A Scientist in the City [Paperback]

James Trefil (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1994

In his previous books, A Scientist At  The Seashore and Meditations At  Sunset, James Trefil used commonplace  settings in the natural world as a point of departure  for probing the mysteries of nature. In A  Scientist In The City, Trefil takes the  opposite tack, looking at the quintessential  man-made environment of the city as a way of examining  the forces that define our world. What does the  heating system of a building or the construction of  a bridge tell us about the development of a city?  What does the amplified environmental stress of  city life on plants and animals suggest about the  wild? How have scientific advances in building  materials and an understanding of the structure of the  atom helped to shape the cities of today? From an  explanation of the evolution and influence of  plate glass to reinforced steel to an analysis of the  future of the skyscraper, A Scientist In  The City offers a fascinating study of  the promise and the consequences of technology in  our everyday urban lives. In addition, Trefil goes  on to explore how the new technologies being  developed today will help to determine the changing  forms that cities will take in the future. A  Scientist In The City is the kind of  book that will open our eyes to the man-made world  around us, and show us some of the scientific  reasons for why we live the way we do.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After last year's brave foray into the biology of the abortion controversy in The Facts of Life (written with Harold Morowitz), Trefil returns to the general science territory he staked out in A Scientist at the Seashore. This city-mouse version of that title is an equally felicitous adventure for the science lover isolated from nature's countryside lab. The physical sciences predominate here as Trefil offers deft analogies to explain invisible forces like gravity in building architecture, e.g., comparing masonry structures and skyscrapers to crustaceans (with exoskeletons) and humans, whose weight-bearing skeleton is internal. He explains the atomic structure of materials that underlie every corner of a city block and includes other systems like power grids on the tour. The addition of a futurist urban vision adds little to the text but does not mitigate Trefil's particular talent for lively explanation. Illustrated.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal

YA-Trefil states that a city is an environment built by one of nature's creatures, man. Therefore, it is a "natural system, and we can study it the same way we study other natural systems." Whether or not readers accept this premise, the resultant study is fascinating. Trefil leads readers through the history of cities as a result of the development of various technologies and humanity's needs. Each chapter is filled with scientific facts. On virtually every page, however, is a little nugget of information that adds spice to the mixture of physical laws or engineering truths. For example, insects fly higher in urban areas as a result of the higher levels of the hotter air. The opening chapters describe the development of various technologies such as steel, glass-making, structural engineering, or subways and the resulting changes in cities because of them, while the last sections describe future possibilities. The book can be read, and very enjoyably too, straight through. It can, as well, be used for research papers. It contains wonderful descriptions of scientific processes. The author stresses the need for understanding the laws of nature as technologies develop, as opposed to the use of "clever techniques," and he makes the learning of many of these laws almost painless.
Susan H. Woodcock, King's Park Library, Burke, VA
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; Anchor Books ed edition (December 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385261098
• ISBN-13: 978-0385261098
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,972,861 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well-written summary of how technology makes cities work, January 29, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Scientist in the City (Hardcover)

Book Report: A Scientist in the City, by James Trefil I picked up this book because the title intrigued me. I found it a well written and layperson-friendly explanation of the technology that makes cities possible and what that technology is likely to enable in the future. Trefil is an author that one feels a connection with quickly-he is a very beguiling storyteller. This book is not about social issues. It is about the materials and building blocks of cities. Trefil discusses materials, such as wood, brick, concrete, steel and glass. He investigates what holds buildings up and what conspires to tear them down. (The real challenge for a modern skyscraper, for example, is not collapse, but wind.) Moving people, energy and information around are city factors he visits at length. Sound boring? Its not. For example, he discusses how most of the glass manufactured in the U.S. today is made by a process called floating. "Glass is melted, then poured onto a pool of molten tin. The glass floats on the metal, hence the name of the process. Near the furnace, the glass is heated from above to keep it fluid, and as a result it flows into a uniform thin sheet. . . This process has the advantage of never having the glass come into contact with rollers, so that it doesn't have to be ground or polished after it comes out of the furnace." I have no earthly idea what I will ever need that information for, but I find it absolutely fascinating. Cool as that part is, Trefil goes on to discuss the future he believes most likely. He foresees that the Edge City pollution problems can be solved by electric cars and better recycling, but the congestion issues will need the information economy to remove the need to commute at all. New suburbs will stretch farther into the country, enabled by high-speed magnetic levitation trains. (Most people, it develops, adhere to the `Rule of 45'-not commuting longer than 45 minutes.) I find this book thought-provoking, informative, and readable-in-an-airplane. Here are some of excerpts I found interesting: *"The kind of cities we build depend on our understanding of the natural world-what we call science-and on our ability to turn that understanding to our own ends-what we call technology." *"A city is a natural system, and we can study it in the same way we study other natural systems and how they got to be the way they are." He notes that an ecosystem is a place that supports the existence of niches, where energy flows through, where materials tend to move in cycles, and is not static. *"[With respect to plastics] we seem to be filling 10 percent of our dumps with carbon chains taken from deep reservoirs of oil and coal around the world, used briefly, and then reburied." * "I know of no better way to illustrate the essential unity of nature than to note that the amount of traffic the Golden Gate bridge supports and the height reached by the tree outside your window are governed by the same law." * "What good is this device? Mr. Prime Minister, someday you will be able to tax it. (Physicist Michael Faraday, on the first electrical generator)" * "Improving efficiency doesn't produce radical changes in the structure of a society. It just allows people to go on doing what they've been doing all along. It is in . . . the development of new ways of producing energy-that the real potential for change lies." * "In a sense, then, the bedroom suburb filled with people who worked in the central city was a transitory phase in the automobile-driven expansion of American cities. Within a few decades of the time that workers began moving to the suburbs, the jobs moved to be near them. City planners and intellectuals still haven't grasped this fact, nor has the reality of what's going on the outskirts of American cities penetrated the national consciousness. The central feature of what Joel Garreau calls Edge Cities is that a combination of personal mobility (supplied by the automobile) and a new kind of industry (based on information technology and the microchip) has spawned a metropolis characterized by a network of work centers, or nodes, of which the centralized city is only one. In such a system, people live in the development between the nodes and commute to work in them, not necessarily into the central city." * "No sooner had telegraph lines been spread around the world in the late 1800s than what analysts call a killer technology came on the scene. A killer technology is one that completely replaces (kills) an old way of doing things, as cars replaced horse-drawn carriages and transistors replaced vacuum tubes. In this case, the killer technology was the telephone." * "The history of our ability to control matter, energy, and information leads, it seems to me, to an interesting hypothesis: There are no longer any technological limits on the kinds of cities we can build." * "There are two great hurdles to an urban future dominated by the construction of edge cities. One is the pollution associated with the widespread use of automobiles; the other is the congestion resulting from the need for constant traffic between nodes. Both these problems must be dealt with to make this sort of future possible." * "Astronomer Robert Wood and I once calculated that the market value of materials in a single asteroid 10 miles across exceeds the total national debt of the United States. If the asteroids turn out to be an exploitable resource, then the first permanent residents in space may be miners, as were the first Europeans in the American West." Chip Saltsman ([e-mail])

3 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I think it was an interesting book about scientist, May 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: A Scientist in the City (Paperback)

This book was very interlectial and extreamly facinating. I throughly enjoyed readin this book about a scientist that gets lost in the city. My mum,dad,brothers,uncles,aunts also liked this book because I lent it to them all.

0 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Better than Ambien..., August 28, 2006

By 

M. Piccione - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Scientist in the City (Paperback)

This was required reading back when I was a college freshman for all english 101 classes.
It was sooo horrible, I couldn't get past page 3. Without fail, I would fall deeply asleep for hours. Fortunately, for me, my ENG 101 professor couldn't get through the book either.
Don't get me wrong, it wasn't because it was a dry subject matter. I did read plenty of that (and do to this day) quite easily and with interest.
It was the meandering, stream of consciousness style that just is torturous to read.
I did keep it. It has proven over the past 11 years to be better than any sleeping pill on the market.