Gravity by Brian Clegg

Why What Goes Up, Must Come Down

This book is a history of gravity, and a study of its importance and relevance to our lives, as well as its influence on other areas of science.

Physicists will tell you that four forces control the universe. 

Of these, gravity may the most obvious, but it is also the most mysterious. 

Although ludicrously weak compared to the other forces (a tiny magnet can hold up a piece of metal against the gravitational attraction of the whole Earth), gravity permeates our everyday life and being.

We begin with humanity's earliest ideas of how we remain stuck to the ground - a significant consideration when you realize that despite the myths, educated people have known the Earth was a sphere since the time of the Ancient Greeks. 

Along the way we'll see how the Arabic scholars explained the force of gravity, why Galileo didn't need to drop balls off the tower of Pisa, exactly how Newton came to his conclusions and why he refused to 'frame hypotheses' about gravity. 

Newton managed to predict the force of gravity but couldn’t explain how it worked at a distance. 

Einstein picked up on the simple premise that gravity and acceleration are interchangeable to devise his mind-bending general relativity, showing how matter warps space and time. 

Not only did this explain how gravity worked – and how apparently simple gravitation has four separate components – but it predicted everything from black holes to gravity’s effect on time. 

We will explore the concept of action at a distance, and see how Einstein transformed our understanding of gravitation with general relativity and consider whether the graviton will ever be discovered. We will see how birds, bees and rockets seem to defy gravity, and whether the concept of anti-gravity can move from pure science fiction to possible fact. 

Whether it’s the reality of anti-gravity or the unexpected discovery that a ball and a laser beam drop at the same rate, gravity is the force that fascinates.

Gravity never fails to fascinate...

[Based on the book description on the author Ben Clegg's website and  Amazon.com]

Link:
Hear Brian Clegg talk about gravity in a radio interview.

 My Comments: 
Many books and authors of this genre claim to explain abstruse concepts in a manner a layman can easily understand. Unfortunately though their intentions are good, they fall woefully short of this objective (at least as far as I am concerned !).
But this book came the closest in my opinion . I understood more than 80 % of what it was trying to explain.
Therefore highly recommend it to all the readers of the Popular Science genre.
 


Goodreads Rating - 4 out of 5 ( 3 Ratings)
 
 
Buy the Kindle book version.
(Anybody can read Kindle books—even without a Kindle device—with the FREE Kindle app for smartphones and tablets.)

Science - A Four Thousand Year History

[Author: Patricia Fara; Publisher: Oxford University Press; Paperback: 512 pages ]

 
First I will let the author Patricia Fara  to introduce her book.
(Play the embedded video below. In case of any problem view it on the YouTube site)

This book:

• Does not portray scientists and inventors as ideal heroes but as  real people who needed to earn their living, who made mistakes, who trampled down their rivals, or even sometimes got bored and did something else.
• Argues that for a scientific idea to prevail it being right is not always enough. People should accept the fact that the idea is right.
• Challenges the notion of European superiority in science,  by showing how science has been built up from knowledge and skills developed in other parts of the world like China and Islamic world.
• Instead of focusing on  abstract theories proposed and esoteric experiments conducted by scientists , it explains how science belongs to the real world of war, politics, and business.
• Describes the works of many individuals who were not scientists in conventional sense, but who developed a variety of skills - navigating by the stars, smelting ores, preparing herbal medicines, building ships, designing cannon - the contributed to the global scientific enterprises of today.
• Explains why the following questions are important and suggests ways of tackling them:
• Does religion inhibit or encourage science?
• Are alchemy and magic completely divorced from science?
• Were there really so few women or have historians the picture by telling too many exciting adventure stories about intrepid men exploring the female nature of world?
• Is it possible to have different types of science that are all valid?
• If there were indeed different sciences in different places, then how are they related to each other and modern science?
• Investigates the financial interests, imperial ambitions, and academic enterprises that made science global.
• Shows that what counts as a scientific fact depends not only on the natural world but also on who is doing research and where and when.
• Argues that scientific knowledge as it travels from one environment to another, is constantly adapted and absorbed in different ways and such transformation is still continuing.
• Challenges assumptions that appear natural yet have been created artificially - it aims to provoke thought and argument, not just provide information.
• Looks at past in order to find out how we've arrived at the present in order to improve the future.

The book has seven parts each consisting of seven short (8-10 pages) chapters. Discussions are well supported by illustrations, anecdotes. Author's sense of humor and sarcasm.also surfaces at several places.

One drawback in this book is , barring a few stray references here and their the contribution of  India towards the development of science is not given due credit. In fact decimal arithmetic and the concept of zero was  discovered in India before it spread elsewhere.

Though the readers looking for something more technical will be disappointed, overall this book is quite a light and entertaining read on the sociological history of science for a layman.





Key Points from the Book

Part I: Origins
Key Points : Science's origin is traced to ancient Babylonia & Greece. Ideas and discoveries pertained to projects like finding auspicious time for religious festivals, winning wars, vindicating biblical prophecies, divining the future, explaining the cosmos. Science's very foundation lie in techniques and concepts now often designated as magical or pseudo-scientific.
Chapter Titles : Sevens, Babylon, Heroes, Cosmos, Life, Matter, Technology

Part II: Interactions
Key Points: What counts as science depends on where and when you are looking. Information, skills and objects constantly travel from one place to another, gets passed on through generations and get adapted to local needs and taste. Scientific knowledge resulted from many centuries of communications and interactions between different peoples and places especially China, the Islamic world and the mediaeval  Europe.

Chapter Titles: Eurocentrism, China, Islam, Scholarship, Europe, Aristotle, Alchemy

Part III: Experiments

Key Points: Experimental approach towards the world that characterizes modern science developed only gradually and intermittently. Many innovations arose from reformulating traditional expertise rather than from inspired insights. Ancient ideas coexisted with ones now belonging to modern science. For e.g. coexistence of  -  both Aristotle's theory and Copernican theory of the Universe; magic, alchemy and mathematics.

Chapter Titles: Exploration, Magic, Astronomy, Bodies, Machines, Instruments, Gravity

Part IV: Institutions
 Key Points: Science is an integral component of the society, interwoven with industry, business, warfare, government, and medicine. Eighteenth century was the vital transition phase from private experiments of a select few who were wealthy to the public laboratories, state funding of institutions and industrialization. Institutions though lacking the charisma of heroics of individual discoverers and inventors were vital for advertising scientific achievements and for attracting financial backing for research projects.

Chapter Titles: Societies, Systems, Careers, Industries, Revolutions, Rationality, Disciplines

Part V: Laws
 Key Points: The nineteenth-century scientists' proposed  laws governing human as well as physical world  arrived through supposedly objective reasoning and precise recording of  facts as detached observers. But personal biases and subjective assessments of recorded results were not uncommon among these scientists. The viewpoint of German Romantic philosophers of this era who stressed a unified cosmos in which human beings are integrated within natural world resonates more with modern environmental attitudes.

Chapter Titles: Progress, Globalization, Objectivity, God, Evolution, Power, Time

Part VI: Invisibles 
Key Points: Despite development of increasingly precise instruments in the nineteenth and twentieth century it remained impossible for the atomic scientists to know everything about every natural phenomena  both theoretically and practically due to the uncertainty permeating in every aspect of the Universe. Many politically and commercially motivated research programs claiming to further science and improve humanity, launched triggered deep ethical reservations.

Chapter Titles: Life, Disease, Rays, Particles, Genes, Chemicals, Uncertainties

Part VII:
Key Points:  Modern scientists know much, much more than the ancient Babylonians about the structure of the Universe and mechanisms of the living organisms. But they are still unable to answer some of the basic questions about human existence asked by the people several thousand years ago.Massive investments in science, technology, and medicine yielded great achievements. Yet these achievements are like a double-edged sword. Political decisions needs to be made about how to take advantage of scientific discoveries.

Chapter Titles: Warfare, Heredity, Cosmology, Information, Rivalry, Environment, Futures




Links 

• Goodreads Ratings and Reviews -  Average Rating 3.78 / 5;  73 ratings; 15 reviews

 [Please feel free to leave your comments below or bookmark/share this post]

The Grand Design

Author:         Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow
Published:   2010
Publisher:    Bantam Press
Hardcover: 208  pages
 

This  book is a sort of sequel to Stephen Hawking's classic best seller A Brief History of Time. This time the renowned physicist Hawking teams up with another famous physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow. The book attempts to unanswered questions in "A Brief History of Time".
Questions like - Why is there a universe--why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why are the laws of nature are what they are? Did the universe need a designer and creator?

The authors explain how as per quantum theory there are multiple instances of universe existing simultaneously. Also these universes have not just one but every possible history. 
They question the conventional concept of an objective reality and propose a "model-dependent" theory of reality. 

The book describes how the laws of  the universe we live in are extraordinarily finely tuned to create an environment conducive  to our existence, and shows why quantum theory predicts the multiverse--the idea that ours is just one of many universes that appeared spontaneously out of nothing, each with different laws of nature. 

The authors then conclude that  M-Theory which explains  the laws governing the multiverse, is the only viable candidate for a complete "theory of everything." 

I have read many books which attempt to demystify the esoteric areas of modern physics and cosmology. But I must admit that I am yet to get a complete hang of the subject. Either I am incapable of digesting the stuff or the inherent nature of the subject itself is not amenable to easy explanation. Whatever the case may be, my experience with  this book was no different. 

Initial few pages were quite easy to grasp but things starts getting confusing as I approached the half-way-mark. However it is perhaps better than many of the other books I have read in this genre. Small doses of humor sprinkled and lavish illustrations in myriad colors provide much needed relief to the readers.


Overall a good book to read . I rate it 3.5 in the scale of 5.
Some readers with higher IQ than me may enjoy it much more than I did !

 
Links:

• Stephen Hawking's website
• The Grand Design - Wikipedia entry about the book
• Introduction to M-Theory
  

 [Please feel free to leave your comments below or bookmark/share this summary]

Gut Feelings - Short Cuts to Better Decision Making

Author:                   Gerd Gigerenzer

Published:               2007

Publisher:                Penguin Group

Paperback:             288 pages

Buy from Amazon: Click Here

Readers in India:     

 

Have you  read Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller Blink ? I have not read it yet, but I think this book Gut Feelings which I  just finished reading more than makes up for it.  Because a critical source for Malcolm Gladwell's Blink was the breakthrough research on intuitive thinking carried out by Gerd Gigerenzer who is the author of this book.

This book  warns you from getting stuck in analysis paralysis mode and strongly advocates the necessity and urgency to take decisions based on your intuitive gut feelings given the limited information and time you have at your disposal. Such decisions, the author argues , are generally as good as if not better than the decisions taken with tonnes of data and information.

According to the author gut feelings (aka intuition, hunch) refers to a judgment

1. that appears quickly in consciousness,
2. whose underlying reasons we are not fully aware of, and
3. is strong enough to act upon

The rationale behind working of gut feelings consists of  two components

1.  simple rules of thumb (heuristic), which takes advantage of
2. evolved capacities of the brain.

As per the author the goal of this book is to first explain the hidden rules of thumb underlying the intuition and then to understand when the intuitions are likely to succeed or fail.

Some  such  rules of thumb behind intuitive decision making are:

• If a person looks at one alternative (longer than at others), it is likely the one the person desires.
• In an uncertain environment, good intuitions must ignore information.
• Recognition heuristic - If you recognize one object but not the other, then infer that the recognized object has higher value.
• Health care heuristics - If you see a white coat, trust it. Don't ask your doctors what they recommend. Ask them what they would do if it were their mother.
• Default Rule - If there is default, do nothing about it
• Social instinct heuristics - Do what the majority of your peers do. Do what a successful person does.

 Such common sense heuristics and many more are discussed with convincing examples and case studies throughout the book.

Overall a very interesting read, though at certain places it tends to be  somewhat repetitive.

Inventors Who Revolutionised Our Lives

Author: K.V. Gopalakrishnan
Published: 1999
Publisher: National Book Trust, India

The author of this book is a well respected Professor of Mechanical Engineering who during his tenure of almost 40 years in IIT Madras taught advanced topics on internal combustion engines (I was privileged to be his student !), guided several research projects, and published several research papers .
Yet coming from such a highly technical and academic person, is this delightful little book on inventions and inventors which is very simple to read and can be easily understood by a layman.

The book is divided into two parts.
Part A called The Art and Science of Invention, discusses the impact of science and technology in our lives, how an inventor is different from a scientist, what makes an inventor tick and the process of invention.
Part B called the Great Inventors has short life sketches of twenty inventors, spanning over two centuries (18th to 20th) whose inventions/discoveries are taken for granted today.

The inventors covered are - James Watt, Eli Whitney, Michael Faraday, Samuel Morse, Charles Babbage, Henry Bessemer, Alfred Nobel, Thomas Alva Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Nikola Tesla, Rudolf Diesel, The Wright Brothers, Guglielmo Marconi, Robert Goddard, Igor Sikorsky, Robert Watson-Watt, Chester Carlson, Sir Frank Whittle, Edwin Land, Robert Noyce.

I came to know about several interesting little known facts about these inventors.

These life sketches bring out very clearly the tenacity of purpose, capacity of hard work, and supreme self-confidence these inventors exhibited to translate their ideas into reality.

A very motivating read for everyone especially for the young budding inventors.