautiful, not a hand-waving appeal to a roll of the dice. Willis would have us bury decidability alive under piles of probabilistic Nerf balls. Goedel's stiletto cuts to the heart of decidability in one straight stroke,and pierces it.

This book really is a rich feast for the intellect. Willis has done a good job of presenting science - strong, deep science - in a way that appeals and excites. She proves, on nearly every page, that deep science isn't necessarily obscure. The simple shape of a tree, for example, emerges from a profound set of design goals, including survival in normal kinds of exceptional winds, and including survival of another kind under even more exceptional wind loads. The few glitches (very few, I admit) just weakened all of this book's good, at least for me.

//wiredweird

Delta Willis has mastered the art of making scientific concepts easy to understand. Her celebration of our natural universe and enthusiasm for the scientists who inspire her is infectious. A joy of discovery, steeped in a sense of the absurd, makes her writing both knowledgeable and niave -- and devilishly fun. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

The book is interesting, but could use a rewrite -- I found it hard to follow the language. The logic is sound, the examples a bit obscure. Maybe there will be a revised edition. The book has a lot of valuable references.