Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

For once, I made good progress on this book and though I could have finished it Friday, I did finish it Saturday with one day to spare. I started it after finishing The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis. This book was twelve hours long I needed to hammer it all last week while I was dealing with constant Job Recruiter Cold Calls.

In any case, Leonard Mlodinow‘s book was more of a personal journey rather than a hard science book. Which is to say, it does have a history of scientific discovery and a brief story of human evolution, but none of the details were particulary new to me and so, for the most part, I read it for the assides with his father and how he related his personal journey of discovery to his conversations with his father.

After all, how many stories have I read describing Evolution? Of course, humanity advanced to where we are through our inquisitive nature. However, I was unfamiliar with Göbekli Tepe temple and that story that started us on the journey to urban life was interesting. I was bothered by Mlodinow’s assumption that Chinese and Mayan scripts being derived from cuneiform. I don’t know why he could assume that writing developed independently, which seems to be the case for these scripts.

From there we investigate the Greek golden age of discovery and early science. It’s always interesting how the ancients were sometimes kind of correct, often very wrong, and sometimes on the right path. Then, we have the fascinating story of the 150 years that overthrew that millennium old superstition from Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton.

I was fascinated how Antoine Lavoisier was actually quite charitable yet lost his head to La Terreur. Then, to add insult to injury, when, in the turn of the Twentieth Century they erected a statue to him with the wrong head. Also fascinating was how despite his near perfect predictions Dmitri Mendeleev, with, among others, the exception of Praseodymium and Neodymium being lumped into Didymium as an element. The main reason for these errors was that Mendeleev sorted by Atomic Weight, not Atomic Number.

Of course, another story about Darwin didn’t add much to my knowledge and was something I could have done without. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek‘s story, on the other hand, including being a member of the Royal Society in absentia was really interesting. But then, I’ve also read about Max Planck and Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr and Max Born and Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger extensively, so there was absolutely nothing new in the section on Quantum Physics. I do with there had been more about Richard Feynman, though.

However, the most touching part of the book is when Mlodinow discusses the last days of his dear father. The fact that he dedicated the book to him was very endearing, and all the stories in Poland were touching and very enjoyable. Even more for his father’s experience as a Jew under the Nazis.

The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos

Overall, not a terrible book, if a bit unoriginal. Next up, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization. Until we meet again my fellow sapiosexuals! Shalom!

Because of the issues with #CO2Fre’s tyre, it only just finished this book in time for our meeting today.

I started this book right after finishing 18 Miles: The Epic Dreams of Our Atmosphere and Its Weather. Overall, I found the book a bit repetitive but it does bring up some interesting topics. I think the conclusion of we being born of both order and chaos is a nice ides given other books I’ve read that go into great detail on how unusual it is for biologic life to arise and how even more astronomical the odds are that a bacterium would take up residence in an archaea to make eukaryotes.

The survey of extrasolar planetary configurations was fun, however. I love the description of unusual systems like tight packing of planets, binary star systems, and life evolving on a Gas Giant moon. Although there are multiple ways a binary star system could have planets. For instance, one could have one star is a large (but not huge) one like our sun, and the other is a red dwarf, a bit larger than Jupiter, with the planet orbiting only the major star. But what Caleb Scharf seems to present is something more akin to two stars of relatively close mass orbiting one another tightly and a planet much farther out which orbits them both. In the later case, the idea that suns eclipse each other in regular cycles making the nature of a solar-centric universe much more amenable to budding intelligent life was a great and interesting flight of fancy that will help inform my better authorship of Science Fiction.

My main nit goes back to the first issue, though, with the mention of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the prologue. I thought the author did better introducing astronomical elements than he did biological elements and it was in the biological sections in which I was bogged down.

I am happy though to concede that with the modified Drake equation: $N = R_* \cdot f_p \cdot n_e \cdot f_i \cdot f_e \cdot f_i \cdot f_c \cdot L$ where,

$R_*$ : the average rate of star formation in a galaxy
$f_p$ : the fraction of those stars that have planets
$n_e$ : the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
$f_i$ : the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life (like bacteria or archaea) at some point
$f_e$ : the fraction of planets with life (like bacteria or archaea) that develop complex life (like eucaryotes)
$f_i$ : the fraction of planets with complex life (like eucaryotes) that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
$f_c$ : the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
$L$ : the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space

We know $R_*$ is about three percent more stars per year, and that $f_p$ is often greater than one, perhaps an average of four in modern surveys. $n_e$ is a little harder to determine as we generally define it as a goldilocks zone, but as the book points out, life with radically different chemistry could have a different universal solvent than water. Methane, CH₄, for instance. $l_i$ is a harder one but it seems this may indeed be quite common in any planet large enough to have plate tectonics and a hot core. The harder question is if $l_e$ is common or not. As we don’t exactly know how eucaryotes evolved or, more specifically, how such a symbiosis could evolve so stably without consuming it. Finally, $f_i$ , $f_c$ , and $L$ are all based on how intelligent life evolves and sustain itself, which, again, we have only one data point and can’t draw any conclusions from that at all. The main point though is we are getting closer to answering the first five terms at least and all are looking, even $f_e$ , a bit like we are not alone.

One of the most interesting aspects, however, were the Zodiacal Light display. I never knew that was possible and now I definitely have it added to my Bucket List. It was fascinating to learn about all the planetary and extrasolar debris that just sits along the ecliptic plane. And I enjoyed the author’s discussions of the origin of our solar system and how it compares to the many other stellar systems possible.

Talking about how Copernicus made our universe more knowable by virtue of it being ordinary and nothing special was a great way of presenting the conundrum between Anthropocentrism and ubiquity implied by Copernicus. I think that is the most important conclusion: that we are both special and ubiquitous. That our journey to intelligent life was unique, but that there are many ways of for the universe to know itself, and we are only one of those ways.

The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities

Overall, the text could have been tighter and less repetitive but the overall conclusion seems sound. We are, indeed Unique and Ubiquitous. Now, on to, The Thing with Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human…

See you later, my friendly fellow sapiosexuals!

TimeHorse

Tag: Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos

The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities

TimeHorse

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